Tag: racism

It’s 2017, Why Do We Have To Even Talk About White Supremacy?

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I get it. You voted for Trump.

Well, no, I don’t. I don’t get it. It’s not like Trump hid who he was at any point during the race or during his first (sigh) 200 days.

But you wanted a Republican agenda, and you were disgusted at the prospect of a Hillary Clinton presidency, and you pulled the lever for the orange one. You held your nose and voted. Lesser of two evils.

Maybe you wanted to believe his shenanigans were an act. His stir-the-pot, say-something-outrageous-and-watch-the-media-jump antics were a means to an end, and not just an end in themselves. Seven-dimensional chess. The real point was that he was going to make America great again. Shake up the system. Drain the swamp. Lock her up.

And maybe it was possible to hide behind all that. “I wish he’d act more presidential, but…” Point to healthcare instead. (Oh, wait.) Point to his wall instead. (Hmm, maybe not.) Point to the Republican-controlled congress and all the progress they’re making. (Yeah, about that…)

But you can’t hide behind that anymore, can you? You can’t, with any ounce of dignity or plausible deniability, say that you “wish he’d act better.” Because he has now laid out on the table exactly who he is for everybody to see. It doesn’t get simpler than condemning white nationalists. It doesn’t get easier than saying “those dicks over there? The ones flying swastikas on the streets of America? Yeah, they’re not okay.” You don’t have to wait two days for “the facts to come in.” (When does this guy ever wait for facts, anyway? He’s got a tweet locked and loaded for anybody who rubs him wrong on literally any other topic, but literal Nazis? Nah, let’s make sure we have full information.) You stomp on it. Set fire to it. Throw it over the fence. Put as much daylight between you and that ideology as you possibly can.

But he can’t (or won’t) do that.

I can’t say I’m surprised, and really, nobody should be. But maybe you are. Maybe it’s possible that you thought this was all an act, that he courted the support of these people to further his political ends.

But you see that’s impossible, right? This ridiculous stand for the wrongest thing possible is costing him politically no matter how you look at it. There’s no reason for it other than that he supports these people, or at the very least, doesn’t think they’re a problem.

And that’s a problem.

The president should be unifying us, but instead he’s dividing us more and more at every turn.

He should be supporting and protecting the lowest among us, and instead he’s empowering the worst among us (to be clear, those would be the Nazis and white supremacists) to prey on and intimidate everybody else.

The Trump train is heading for a catastrophe. Let’s not kid ourselves: already it’s a catastrophe, but now it’s a catastrophe heading for calamity.

One is dead in this conflict, and he can’t call those responsible by name.

And they’re planning more rallies this weekend. One in my home city. And worse than the fact that they’re doing it to begin with is the fact that now they feel empowered because the president (who they clearly identify as one of their own, and he doesn’t seem to want to decry that characterization, either).

Decrying his bad behavior is no longer enough. Republicans coming out and condemning white supremacy in the wake of this — that’s, like, less than the bare minimum. Condemning white supremacy is the default position for a human. You shouldn’t have to announce that you don’t approve of it, and yet doing so is somehow seen as a brave stand by those who have hitched themselves to Trump’s wagon for 200 painful days.

It’s not enough. Talk is cheap. It’s time for the people who held their noses and voted for Trump to stop blindly defending this old, racist monster. And stop supporting the cowardly Republicans who won’t stand up to him.

You can’t pretend anymore.

It’s time for him to go.

Past time, really.

But there’s no time like the present.

Tone-Deaf White People

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I’m not sure if I’m on high alert what with all the bad juju in the air, or if the stupid really is going around like a bad case of the clap, but today — TODAY ALONE — I bore firsthand witness to some serious stupidness on display from white people, particularly given the climate (can you call it the climate when it’s the past week we’re talking about?), or maybe just the weather, of the past week.

I’m talking specifically about the culture of rediscovered racial tension and unrest between civilians and police.

Look, it’s hard on white people. I don’t mean it’s hard on white people like it is on people who aren’t white. I mean we face our own series of challenges. Specifically, there are things we can’t understand and will have a hard time grasping just by dint of the fact that we’re white. But that doesn’t mean we can’t try, and it doesn’t mean we can’t stop and think about a thing before we slap our balls on the table and do the thing.

But the problem with people? Too many of us don’t think.

So, here are two balls-on-table moments that I witnessed TODAY.

