Ginni Thomas, tea partier and wife of Clarence Thomas, recently hosted noted conservative bigot Jesse Lee Peterson, where they had a lovely chat about how evil Black Lives Matter is, and that race is just an illusion. Imagine that! I had no idea.
“Who are the race hustlers?” Thomas asked. “Who’s in the business of keeping blacks angry?”
“The race hustlers,” Peterson replied, “are people like Jesse Jackson, the NAACP, the Congressional Black Caucus, Louis Farrakhan—the so-called civil rights leaders—many of the black preachers, Barack Obama, they’re all into keeping black Americans angry and demoralized for power and wealth for themselves. And you have to demoralize a person or a people in order to control them, you cannot control a moral people so they keep them in a state of anger and confusion so that they can use them for their personal gain.”
Peterson then told Thomas about his theory that he explains in a recent book positing that because President Obama “grew up without a father in the home,” he only feels “anger” and not “love,” and that’s why he’s sympathetic to Black Lives Matter.
“Those people are evil, they’re wicked, they’re an agitating group, they’re worse than the KKK,” he said. “If Black Lives Matter was a white organization and doing exactly what they’re doing now, America would not accept them, they would not. But because they are black and white people are afraid, and then they have the support of the president, they’re allowed to bring on destruction in this country.”
Erm, white organizations do exist, Rev., and they are allowed to do pretty much whatever they want to do, including the KKK and other white supremacist organizations hosting counter protests which are full of truly abominable sentiments which are racist in nature. Some people, like yourself, are all upsetty because for once, black people are standing up for themselves, and sending the classic message of we’re angry as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore. I’m all the way behind that, my people are doing a similar thing right now, because they face great discrimination, oppression, and marginalization too. We’ve all had generation after generation after generation who has remained trodden down, told over and over to assimilate, to be the best white person you can be, be polite, smile, be submissive. In this so called land of the free, a court has ruled that it is perfectly okay for people to discriminate against and not hire anyone who dares to have natural hair, or a specifically cultural hair style. Fuck that, and fuck you, Reverend.
Claiming that Obama sees the killing of police officers as “no big deal,” Peterson went on to repeat his exhortation to white people to “stand up for themselves” against the Black Lives Matter movement.
“There’s no such thing as racism,” he concluded. “It doesn’t exist. It’s an illusion. It has been made up by the race hustlers in order to intimidate and control to get that power.”
Okay, I would really like to know just when it was that black people had control and power in this country. Anyone know? I’m pretty sure that black people aren’t looking to lord it over the precious white people, Rev. They would like it if they were treated as people, y’know, human beings, with the full rights thereof. They would like some respect. They’d like it if they could go one day without being under constant suspicion of something or other. They would like it if they could live without a constant fear of white people. They would like it if cops would stop murdering black people with impunity. The list goes on. My people (Lakota) have a similar list. So do all other indigenous peoples. I’m pretty sure Hispanic and Latino peoples also have a similar list. Well, pretty much everyone who isn’t white. Going by the Reverend’s logic, slavery was the apex of black people in America.
After that lovely little chat neatly disposing of racism, the Reverend went on to rail and moan about intellectuals and drag queens in foxholes.
Right-wing activist Jesse Lee Peterson recently delivered a sermon in which he warned his congregation not to become intellectuals because intellectualism is responsible for foisting things like gay marriage upon America.
“I notice that the people who are really into the intellect are nutcases,” Peterson said. “Absolute nutcases. Because of this intellectual thing taking over and the people rule us, we now have so-called same-sex marriage. That wouldn’t happen if we weren’t into the intellect. Common sense would dictate that is not going to happen and common sense wouldn’t care what you thought about it because we would know that that’s wrong.”
Intellectuals are also responsible for the fact that “we now have drag queens running around in the military,” Peterson added.
“Can you imagine jumping down in a foxhole, running from bin Laden, and there is a man in there with a dress and lipstick on? It would shock you. You would rather be out with bin Laden,” Peterson stated, apparently so dedicated to being anti-intellectual that he’s totally unaware that Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011.
People simply need to rely “on the intellect of God,” he recommended, because human intellect is a tool of the devil, which is why “all intellectual people are insecure people … because their father is weak, their father Satan is a deceiver.”
Y’know, if you’re going to buy into that whole creationism business, and that we’re created in El Shaddai’s image and all that, fine, but what does that say about your god? That he’s an idiot? Or just his standard sociopathic sadism at work, giving people a brain to use, in order to punish us for using it. That’s probably about right. Oh, yes, and I almost forgot, that evil intellect stuff is Eve’s fault, ennit? Right, so once again it’s the evil of women at fault.
As for dresses and lipstick in foxholes, I’m not sure how you missed this one, Rev, but the military provides uniforms, and people are expected to wear them. Personally, if I found myself in the middle of a war zone, trying not to piss myself in a foxhole, I wouldn’t care if a whole regiment of drag queens showed up, as long as they got me out alive, and they’d have my undying thanks.
