In some cases DHS produced minute-by-minute reports on #BlackLivesMatter protesters’ movements http://t.co/iSWYn9x0rY pic.twitter.com/QinTqM2ffQ
— The Intercept (@the_intercept) July 24, 2015
Post-racial America
Open Thread: Our National Plague
For your enjoyment, David Roth’s musings in Vice Sports upon “The Importance Of Not Being An A-Hole“:
On Thursday, Ohio State quarterback Cardale Jones made a guy disappear. He did not make him disappear entirely, and probably not nearly decisively enough for those who deal with this person steering casual workplace conversations towards “reverse racism.” But when the man high-handedly told Jones on Twitter not to sweat this #BlackLivesMatter “bullshit” and instead worry about winning “us fans” another national championship, Jones dismissed him so decisively that the dude deleted his account(s); as a state-of-the-art internet dicklord, he appears to have had an anonymized one that he used to send racialized newsgrumps at right-wing media accounts, and another that he used to bark pissy shaddups at the young athletes he thinks work for him. This man will not be missed, but he will also likely not be gone. Somewhere on the great horizon-to-horizon garbage desert of the internet, this dipshit is just emerging from a new Twitter egg, hideous and translucent and still-embryonic, and croaking something about “race hustlers.” Life finds a way, always, and people have always found ways to be assholes about sports.
This is not just a sports thing, to be fair. It’s not that we’re so exhausted after all that courteous, well-informed, good-faith discussion about politics or religion that we’ve just got nothing left in the tank when it comes to sports and so revert to tantrums and ham-headed trolling and sending “kill urself” tweets to ineffective relief pitchers. People are just sort of like that when they let themselves be, and something about being in sports’ toy department awakens, in what are otherwise chronologically adults, the toddler’s idiot urge to lick every flat surface and cram various jagged things into nostrils. Part of the appeal of sports is that it is, experientially if not politically or economically, safely outside the broader world. But that perceived lack of consequence reads, to those looking for an excuse, as an invitation to unabashedly fart themselves hoarse….
… A world in which people feel not just okay about but a certain smug pride in behaving like assholes is not a world that anyone would really want to live in, really. Because the defining trait of assholery is an unwillingness or inability to deal with the reality of a world that contains other people, an asshole-positive culture is an unworkably narcissistic one. That culture is aggrieved and fact-averse and tribal. More than that, though, it’s warped and stunted and incomplete—every insufficiently flattering or convenient perspective is filed under “Bullshit/Whatever,” every trial or tragedy or triumph is run through the filter of the self until it makes the sort of sense that the asshole-in-question wants it to make…
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Apart from that, what’s on the agenda for the evening?
Open Thread: The “Smarter Bush Brother” Strikes Again!
It would help organize their vast numbers if the GOP primary candidates were arranged along a spectrum from calculated stupid to real stupid
— Bob Schooley (@Rschooley) July 23, 2015
Jeb! on O’Malley: “If he believes that white lives matter, which I hope he does, then he shouldn't have apologized.” http://t.co/9I0UZCyZ20
— daveweigel (@daveweigel) July 23, 2015
From the Washington Post article:
After an event in Gorham, N.H. today, Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush rolled his eyes at the mention of protesters who heckled the phrase “black lives matter, white lives matter, all lives matter” at a progressive conference…
“We’re so uptight and so politically correct now that we apologize for saying ‘lives matter?'” asked Bush. “Life is precious. It’s a gift from God. I frankly think that it’s one of the most important values that we have. I know in the political context it’s a slogan, I guess. Should he have apologized? No. If he believes that white lives matter, which I hope he does, then he shouldn’t have apologized to a group that seemed to disagree with it. Gosh.”…
In his Florida political career, Bush sometimes stumbled over racial questions. During his unsuccessful 1994 campaign for governor, when asked what he would do for black people, Bush said “nothing.” He intended that to be a comment about higher standards and economic growth benefiting everyone, but it came off as a gaffe. Then, as now, Bush felt burned by the language of “political correctness.”
My emphases, because I suspect JEB! got his lazy tongue tangled over the memorized “pro life” mottoes he’s been feeding the fetus fetishists for his entire career, and the inborn Bush Clan contempt for all those puling humanoids who are Not Bushes — with a side order of blatant racism, of course. Catholic convert or not, all the anti-abortion pandering is just the highly-processed junk food demanded by “voters”, ugh, in return for their temporary allegiance.
Video and a pretty good #BlackLivesMatter analogy at the link.
