What we were vs. what we said we were

This is a factually true statement from Clint Eastwood.

Everybody’s walking on eggshells, said Eastwood, 86. We see people accusing people of being racist and all kinds of stuff. When I grew up, those things weren’t called racist.

He’s right. When I was growing up, too, these things weren’t called racist. They were blatantly, unashamedly, disgustingly racist as fuck, but no one called them racist. If only we could go back to the Good Old Days, when we were all complacently complicit in horrific discrimination and denial.

Clint Eastwood has made some really good movies, and we all obligingly bought our theater tickets and happily gave them positive reviews and all kinds of awards. We acted as if being an excellent film-maker would excuse all of his failings as a human being. I appreciate that he’s made it quite clear that good artists can be terrible people, as he joins that ugly pantheon of crappy artists who have respectable skills: Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, and now Clint Eastwood.

I won’t be watching his new movie, Sully. There’s a gaping hole in his soul that makes him an untrustworthy observer of the human condition.

A gathering of wickedness and ignorance

I just saw on Facebook that someone I know is going to peek into this rally in Buffalo today.

wlm

Yikes. This is not good. That symbol on the poster is the runic odal — it stands for the Volksdeutsche movement, or the ‘pure’ Germans. WLM is a racist movement, plain and simple; the NSM are outright neo-Nazis. The ARS is the Aryan Renaissance Society. ANA is the Aryan Nationalist Alliance, an umbrella organization trying to bring a hodge-podge of bigots together. The person posting it is Rebecca Barnette, who is a nasty piece of work. The “88” in her email address is a “Heil Hitler” reference.

I suspect this rally will be small, but the reek of concentrated flaming shit will be intense.

Still, this is in upstate New York, home of CFI. I just learned that it may also be home for my son Captain Connlann, who has been given a preliminary (it may change between now and November) assignment to Fort Drum. If he ends up there, I’ll certainly be making the trip to the Syracuse area every year or so.

I will credit them for honesty, though. They at least know what the “All Lives Matter” slogan implies.

truemeaningofalm

They’re also big fans of Donald Trump. Surprising, I know.

It was a rout.

Is it a neo-Nazi rally when only one neo-Nazi shows up?

On a warm, sunny Saturday at Cazenovia Park in South Buffalo, well-known white supremacist Karl Hand of Lockport was the only evidence of a much-anticipated “White Lives Matter” rally.

And Hand was outnumbered by about 350 to 1.

I’m just going to call him the Amazing Racist from now on

He’s done it again. The Amazing Atheist is very upset that people are calling him a racist because he says racist things, so he’s made a video in which he demands that everyone stop calling him a mean name. His argument for why calling him a racist is unjust is basically that he claims everything he said was true…but then, that’s what every racist says about their arguments.

He claims there are two main reasons people accuse him of racism, and then proceeds to make the same old racist arguments with greater vehemence, like that will persuade. The two things he tries to defend are:

  • He’s pro-gentrification. He argues that it improves neighborhoods, and that is a good thing, which is true. The problem, though, is that it does so in a way that does not benefit the people in those neighborhoods. He even acknowledges that gentrification displaces people: he argues that it makes no difference, they’re living in a “shithole” and they’ll just move to a different “shithole”. Treating black people as a fungible mass is racism. You don’t deny that you’re racist by ignoring systemic effects of historical oppression and acting as if current oppression is no big deal.

  • He claims that black culture is a victim culture, and boy, does he ever hate victim culture. Feminism is also a victim culture, don’t you know. Apparently, victim culture is whenever a group or person that has been targeted for victimization actually speaks up and complains about the problem, says the atheist complaining loudly that he’s being victimized by SJWs.

Martin Hughes notices the irony.

Here’s the point I want to make absolutely clear. I don’t particularly care whether you label The Amazing Atheist a racist or not. What I’d like to say is that when The Amazing Atheist talks about race, he simply does not know what he’s talking about, and a lot of his fan base doesn’t, either. He’s an ignorant asshole.

And either one of those things is fine. I like ignorant people who will admit that they are ignorant, and I can stand assholes who actually have the intelligence and knowledge to logically back up their condescending tone. But the two of them together is as annoying as nails on a chalkboard.