#1:

Wife and I are out shopping at the Kroger. Early, no less — about 8 am. (This is the best time to shop, by the way. The aisles are largely empty, the employees are just beginning their shifts so they haven’t been filled to the brim with customers’ bullsharknado … it’s the best.) As we’re checking out, I look up.

And here comes this guy.

He’s older. Upper fifties, maybe early sixties. Overweight, but moving spryly, like an ex-NFL player or something. Cargo shorts. Hawaiian shirt. And a motherfargoing gun belt with a gun on each hip. One looks, I dunno, standard? I’m not a gun guy, but it looks like you expect a gun to look. The other gun is a straight-out-of-a-John-Wayne-cowboy-flick six-shooter pistol. He grabs a cart and scoots over toward the tomatoes. Guns just hanging off his hip.

I double take. Then triple take. I nudge my wife. Duck my head in the suburban cowboy’s direction. I ask the cashier: do you know that guy?

Oh yeah, she says, he comes in here all the time.

I blink. “Strapped up like that, though?”

She looks. Double takes. “No, can’t say I’ve ever seen him carrying any weapons.”

My wife and I share a look and beat it out of the store.

Look, I am sure this dude has all his permits in order. Maybe he’s retired military or police; I dunno. But here’s the thing: sure, you can have your guns. And I guess if you’ve got your open-carry business in order, that’s fine and swell. But you’re not flying TWO weapons — one of which is a bonafide antique — for self-defense. You’re flying two weapons, including the Wyatt Earp boomstick, to show out. Fly your 2nd Amendment flag. Let everybody know that you’re the dude who carries his guns to the grocery store.

And I couldn’t help but wonder two things:

Why do you need all that firepower on Sunday morning in the produce section? Are you planning on overthrowing a terrorist plot in the deli?

And what would have happened if he were NOT a white dude?

I mean, I blinked and stared a bit, but nobody else did, really. Just a white dude with his guns, NBD. But what if he were a black guy, or a Muslim wearing a head scarf? The cops would have have been on scene before he could squeeze an avocado.

Just a little bit of white privilege cruising toward the Frosted Flakes.

#2.

I was browsing facebook again (yeah, I know. What can I say, it’s summer) and I saw a post from a girl I went to high school with.

Turns out, she was out driving and went through a DUI checkpoint. Sped through it, actually. Got flagged over and screened for DUI. Which, okay, that happens, I guess. She gets put through the paces, but she’s one hundred percent sober, so of course she gets sent on her way with just a warning, despite the speeding.

Fine and dandy.

Here’s the tone-deaf part: she said that her nerves had her shaking, even though she was sober, and wrapped up with this: “He let me go without a ticket and thanked me for not driving drunk. Still processing the whole thing. I wonder what my rights were if I denied the test?”

She, a liberal. She, who, this very week, has posted her disgust over the needless killings that have spawned protests and outrage.

And all I could think was, you’ve got to be kidding. You entitled b-word.

How about THANKS FOR KEEPING MY STREETS SAFE, OFFICER.

How about THANKS FOR NOT SHOOTING ME DURING AN OTHERWISE ROUTINE TRAFFIC STOP.

How about THANK GOD I’M A WHITE FEMALE, HE LET ME OFF WITH JUST A WARNING.

How about maybe not posting something so horrifically tone-deaf complaining about a minor inconvenience in a week where, yet again, two black men were killed by police ON CAMERA. To say nothing of what may have happened off-camera.

You were inconvenienced for about ten minutes — because you were SPEEDING, by the way — and you are pondering your legal standing with the officer who had the audacity to delay you.

And even worse! The comments section was filled up with friends saying “glad you’re okay!” and “that sounds very scary!” …WHAT?  Glad you’re okay, as if she faced some harrowing experience that will haunt her for the rest of her days. That sounds scary, because anybody reading her story will think for any amount of time that she was in any amount of danger.

There were about a hundred things I wanted to say, that I didn’t, mostly due to not wanting to start a fight with somebody who’s been out of my life for almost twenty years now (and thank goodness, by the way, given this idiocy).

And also, my wife convinced me not to.

So I’ll just say it here.

Be glad you’re not black, or else you might have had real reason to be nervous at that traffic stop. Be glad you’re white, and can worry about your rights as you drive away from the encounter instead of being thankful you weren’t arrested or shot.

And more, along the same line, in all sorts of permutations and combinations.