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Apart from giving our enemies as much rope as they need to hang themselves, what’s on the agenda for the evening?
Open Thread: The “Smarter Bush Brother” Strikes Again!Post + Comments (118)
Open Thread: Seems to Be Working As Intended (So Far)
HRC made sure @deray was at her campaign launch. And other activists expect more outreach soon from the Clinton camp http://t.co/sAtpBiBuIw
— Wesley Lowery (@WesleyLowery) July 22, 2015
From Lowery’s and Weigel’s article:
… The rise of Black Lives Matter has presented opportunities for Clinton and her opponents, who are seeking to energize black voters to build on the multiethnic coalitions that twice elected Barack Obama. But the candidates have struggled to tap into a movement that has proved unpredictable and fiercely independent. It is a largely organic web of young African American activists — many of them unbound by partisan allegiances and largely unaffiliated with establishment groups such as the NAACP that typically forge close ties with Democrats.
Led by several dozen core activists, many of whom voted for the first time in 2008, Black Lives Matter has organized protests — at times drawing hundreds of participants — in more than two dozen cities and colleges. Many of the movement’s leading activists are among Twitter’s most influential users — with the ability to pump messages out to hundreds of thousands of people, often prompting topics to trend nationwide….
“If you are running to be the leader of the free world, it is your responsibility to seize the opportunity that the protest movement has created,” said Brittany Packnett, 30, a St. Louis-based activist who serves on a White House task force formed after the Ferguson protests to study policing issues….
Patrisse Cullors, another leading organizer, added: “It’s not going to be easy to get our votes.”
Democratic leaders are taking note, party strategists say. The campaigns recognize the importance of reaching out to the movement, and understand the perils of ignoring it.
“While it’s inconvenient, or it makes some people uncomfortable, we can’t go back,” said Donna Brazile, a Democratic strategist who has taken heat in recent weeks for defending Clinton against criticisms from some Black Lives Matter activists. “Politicians need to tune in.”…
I’ve seen Patrisse Cullors and Tia Oso quoted in the MSM multiple times since they took over the stage at NRN, so the protest was also a success for them and their group — they’ve broken through the social-media clutter, been identified as leaders, and had their contact information inserted into the political horserace touts’ digital rolodexes. Every Wingnut Wurlitzer beneficiary can tell you how important this is for people trying to keep control of their own narrative.
Open Thread: Seems to Be Working As Intended (So Far)Post + Comments (75)
The Dashcam Video
The two scariest things I think about the Bland dashcam video are as follows:
1.) The fact that they had the enormous brass balls to release an obviously edited video makes you wonder just what exactly they are used to getting away with down there that they thought they could do this and no one would notice. It’s stunning, really, as well as horrifying. A DOJ investigation of all the practices down there is warranted, IMHO.
2.) It confirms to everyone that literally anything is a pretext for the murder of black people at the hands of police. I still have yet to figure out why he raced up behind her, why he then pulled her over, and why he decided that because she refused to put out a cigarette in her own god damned car that she needed to go to jail. It really can’t be anything other than the black woman refused to kiss his ass. I mean, he asked her why she was pissed, she told him, and that made him angrier. Why the fuck did he ask? How many loose cannons like this are there out there terrorizing black people?
And this strikes closer to home than many of you think. As many of you know, I am the advisor for a fraternity, and there are a lot of black men in my fraternity. Currently, one of our brothers who you have seen a good bit of, Christion, is living with me. He graduated in May and doesn’t have a great support system, and no family wealth to set him up anywhere or buy him a car, so he is living here, working, trying to get a job, and we are working on saving up enough money for him to get a car so he can have stable transportation for when he gets a good career opportunity. From time to time he drives my car to do things, and I often wonder if, even though we don’t live in the deep south, if some cop is going to fuck with him just for being black.
Additionally, a lot of the brothers have to go to national conferences, and often times our delegation will be if not all black, then three or four black young men in the prime age for being accosted by police. There was a conference in St. Louis in the almost immediate aftermath of Ferguson that they had to go to or our house would face fines from Nationals, and I was a fucking nervous wreck the entire time. I didn’t want them to go and debated whether or not I could afford to personally pay the fines to nationals so they wouldn’t have to, but I couldn’t swing it, so they went. I told them repeatedly- “Do not leave the hotel complex. Do not leave the hotel complex. Do not leave the hotel complex. Always carry your id and stick together, don’t cause any trouble whatsoever.” Even the most innocent of things can get you in trouble in that miserable racist shithole. The cops there seem to shoot young black men for sport and the DA will have their back.