And this combined with the fact that he is a hypocritical crybaby is grating. I can stand crybabies. Just be consistent about it. But the crybabies who go out of their way to label other people victim cults for hurting their feelings…and hypocritically sets up a victim cult of hundreds of thousands that caters to their every sniffle…. I’m sorry. I don’t get that.

I also don’t get that the Amazing Racist has never really said anything compelling or interesting about atheism, but has become popular by raging against feminism and minorities, neither criticisms that are particularly well-supported by atheism (and many of us would argue that they are antithetical to the humanist implications of godlessness), yet he sets himself up as a prominent, representative atheist.

O’Reilly needs to join Ailes in exile

Michelle Obama has reduced the right wing to spluttering excuses with one simple fact: slaves built the White House. But it’s true! The White House is located in the South, between Maryland, a slave state which didn’t ban slavery until 1864, and Virginia, which fought on the other side in the Civil War. Of course slaves were heavily used in the construction.

But now we’re seeing standard neo-Confederate apologetics on Fox News. But the slaves were treated kindly by their masters, suggests Bill O’Reilly.

After Michelle Obama’s speech mentioned “a house built by slaves” as part of a beautiful rhetorical arc putting the lie to the idea of some fabled perfect America of some unspecified past, the usual suspects have been performing their gymnastics, trying to reclaim the myth of the perfect Founding Fathers. Bill O’Reilly is just one of them, but yup, he uses the phrase “Slaves that worked there were well-fed and had decent lodgings provided by the government.” He needs to watch Roots again, but the thing that gets me on these usual suspects is, they so often seem to be the same ones bleating “give me liberty or give me death” when confronted with what seem to me to be constraints that are… a little bit less than actual enslavement.

Exactly. People who wax wroth about losing their twitter privileges or having to leave their assault rifle at home are now protesting that slavery wasn’t so bad for the slaves.

O’Reilly needs to be fired. It won’t be so bad…he’s rich, he can count on steady revenue from speaking engagements with the KKK and the League of the South. He’ll continue to be well fed and have decent lodgings. As long as he’s got that, we can do anything we want to him.

If he wept endlessly over a checkmark, what is Milo Yiannopoulos going to do now?

Poor Milo. The Breitbart crank, hero to the worst elements of the internet, was very bitter about the fact that Twitter removed the blue verification checkmark from his profile, about as petty a slight as can be imagined. I have no idea how he’ll react to the latest news: Twitter has finally, permanently banned Milo Yiannopoulos from the service.

Yiannopoulos, who currently serves as Breitbart.com’s tech editor, has been hailed as a standout voice of the new “alt-right” movement. As such, he has made a living as a provocateur, continually inflaming tensions between progressive branches of the internet focused on identity politics and the fervently anti-PC segment that constantly trolls it. For years, Yiannopoulous has used Twitter not only to voice his controversial opinions but to direct his legion of followers (388,042 at the time of this writing) toward his opponents. As a result, he’s been temporarily banned from Twitter a number of times for violating terms of service and stripped of his verification.

It’s about time that he was permanently kicked off for his incessant abuse. What did it at last? Milo was one of the people who led the racist, sexist online assault against Leslie Jones, whose sole crime was being one of the stars of the new Ghostbusters movie. The social injustice warriors were already irate that somehow, a remake of an old movie with women cast in major roles was an unforgivable slight against their masculinity, so they tried to pump themselves up by sending a tsunami of vile, filthy, bigoted imagery against a black woman.

It’s nice that something finally drove Twitter to do something about it — their responses to online harassment have been infuriatingly forgiving to some incredibly nasty stuff — but it’s a shame that it takes something as savage as the attacks on Jones to get them to finally do what needed to be done about one person.

Steve King, keeping the RNC classy

Steve King doesn’t like it when you point out the the Republican convention seems to consist of a lot of angry white people.

“This whole ‘white people’ business, though, does get a little tired, Charlie [Pierce]. I mean, I’d ask you to go back through history and figure out, where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you’re talking about? Where did any other sub-group of people contribute to civilization?”

If you, like me, found it hard to believe anyone would say something so stupid and wrong, it’s on video.

