You know what’s ruining this country? Talking about racism.

Maxine Waters has been getting praise the last couple of days for her actions in standing against a bill designed to erode consumer protections. The protections in question are designed to make it harder for auto-loan companies to discriminate against people of color in lending terms.

The auto-loan business is unlike, say, the mortgage business where it’s relatively rare for the seller of a home to negotiate the terms of a mortgage taken out by the buyer. In the car business, negotiating the terms of a potential loan is part of the wheeling and dealing that goes into the process of selling the car. It turns out that there’s a lot of data that discrimination in loan terms has been happening even very recently. (This, unfortunately, is actually quite like mortgages where we know from the information that came out after the 2008 housing crash that people of color had been systematically pressed into taking unfavorable loan terms.) Because of this, these regulations have a direct impact on car dealerships themselves who are implicated in creating unfair terms – indeed the closely-connected, but frequently legally-separate loan companies don’t always know anything about the race of the buyer, but the car seller interacting with a buyer face-to-face certainly does. And it’s that seller negotiating the terms. So, of course, car sellers were a primary target of the regulations.

This has not gone down well with car sellers who take great exception to the idea that people of color being routinely charged more interest than white folks should in any way reflect badly on them … or justify intrusive government regulations. Trump, of course, is here to help out those beleaguered racists who desperately want the freedom to change people different interest rates based on race. Thus entered Maxine Waters and her praiseworthy defense of reasonable regulations on the floor of the House.

Not everyone found Waters’ defense praiseworthy, however. Mike Kelly, coincidentally the owner of several car dealerships, did not like Waters’ floor speech one bit. Not that he wanted to disagree with her, of course. He hated being put in a position where he was forced to disagree with her. The truly terrible thing about repealing anti-discrimination protections is that when repealing law whose entire purpose is to prevent discrimination based on race, the repeal’s opponents mention race at all!

“We have seen the economy take off,” Kelly, who also owns three auto dealerships, exclaimed. “I just think that if you come to the floor and there are 60 minutes to debate. 30 minutes on each side. But as I was sitting there, I had 30 minutes of Democrats coming down and talking about how bad automobile people are because they discriminate against nonwhite buyers. I said that’s not America. We don’t talk about those things.”

There’s so much to address. I’d love to leave the Jordan Peterson post up longer. I need to follow up on what happened in Gaza, Jerusalem, and the West Bank yesterday. And yet, here I am quoting some asshat white man who thinks the biggest tragedy in repealing a requirement that we not discriminate based on race is that we violate the sacred dictum that in REAL AMERIKKKA we shouldn’t ever talk about race.

Fuck Trump’s America.

 

Cops vs Volunteers: Race Has Nothing To Do With It, Of Course

I found yet another example of police officers abusing their powers in order to indulge their prejudices over on RawStory. While I’m sure that university sororities have done plenty of good things (heck, even fraternities, I’m sure, have done plenty of good things) there is so much awfulness in Greek life that one could reasonably (though erroneously) suppose that I’m resolutely against sororities and all they stand for.

While that’s not true, one has to wonder about this cop from the Pennsylvania State Highway Patrol:

As a part of the adopt a highway program, members of Sigma Gamma Rho were picking up trash alongside Highway 83 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, when a cop accused them of fighting each other, according to COED News.

Throughout the conversation the officer contradicted himself, according to Sigma Gamma Rho member Shawna Naomi.

Originally the officer said: “I’ve never seen anyone out here cleaning and I’m responding to a call.” Later it was revealed the cop “called in” the report himself.

After the women explained to the officer why they were cleaning the highways even pointing to the “adopt a highway sign” with their sorority name on it the cop still asked to see their IDs.

There’s a picture of the women out doing the work and enjoying themselves. At least a couple are wearing jackets or sweaters with big greek letters on them making their sorority affiliation entirely obvious. So when they were pointing to that equally-obvious official green sign declaring that their sorority has volunteered to clean up that stretch of highway, it wasn’t as if their affiliation was in any way in doubt.

Of course, the PSHP is sure to release a statement at any moment that this had nothing to do with race. So one has to ask: is it the PSHP that is resolutely opposed to sororities and everything they stand for?

Just asking questions!