Sometimes, when the conference is somewhere not too far away, like Indianapolis, I will just load everyone into my car and I will drive and drop them off at the conference hotel and then rent a room elsewhere for myself for the weekend, and pick them up and drive them home when the conference is over. That way I don’t have to worry about the driving while black issue.
I remember one time we were driving somewhere, and there was a minor accident while blocking the road ahead- lots of lights and sirens and traffic was at a dead standstill. After about fifteen minutes, I got out of the car, walked up to one of the cops, and asked “What’s going on? Do you need some help? How long are we going to be here? We have places to go.” The cop looked like they hadn’t thought about that, and they started slowly waving us around the accident. The guys couldn’t believe I did that- had the balls to get out of the car and approach a cop, and it wasn’t anything I had even thought about. Me being in danger didn’t even occur to me because all I was thinking about was that I used to be in the Fire Department and could help out or at least get us on our way.
So yeah. Kinda rambling. But I’m just kind of stunned about this whole thing. This is even worse than Garner, I think, because I just can’t think of any justifiable reason for that cop to pull her over and start the stupid and inexcusable chain of events that left her dead. It makes no fucking sense.
Long(ish) Read: “Atticus Was Always a Racist”
Since the first hasty not our Gregory Peck Atticus! media “shock,”, there’s been some excellent reviews written about Go Set A Watchman. Many of them make the point that To Kill A Mockingbird (along with Catcher in the Rye) were the first novels sold explicitly as YA, young adult — a new marketing category, basically fairy-tales-for-teenagers. People feel very strongly about Mockingbird, just as people feel strongly about Harry Potter and the Hunger Games; apart from any literary critique, such books capture a permanent place in people’s memories that will always remain tender.
But the review that I most agree with is from Catherine Nicols, at Jezebel, on “Why Go Set a Watchman Is No Surprise“:
The final tableau of To Kill A Mockingbird has always given me a sour feeling toward the book—it ends with the black man dead, the poor white man also dead, the law uninterested in prosecuting their murders. The white gentleman and his children are sadder and wiser, but the wisdom imparted is essentially about the hopelessness of defending black people and poor white people from one another. I used to think Mockingbird was a shameful book to hand out in a high school classroom, all things considered, given that it’s a race story that scarcely passes the black-person version of the Bechdel test. It’s about white people within white culture making Tom Robinson’s life and death about themselves.
So, when the news broke about Go Set a Watchman’s Atticus being racist—in contrast as people said, to Mockingbird’s Atticus, I went back to read both books, wondering: hasn’t it always been this way? Hasn’t he always been racist? As Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in the New Yorker, his defense of Tom Robinson is based on segregationist principles—he works for “accommodation, not reform.” The new book gives the impression that Lee knew what much of her audience didn’t: that her character’s principles didn’t constitute justice. By itself, I thought To Kill a Mockingbird was a racist book. Now, with the publication of Watchman, it stands to be redefined as a book about racism not just in Maycomb County, but within the Finch household itself…
Throughout Mockingbird, Atticus is engaged in the foundational moonlight-and-magnolias Southern delusion that so swayed Ashley Wilkes and Ellen O’Hara in Gone With the Wind. He fought with the genteel cruelty of the slaver, in service of the other American dream, which is the idea that a man can be the ultimate patriarch: the cultivated master of the lower orders, the head of a family that extends through his wife and children down through the slaves. Everyone but the patriarch, it’s assumed, is slowly developing out of moral infancy—and as such, the patriarch is charged with leading everyone in religion, work ethic and cleanliness. Atticus is the son of slave owners, and he’s acting the part of one when he argues that Tom Robinson is from a clean-living family, and the black servant Calpurnia can be trusted raising white kids—this is the race equivalent of chivalry, the imperiled pedestal…
Long(ish) Read: “Atticus Was Always a Racist”Post + Comments (97)
Open Thread: “I Am Not A Member of Any Organized Political Party… “
A tale of two parties: Democratic town hall taken over by Black Lives Matter protesters, Republican event was taken over by Donald Trump
— Jane C. Timm (@janestreet) July 18, 2015
People's Front of Judea really showed the Judean People's Front today
— Benjy Sarlin (@BenjySarlin) July 18, 2015
Surprised that Bernie Sanders’s call for “revolution” was interrupted by more radical activists? May I introduce you to Russia 1917
— daveweigel (@daveweigel) July 18, 2015
Even before Will Roger’s famous snark, there was Finley Peter Dunne, back in the original Gilded Age:
No, sir, th’ dimmycratic party ain’t on speakin’ terms with itsilf. Whin ye see two men with white neckties go into a sthreet car an’ set in opposite corners while wan mutthers Thraiter an’ th’ other hisses Miscreent ye can bet they’re two dimmycratic leaders thryin’ to reunite th’ gran’ ol’ party.