Hey, at least King is being open and honest in confirming that the GOP is the party of cranky white bigots.

Nothing ever changes

The internet, social media, the passage of time…none of that matters. When you read Martin Luther King’s hate mail, it all sounds exactly the same. White people complaining about black people disrupting their comfortable lives by getting demanding, and using their discomfort to justify slapping them down.

What is this Black Power business? If it is a threat to Whites– why should Whites not retaliate? Why should Whites hire Blacks?

And who is at fault? The people who are most oppressed.

You are responsible for all of these riots and havoc in this country today.

I want that person to get together with this person:

You don’t point out any FAULTS at all of your own people, just the whites.

I’m sure they’d then agree that it’s unfair to single out one group. Or perhaps a third person would chime in with an accusation of black criminality.

The hatred between the race is now at an all time peak and will get worse as the niggers continue to beat, rape and murder white women and girls.

No round of complaints is complete without someone chiming in with a ‘Dear Muslima’ — it’s much worse elsewhere, so shut up and accept a lesser inequality here.

It would be well if every American Negro compared his position and opportunity with that of his race in other countries. He would find that in none does the Negro have the advantages the United States gives him. As justified as may be many of the demands Negroes make, they are not the only matter of importance in the world.

And of course, the people telling a black civil rights leader to sit down and shut up are the true egalitarians.

It certainly must take unmititgated gall to ask the public, particularly “WHITEY” for funds to keep you and your ilk rolling along in the manner to which you have become to visibly accustomed.

Your false image is beginning to catch up with your as well as others.

I believe and contribute to any cause for advancing human dignity.

But this letter is my very favorite.

Do return that ‘Nobel-peace-prize’ that we bestowed upon you, (as a great honor) so we can give it to some one who really deserves it.

“We”? Don’t you just love the casual assumption that all the white people get together and decide who gets to have a Nobel prize?

But yeah, this person would sort of get their wish. The prize wasn’t retracted, but the Nobel committee did award one to a deserving white man: Henry Kissinger.

It’s a collection of old letters, ink on paper, that does provide some perspective on the electronic deluge of anonymous hatred we get now. It’s nothing new. Different medium, same old bigots.

Minnesota’s flaws

bigole

I’m happy to be living in the relatively liberal, progressive state of Minnesota, but one of the goals of being progressive ought to be that we, well, progress, that we get better and better. And that requires paying attention to what we do wrong. And one of those things that needs attention is Minnesota’s attitude towards race. And what do you know, a couple of pieces emerged recently that get our problem exactly right.

Minnesotans like to pretend that they don’t see color. The state was taken over by Scandinavian and German people about two centuries ago, and we like to note that we’re pretty damned white around here.

Here’s the thing, though: it’s not. At least, it’s not as white as it looks if you hang out in most of the places most white people hang out. Yes, on average Minnesota is whiter than most states — but we’re far from the whitest state, and there are large communities of color in Minneapolis and St. Paul. When white people say Minnesota is so white, what we really mean is that Minnesota is so segregated.

Very often, due to residential, educational, and professional segregation, white Minnesotans just don’t see people of color — and when we do, we often don’t realize we do. Another thing white Minnesotans often mean when we say Minnesota is so white is that if you’re not white, you’re not seen as “Minnesotan.”

We also have several large Indian reservations and substantial Anishinaabe and Dakota populations. When you see those adorable Minnesotans in the movies and on TV with their sing-song accents saying “Fer cute!” and babbling about the weather, it’s easy to forget that those charming Lake Wobegoners fought some savage wars with the native people and hanged and shot many of them.

We had Prince, and he was black…but do people think of the large black communities, or the Somali and Hmong people who’ve moved into Minneapolis-St Paul? Nope. Vikings and blonde kids and Nordic beauties, that’s us. Except it isn’t.

We also have a reputation for Minnesota Nice. I’ve tried to warn people that Minnesota Nice is the very opposite of nice, but they don’t believe me until they experience it.

