It even shocked Megyn Kelly of Fox News, so you know it’s got to be far beyond the pale: a Trumpkin cites the WWII Japanese internment camps as precedent for how to deal with Muslims.

We used to legally allow slaves, denied women the right to vote, and hanged witches, too. Is this what “Make America Great Again” means?

A member of the Seattle city council has been flooded with hateful email because she, a proud socialist, has advocated for protests at the presidential inauguration in January (oh, and gosh do I love Seattle). This is not surprising. It’s the new reality that all the racists and sexists in the country have gotten goosed on happy juice by the recent election, and since Kshama Sawant is both a woman and brown, of course she’s getting the worst of the frenetically incoherent deplorables shrieking at her. But I just wanted to single out one message she got that demonstrates racist logic.

Go back to India b*tch. I am tired of being shamed because I’m a white male. You automatically think I’m a racist. How about you go the f*ck back to India or wherever you came from?

Isn’t that amazing? It’s a couple of sentences that completely fuck themselves over. Has the stupid sap ever stopped to think that maybe he’s not being shamed because he’s a white male, but because he says absurd things like “go back to India” to an elected American official?

Of course I also have the liberty of marveling at such dazzling inanity because I’m not the target (at least, not as much of a target — I still get the occasional rant cussing me out for being a Jew). It’s got to be even more terrifying to see that your opponents angry and irrational.

I know I said this was going to be my “self-care” weekend, but I could not help myself, and last night while I was stuck in an airport I engaged with some liberals who were very irritated that I dared to point out that voting for Trump meant you were racist. Don’t you know that some of them voted for Obama in the last election, so they can’t be racist? (This is going to be the new “I have a black friend” theme). Don’t you know that if you call white people racists they’ll be alienated and won’t vote for Democrats anymore? (But somehow they care so little about race issues they’ll vote for an openly racist/sexist pig who is endorsed by the KKK and Stormfront). But my favorite response is this one:

Shut up, in the name of Free Speech!

I’ve also gotten a few responses, echoing the sentiments of Obama and Clinton, that we’ve got to give the guy a chance, and gosh, maybe he won’t be as bad as we think. I’ve decided that liberals have become masters of delusional thinking, because no, he’s going to be worse than we can imagine. He is appointing a climate change denialists to head up his transition team for the EPA, he’s going to have a known hate group leader to run his immigration transition team, and another anti-gay hate group leader to run domestic policy. He wants to put Sarah Palin in his cabinet, possibly as secretary of the interior. If you think the election was a shitshow, wait until you see how he governs.

So no apologies. If you voted for Trump, you belong in the basket of deplorables, and there’s no excuse you can offer to get you out. Whining that it hurts your feelings when we mention that the man you voted for is ready to wreck the environment, discriminate against everyone but white people, and turn the whole nation into Brownback’s Kansas is not only the worst excuse ever, but it’s pathetic as well.

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By the way, Iris and Caine share similar feelings. You don’t get to claim you were a nice, conscientious, thoughtful person if you voted for Trump. You were just an asshole.

For some reason, she came to mind when I was doing my thing this morning. I think if she were alive now, she’d be impressed with the great strides we’ve taken, and also dismayed at how much injustice still remains.

Brandon Levston had an encounter with a road-raging Trump supporter. It’s kind of awful: the road rager uses racial slurs, dismisses his wife’s protest with “be a woman”, and declares that black lives don’t matter, repeatedly. The video is definitely not safe for work.

And then, as the Trump-lovin’ asshole walks away, Levston throws his own insult at about the 3:05 mark and calls him…

…transgender faggot…

And with that, they both get thrown into the basket of deplorables. I guess some bigotries just stick around forever.

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OK, a lot of people are saying Levston did not say the slur — it was the Trumpkin. It’s not clear: Levston is laughing just after the comment, and it blurs together with the voice.

I’d love to hear from Levston himself to clear up the ambiguity. It may well be that only one of them needs to go in the basket, but it’s going to need to be a bigger basket.

You can build all kinds of horrible stories around anecdotes, and here’s a perfect example. A woman’s mother is ill, and needs constant care. One day she starts to slide out of her wheelchair, and the woman rushes to prevent her from falling, and yells for their live-in caretaker…and that’s where it gets weird.

When I shouted for the personal support worker, I was panicked. Paralysed bodies are like dead weight — they are heavy and I wasn’t sure how long I could hold my mother up.

The worker, a visible minority and recent immigrant, was sitting on the couch behind my mother and couldn’t see what was happening. She slowly and deliberately put aside her homework — an open binder and some textbooks — and came to help me. Her annoyance at being interrupted was obvious. The emergency was taking her away from her real goal in life, becoming someone in her adopted country of Canada.

Ah. The relevant point here is apparently that the worker is a “visible minority and recent immigrant”, and wasn’t as solicitous of the woman’s mother as her daughter was. Let’s unpack an assumption or two, shall we? The first is that the minority status of this person was relevant; are foreigners just assumed to be more callous than True Canadians? Are we expected to believe that if the personal support worker were a real “someone”, that is a white native-born Canadian, they would have been more eager to drop their books and leap out of their chair to assist this rather unpleasant woman who is shouting at them? Is the problem here really that the caregiver is an immigrant, or that she is poorly trained and working for cheap?

And then the story gets worse.

[Read more…]

Amy Schumer has stepped in it again — she did a parody video of Beyoncé’s Formation that wasn’t very funny, wasn’t at all enlightening, and most eye-rollingly of all, once again let a white woman pretend to be synonymous with being black. There was an awkward event in which Jessi Klein, Schumer’s producer, tried to defend her against the charge that she was racist. It did not go well, as described in this article by Nikki Gloudeman.

Because here’s the thing: Yes, Amy Schumer is racist. Amy. Schumer. is. racist. She’s racist because we live in a society founded on racism that has afforded her racial privilege, and she’s racist because she’s said some racist shit. Last night, Jessi made it clear that she’s racist, too.

And yes, I am white, and yes, I am racist too—because we live in a society founded on racism that affords me racial privilege, and because I haven’t always fully acknowledged how I move through this world differently because of the color of my skin, and I’ve done some racist shit. I’ve thought “that cop was nice!” when I got off without a ticket, instead of “How would that have been different if I wasn’t white?” I’ve viewed black men and white men walking behind me at night differently. I’m trying to be more aware every day, but I fuck up. I’m still racist.

So if racism can happen in contexts outside white-hooded vigilantism, and if it indeed perpetuates our entire society, what now then? It’s not quite as simple as saying “Yep, I guess I’m racist like everyone else!” For one thing, that ignores the nuances and degrees of racism. For another, that’s not really going to affect anything.

The most important step is owning that shit.

Yep. I’m racist, too, and I’m also sexist, because I take advantage of all of the immense privilege of being a white man in a racist, sexist culture. You take every advantage you are given, as well. It shouldn’t be so hard to acknowledge that fact, but I do know what is really difficult, and that is…changing it.

I also don’t often know how to “own it”. When a traffic cop doesn’t give me a ticket, in part because I’m white, it wouldn’t help to demand that I be punished; that I don’t get pulled over as often because I’m driving while white isn’t going to be corrected by pulling up to random patrol cars and insisting that I really should have my plates run and hey, officer, maybe you should check my trunk or frisk me? The goal of us privileged people shouldn’t be to share the injustices given to others, but to make sure we all get the same justice.

I think the first step is simply to listen to those who have been oppressed and honor their requests for respect. Schumer and Klein don’t seem to be able to do that.