I was born into the Democratic Party, and the 1972 Democratic National Convention was the first to which I paid serious attention. (I was sixteen, and enamored with Shirley Chisholm.) So yesterday’s “shit show” at Netroots Nation wasn’t the shock to my sensibilities that it was to some other people. As described by local outlet AZ Central:
Civil-rights protesters gave Democratic presidential contenders Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley a raucous and tense reception Saturday in downtown Phoenix, disrupting and commandeering a forum that was billed as a conversation with the two progressive candidates…
Tia Oso, a Phoenix resident with the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, said she helped organize the protest because Black-rights issues were not represented at Netroots Nation this year. While events for Latino immigrants were integrated into the convention, black immigrants were ignored, she said…
“They said, ‘Oh we’re doing it in Arizona. We have to be all about immigration,'” said Angela Peoples, a co-director at LGBT inequality group Get Equal from Maryland. “But then they’re only centering the conversation on Latinos, which is important, but we also know that the experiences … are connected and we need people to be connected to Black lives as much as brown lives.”
In a written statement, Netroots Nation said it “stands in solidarity with all people seeking human rights.”
“Although we wish the candidates had more time to respond to the issues, what happened today is reflective of an urgent moment that America is facing today,” the statement said. “In 2016, we’re heading to St. Louis. We plan to work with activists there just as we did in Phoenix with local leaders, including the #BlackLivesMatter movement, to amplify issues like racial profiling and police brutality in a major way…
Of course, NN15 paid special attention to Latino issues because Markos Moulitsas “and his DailyKos community” were already boycotting the event in protest over its location. The Phoenix affiliate had done a lot of planning, and I’m sure they hoped for more coverage of events like the #ArpaioFreeAZ protest…
Huge Turnout for #ArpaioFreeAZ protest http://t.co/y26z3HOT6N @PuenteAZ @Netroots_Nation @phxnews
— Miriam Wasser (@MiriamWasser) July 18, 2015
… not to mention the general Progressive goal of “dragging HRC leftwards.”
Activists at #NN15TownHall are shouting the names of black women who have died in police custody. "Say her name!" pic.twitter.com/GC4g5iz2XB
— Darren Sands (@darrensands) July 18, 2015
But the #BlackLivesMatter protest organizers understandably have their own goals, sometimes orthogonal to those of the general Netroots Nation “train grassroots workers to better promote and elect more progressive (i.e., Democratic) officials at every level of government.” They feel their concerns are underrepresented, and they have to use the platforms available — which will be Democratic, not Republican, venues — to rectify that. It would seem, from the reports, that they succeeded in doing so yesterday:
“It’s not like we like shutting s— down, but we have to,” Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of Black Lives Matters, told the crowd, saying the group’s issues were an emergency.
As a side benefit, the protest identified its organizers (Oso, Peoples, Cullors) to the general media as “leaders”, spokeswomen for the larger issue, and the MSM can be expected to go to them and their group in the future for quotes and stories. This is not nothing, since the very diffusion of social media that makes it possible for movements like #BlackLivesMatter to arise makes it harder for any group or individual to achieve “credibility” with the MSM.
Twitter users debate Bernie Sanders' civil rights credibility with #BernieSoBlack hashtag http://t.co/a5sAaMhFxm
— Raw Story (@RawStory) July 19, 2015
Financial oligarchs, Tea Party fascists gotta be watching all this, thinking "Man, they make it so EASY for us!" https://t.co/EBCU1GR7Eu
— Billmon (@billmon1) July 19, 2015
So, what’s done is done, and it is to be hoped that the aftereffects won’t be as toxic as the 1972 convention (which broke Rep. Chisholm’s heart, destroyed McGovern’s never strong chance of taking back the White House, and established a tradition of hippie-punching and anti-feminism that have yet to be exorcised). Never thought I’d be using the phrase “Thank God for Donald Trump’s big mouth” in earnest…
I wonder if Trump supporters and #NN15 activists realize just how good a day it's been for Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush.
— Daniel Drezner (@dandrezner) July 19, 2015
Open Thread: “I Am Not A Member of Any Organized Political Party… “Post + Comments (358)