Minnesota Nice is the transplants’ nice way of calling born-and-reared-here Minnesotans passive-aggressive. For those of us who’ve lived in other places, such indirectness is baffling at best, and emotionally abusive at worst. Unlike what the Star Tribune and City Pages offer in their analyses about “overcoming Minnesota Nice,” the problem is deeper than a state full of polite, but shallow, conversationalists. This isn’t about Indigenous people and people of color (POCs) simply needing to be more assertive in shaking hands with and smiling more often at white people – in other words, being nice to them. The interpersonal “remedies” offered by the mainstream press and its “alternative” subsidiary flippantly dismiss the realities of how racial inequity operates here and squarely puts the burden on Indigenous people and POCs to correct it in order to make white people more comfortable and not challenge – if not outright dismantle – the particular “friendly” construction of Minnesota’s racism. In other words, this state’s niceness isn’t nice at all.

The most common way this plays out in race relations is in what social justice thinkers and psychologists call microaggressions. As psychologist Derald Wing Sue notes particularly with racial microaggressions, they’re the “everyday insults, indignities and demeaning messages sent to people of color by well-intentioned white people who are unaware of the hidden messages being sent to them.”

I can vouch for that last bit. Everyone here is extremely well-intentioned. If you want to have a visceral education in how intentions do not magically solve problems, but can actually make them worse, move to Minnesota. But remember: if the passive-aggressive, smiling attitude makes you uncomfortable, the problem isn’t them, it’s you. You must adapt. You must become like them. If you don’t, you aren’t very nice, now are you? And we all want to be nice.

I remember my Minnesotan grandmother who I loved very much, and who I think also loved me very much, taking me aside when I went off to university and warning me that I better not date any of those black girls in the big city. But she was nice about it. She meant well.

We need to fix this.

We can talk not just about Prince, but about the African-American musical community that nurtured his talent. We can talk not just about Oscar nominee Barkhad Abdi, but about the Somali-American community who enrich the fabric of Minneapolis. When we talk about Minnesota’s fertile fields, we can also talk about the generations of hands — many of them Latino and Asian-American hands — that have cultivated those fields alongside German-American and Scandinavian-American hands.

Ole Rølvaag’s epic novel about Norwegian farmers is titled Giants in the Earth. It’s true, in Minnesota we are standing on the shoulders of giants — including a lot of people of color who haven’t been celebrated with novels and statues. That’s a reality that white Minnesotans need to recognize, and we need to participate in the dismantling of a system that makes some Minnesotans more equal than others.

How about some real concerns?

Forget that parade of ignorant bozos asking stupid questions of progressives…there are genuine social problems that need to be dealt with, rather than more coddling of us lucky white men. Start with this excellent discussion of identity politics and the left.

That sexism and racism exist cannot seriously be in doubt for any progressive person in the year 2016. Everyone has an identity; every identity is political, whether because it is marginalized or because it benefits from the marginalization of others. It is not “enlightening” or fresh or radical to ignore identity-based oppressions, or minimize them, or demand marginalized people stop talking about them. Oppression is not a “debate” or a “discussion.” It’s a fact. You can “debate” gravity all day, but that won’t change what happens when you drop a bowling ball on your foot. You can “debate” sexism all day, too. The outcome of sexist behaviors remains the same.

Viewpoints which attack “identity politics” directly attack marginalized people. Viewpoints which do not take racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, or transphobia into account are not “universal” or “pure” — they are biased in favor of white, male, straight, Christian or cisgender people.

Too often complaints about politics are fundamentally not about politics, but that questioning the status quo upsets their political views. Similarly, right now people are upset about Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s comments about our orange fascist, Donald Trump, and she’s being accused of “politicizing” the Supreme Court, which is simply absurd. The Republicans are extremely annoyed.

But the Supreme Court is extremely political! Every election year, everyone fusses over the importance of which political party captures the presidency, because it will affect appointments to the court. We all know this. Yet somehow we’re supposed to just close our eyes and pretend that these people have no political views? Roberts and Thomas and Alito and goddamned Scalia were pure political ciphers, completely neutral on everything?

We only do that when the political actor reflects the dominant, majority view, which we’re told is simply the default, and anyone who disagrees with it must be some kind of radical weirdo who is “politicizing” the process.

If you’re really in the reality-based community, you have to acknowledge that the Republican nominee for president is an incompetent bigot. Keep it up, RBG.