We have to wake up.

Part of the reason race continues to be an issue in this country is because stupid white people don’t pause for a SECOND to think.

Think about the privilege we have.

Think about what life might be like for somebody who doesn’t share that privilege.

Think about what somebody without that privilege might think, seeing you doing the things that you do.

In short, start thinking about the bigger world, start thinking about more than what’s right in front of you, start thinking about what it might be to be somebody who isn’t you.

Better yet?

Just start thinking.

 

Rush Limbaugh is a Terrorist

Pavowski3 Comments

Things are bad enough, aren’t they?

We have a police culture that is maybe a little trigger-happy right now. We have a black population that is feeling victimized and angry. We have politicians and talking heads fumbling at the ragged edges of this issue. We have social media activism and god almighty my Facebook feed is choked like a propeller in a weed swamp with sanctimonious links saying “THIS” and “SO MUCH THIS” and I just can’t take anymore.

Everybody’s a poet, everybody has something profound to say, and that’s great and that’s fine, but unfortunately, social media activism is just about as effective as prayer: we think about these things for a little while until the media firestorm dies down, and then we move on to the next thing. This is fine, and it’s probably not going to change anytime soon, because the posts and the shares and the virals are generally the province of people who have relatively small spheres of influence. Pockets of activism spring up, get loud for a little while, and then peter out. This is the way of things.

But not everybody has a small sphere.

Some spheres are rather large.

In fact, some spheres are so bloated they defy belief. So massive they develop their own gravity, which spreads and expands and pulls people in.

Rush Limbaugh is one such sphere. (And in a curious twist, he’s roughly spherical in shape himself.)

If you’re an American, you know Rush. If you’re not, in short, he’s a fat, angry, sweaty ball of grease and hatred with an audience of millions who listen to his radio program daily. He’s a bloated, vindictive, hateful sack of phlegm and poison who vents his spleen to otherwise intelligent people on the “right” side of our political spectrum.

And on his program Friday, he said that the Black Lives Matter movement are terrorists.

Now, I get it. He’s an “entertainer,” it’s his job to get ratings and to get people tuning in. It’s his job to be provocative.

But the problem with being provocative? The root of that word is “provoke.” Which means inciting action. Which means stirring people to do things.

Everybody’s on edge in this country right now. Everybody’s touchy. Everybody’s overly sensitive. You can’t say “black lives matter” because that means you’re anti-cop, and by the way, ALL LIVES MATTER. You can’t say “all lives matter” because you idiot, there’s a pattern of violence and prejudice in law enforcement against people of color, and you’re totally missing the point.

Look around the country at all the protests and the rampant social media activism, and you’ll see that we’re approaching a boiling point. People are angry. Upset. Scared.

Discourse must be had. We have to talk these things out. We have to share uncomfortable ideas, we have to communicate our fears, but more importantly, we have to LISTEN to each other if we want to make it through this.

And here comes Rush, throwing into this volatile mix of mistrust and fear the word “terrorism.”

Don’t forget, too, that Rush’s audience is primarily folks on the “right”. People who feel their country is being taken from them. Rush tells these people that this group of people over here? This group of people that look different from you, that act different from you, that you probably don’t understand very well?

Those people are terrorists.

Rush is telling people who are angry about the state of their country that these people — their own countrymen, other citizens and civilians like them — are terrorists.

Somebody in his audience is going to believe him. Maybe several somebodies.

And somebody in his audience is going to act on those beliefs. Maybe several somebodies.

There will be more blood shed. There will be more protests, more violence, more arrests, and on and on and on.

Demonizing the other side doesn’t help. Sowing the hate and the fear and the distrust even deeper is not a solution.

It’s not like this happens in a vacuum — Rush is always squeezing off tidbits like this, designed to enrage and incite — but this one is particularly bad, because he’s going to get people killed. Blood will be on his hands.

This is how you incite a race war.

Rush Limbaugh is the terrorist. And he has an audience of millions.

Symbols and Smoke Signals

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Things stand for things, right? That’s the whole precept of language, of art, of stories, of life. The banding on that snake means that if it gets its fangs in you, you’re dead. Stay away. The presence of all these closed doors in this character’s life show you how trapped she feels. Let it go. That painting of a monkey doing a handstand on top of the tin man is symbolic of, you know, the struggle of the primitive against the technological. Or something. Or maybe it’s just some jacked-up Wizard of Oz fan art.