If common sense were common, wouldn’t more people have it?
You’d certainly think so. As it stands, not many evil intellects operating, either.
There isn’t an entry on this kook in the Encyclopedia of American Loons, albeit one is promised. The SPLC is aware of him, as one example, Black Pastor Who Thanked God for Slavery Hosts Anti-NAACP Rally (July-2011):
The above-excerpted SPLC article has a link to, among other things, this article in The Nation, The Minister of Minstrelsy.
This reminds me. A couple of weeks ago I was trying to talk some sense into an “anti-SJW” regarding BLM (a futile effort that was rewarded with unwarranted personal attacks, go figure) when a conservative black guy joined the conversation saying he disapproved the movement as well, dismissing their activities as “just yelling.” That disarmed me, as I was afraid that in replying I could start to whitesplain without noticing. I’m not perfect, after all. It made me upset, but I simply accepted his testimony for consideration. What else could I do?
PS: one of the attacks? Implying that I wanted to commit genocide against those who disagreed with me. My WTF meter exploded!
Kreator @ 4:
If you run into that nonsense again, point them to this article. It’s from a black person’s point of view, and why they think it’s time to stop paying attention to white peoples’ opinions at all, as it’s a waste of time. I have to agree that much of time, it is a waste.
As for people of colour who insist on taking what one might call the white side of things (not all white folks, natch), I’d send them there, too, because these are people who are so far gone into the assimilation concept, you really can’t fish them out. They are convinced that assimilation is the only way, and that means being as white as possible. Unfortunately, people of all colours end up in that pool. I can pretty much lay money on conservative black dude getting all explodey and upset over that article.
Oh, and genocide? My, my. There’s a lot to be said about genocide, but trying to help people overcome institutional racism and personal bigotry is not one of the definitions. Trying to convince historically oppressed and marginalized people into assimilation and loss of culture, that is a form of genocide, and I’d be happy to tell conservative black dude that, too.
Thanks, Caine; I’ve bookmarked (and read) that link.
And you have to demoralize a person or a people in order to control them, you cannot control a moral people so they keep them in a state of anger and confusion so that they can use them for their personal gain.
Isn’t that what religion does?
I mean, isn’t that ALL that religion does?
So, is he complaining about competition?
Ah yeah, white genocide. Also usually known as “white women have the gall to fuck black dudes and nobody is stopping them”.
Freud, unsurprisingly, got it all wrong. The thing in existence isn’t penis envy. It’s cis dude womb envy: The need to control cis women and other people with uteri to be able to procreate.
Newsflash: M*A*S*H* was not a documentary.
So, I think you may be misinterpreting Peterson in a few cases.
The way I read what he was saying is that the black leaders do what they do for personal control and power. It has nothing to do with the country as a whole. Your point is still valid, though, in that he’s also saying racism doesn’t exist. If racism doesn’t exist, then, yeah, why don’t blacks have more power in government? Is he then going to be one of these people that claims blacks are factually inferior to white? (The idea here being it can’t be racist if it’s a fact. And I’m sure this fact is just “common sense,” so he wouldn’t need to prove it.)
But he was talking specifically about organizations that do what BLM does. Those probably do not exist and, if they did, yeah, they may indeed not be accepted. So he almost has a point there. Except, as these people usually do*, he is likely overestimating how accepted BLM is. If you were to ask me if I felt BLM is accepted in this country, I’d have to say it’s largely split.
* A common theme I have observed among conservatives is to turn any viewpoint that has majority support, even if it is only a very slight majority, is treated as if there is massive support. This then gets used so that they can project themselves as these insightful individual that see what most others cannot. Yet, they’ll often, as does Peterson, claim their insight is just “common sense.” I see this commonly used among Christians proclaiming how persecuted they are or when attacking those who belong to the LGBT community. I suspect Peterson is taking a similar approach to BLM.
On the ‘if white people were doing what BLM was doing’ -- if there was an organization comprised of white people pointing out police brutality against white people, including unarmed white people being killed by the police, I cannot see it being less accepted than BLM. The only issue is, since white people tend to be more likely to reflexively support law enforcement, I would imagine it would be harder to get such an organization going or off the ground.
What pisses me off about these people who claim BLM is so bad because they are race baiting, violent, etc. is that they are hypocrites of the highest order.
Yes, there are some people (who are not actually associated with the BLM movement) using the BLM protests and actions as a cover for violent action and vandalism. People like Thomas and Peterson are more than willing to throw the whole movement under the bus for the sake of a few agitators who aren’t really even part of the (non-violent) BLM movement. However, when people point out that cops, and the whole justice system is rigged, then their story changes to #notallcops….. This, of course is bullshit, as there are no ‘fake’ cops doing this. These are actual police, and then the rest of the police force and every police organization closes ranks to protect them.
It really makes me wish that these assholes would get pulled over in a neighborhood where the cops didn’t recognize them and get the treatment they say doesn’t exist.