It’d be hard to identify a symbol as intrinsically symbolic as a flag, though. A closed door can be a symbol of entrapment or inaccessibility, but sometimes it’s just, y’know, a door. A flag, on the other hand, by its very nature stands for something. When you fly a flag, it’s a big announcement to the world that this is who I am, this is who we are, this is what we stand for.

Which is why I think this psychopathic racist kid with his shooting spree, in trying to set off a race war, has actually done something productive. Not with his murders, but by associating his particular brand of poison with a symbol.

This symbol.

The confederate flag has long been a troublesome symbol. On the one hand, it is, legitimately, a symbol of the Confederate States back at the time of the Civil War. And lots of people, especially in the South, have family that lived in the same area at that time. That probably died for that cause. And the flag is, for them, a symbol of their heritage, their family, their land. Flying the flag demonstrates their pride in that heritage. And the fact that they see it that way is fine.

Problem is, the Confederates were fighting, among other things, to retain the ability to keep slaves. So of course, the critics are quick to point out that to them, the flag is therefore a symbol of slavery. Flying a flag, then, becomes a statement in favor of slavery, in favor of segregation, in favor of any sort of racist thing you can think of. And the fact that they see it that way is fine.

Symbols are tricky things. They mean only what our society agrees they mean. We can all agree that the green light in The Great Gatsby represents the love Gatsby feels for Daisy, a love he will never actually reach, a light whose heat he will never feel. Or maybe it represents Daisy herself, again, perpetually out of his grasp, separated from him by a bay of misunderstandings and screwed-up ideals. There’s no controversy because either a) we all agree on its meaning or b) we can understand why others view it in a different way. With the Confederate flag, there’s no such agreement, because the people who hate it are morally and righteously offended by the people who fly it and the ideals they embrace, while the people who honor it don’t understand why the critics get so uptight about it. (Except for the racists who fly it because they’re racists. Screw the racists.)

And that’s where the conversation about the Confederate flag has been locked for, oh, I dunno, decades? No headway is made because these people have their view and everybody else can go to hell, and those people have their view and everybody else can go to hell, and everybody who decides to get involved in the discussion just ends up sore and pissed off over it.

Until this guy went and shot up a church after taking a ton of pictures of himself with the Confederate flag. You or me flying a Confederate flag outside our houses is a tiny splash in an enormous pond. A cold-blooded mass execution carried out while waving a Confederate flag around and posing, grumpy-faced, in front of a flag is a hundred-gigawatt, laser-guided broadcast via every major news network into every living room in the country.

It’s going to be a very, very long time indeed before anybody is able to see the Confederate flag without thinking of Dylann Roof. For better or worse, that means that for the time being, the Confederate flag is unequivocally and inarguably a symbol of racism, murder, and evil. The governors of South Carolina and Alabama have already moved to stop flying the flag over their state capitols, tradition and heritage be damned. This is a pretty remarkable thing. It might even be a historic thing. The flag won’t go away, but maybe it will move from front lawns into museums and history books, where it belongs. We can only hope the movement spreads.

If you’ve been watching the news lately, you might have heard that several major retailers are no longer going to be selling merchandise that features the confederate flag. They’ll cite any number of reasons, like inclusiveness or discouraging hurtful public statements or not wanting to be associated with controversy, but at the end of the day they’re pulling the merchandise from their shelves. Which is fascinating. Merchants are taking a stand, making a statement about this symbol. Saying that they don’t want to profit from it, that they don’t want to be associated with it.

Some will argue that those retailers are doing themselves a major disservice by losing out on sales of these items themselves, but more so by people who refuse to shop there because of the statement these companies are making. I’m no economist, but I feel like they’ll pull in as much business with their statement against this symbol as they cost themselves. But I don’t care about their bottom lines, I care that they care enough to put their dollars where their mouths are.

I read a brilliant short story earlier this year: The Appropriation of Cultures, by Percival Everett. In his story, a black man begins flying a rebel flag and urges others in his community to do the same, and within a few months, the Confederate flag becomes a symbol not of the South, but rather of civil rights activists. If only the real-world treatment of the symbol had been as nonviolent. Still, it shows a model, fictional or not, of how the meaning of a symbol can change.

Maybe we’re on the brink of making this symbol as a divisive force in our country a thing of the past. Maybe it can just be evil and we can lock it in a coffin and bury it far from daylight.