The Proud Boys and other so-called alt-right have often maintained that they aren’t Nazis. For instance, in 2017 before, during, and after the Charlottesville travesty where the Proud Boys and their allies and fellow travelers shouted “Jews will not replace us!” they also insisted to the media that they were neither anti-semitic nor Nazis.
Well, apparently not so much. I know. You’re shocked.
Look, let’s not blow smoke. (We have enough of that here in the PNW right now.) I am a cynical old fuck. I remember when Colin Kaepernick was run out of the NFL for quietly taking a knee during the pre-game national anthem.
Why did he do that? He thought enough of his fellow USians to believe that we could enforce the law without the same levels of violence and racism we currently see from US policing agencies. We were told that this was disrespectful to the flag and that while Kaepernick’s message wasn’t bad, during the national anthem at a football game was the wrong time & place.
Of course, when buildings burned in Minneapolis, we were told by those who argued that the US should do nothing to reduce violence and racism that any peaceful protest was fine, but arson isn’t peaceful. Therefore, the unstated – or sometimes stated – conclusion followed, we should not work to reduce racism & violence because if we do the arsonists will win.This message, that any peaceful protest is fine, clashed hard with the treatment of Kaepernick, whose symbolic acts were nothing if not peaceful.
So it’s not like this cynical old woman had been fooled into thinking that we were having an honest national dialog.
Even so, I am depressed and heartbroken in a way that shouldn’t be possible for such a relentless cynic because last night in Missouri, a place where my sister and her veteran husband have quite a nice little home, the NFL opened its season with both the national anthem and a separate moment of silence for racial unity, peace, and cooperation.
The fans – I’m surprised they allowed any in the stadium, but they did – the fans booed throughout the moment of silence
That’s all. I have no commentary. No wisdom to impart.
The football fans booed racial unity. The end.
Was a hateful, hurtful soul.
No, seriously folks, I don’t get a lot of hate mail, but I do get some occasionally and I just got the most delightfully horrifying piece of violent thuggery that I’ve ever had sent to my FreethoughtBlogs comment queue.
It was sent to me by someone calling themselves “Tuffy”, and if you choose to read it, be forewarned: there’s the racism and some more racism and violent fantasies before mixing it up with some anti-semitism, more violence, the racism again, and oh, the direct threats. But what makes it worth posting is that this snowflake is responding to my post about how BLM in Portland won some valuable if modest concessions. And boy, did the idea that BLM has made some progress towards creating a society in which Black lives matter really upset the poor, widdle Tuffy. (I kid you not, that’s the actual screen name they chose.) There’s really no other way to say it but that this Tuffy is the most precious, delicate snowflake in the whole intertubes. He is just foot-stompin’ mad:
We have known for quite some time that, factually speaking, Amber Guyger murdered Botham Jean. What we did not know was whether or not the law would find a white police officer, off duty and on no official business, legally guilty of murder for breaking into Jean’s apartment and shooting him dead.
Now we know.
Guyger could easily have negotiated a plea deal for manslaughter, claiming fatigue or whatever the fuck she felt justified the shooting, since there does seem to be no doubt that she and Jean lived in the same apartment complex and that she was on the wrong floor and at least initially thought maybe she was entering her own apartment. But she, like so many cops before her, wanted the law to impose no consequences whatsoever for shooting a Black man dead. She took her case to the jury, and the jury, almost beyond all reasonable hope, found her guilty not of manslaughter, but of murder.
Now that Guyger’s trial is over, perhaps we can spend much less time on her and spend time instead remembering Jean for his loving, generous life.
Another day, another racist jerkface proudly claiming ownership of, well, everything.
A man was arrested after screaming racist commentary at passersby in Seattle this weekend.
According to MyNorthwest.com, University of Washington photographer and advisor Keoke Silvano was headed home when he exited the Beacon Hill station and heard the white man yelling at an African-American man.
“My people are going to bury you,” the racist man said. “We built these streets! White men built these streets!” He also frequently shouted the N-word.
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.
There is yet another discussion of intelligence raging across the internet just now, sparked by Sam Harris’ interview of Charles Murray and a Vox article critical of that interview. (h/t to PZ) I have been critical of the uses of IQ testing for quite some time now, dating back to 8th grade or so. There is nothing per se wrong with intelligence testing. Nor is it inherently bad to make use of intelligence testing. As part of a job application where one is being asked to perform particular tasks in a particular environment, it’s entirely conceivable that a particular intelligence test or set of such tests might well predict success in that job. However, for many if not the vast majority of public policy purposes, IQ and other intelligence testing will function badly, misleadingly, or both. This is even more true if we make assumptions about how much of a particular test result is due to intraracial genetic factors (factors shared within one race, but not between people of different races).
While it’s not exactly news to say that there are racists in Utah, this particular story captured my eye (h/t RawStory). It’s not so much that it’s got a Halloween slant, though I like Halloween. It’s not so much that his slogan “Purge and Purify” is inevitably terrifying to many Jews, even people like me with no direct connection to the Holocaust. It’s not anything new, unique, or different about this racist jerk at all. Instead it’s what the man said that isn’t new or unique at all when he attempted to preserve his public image against charges of racism. I mean, when you use a white sheet to cover your entire garage door with huge painted letters saying “Make America Great Again, Purge and Purify,” you wouldn’t think it could get much worse. But area racist Kade Rogers took up the challenge and passed his beer to a good friend before speaking in front of local news cameras, saying
So I’ve made it clear that when people equate Black pride and Black Lives Matter to white pride and the KKK, the people making the comparison are failing to understand huge, important, relevant differences between the phenomenon of whiteness and the phenomenon of blackness. I’ve also spent some time making the point that not every murder is a lynching, that lynching is a crime with multiple components and the public infliction of terror is part of that. Because of this, I’ve made the case that lynching is ongoing. If lynching includes murder but is not complete until photos of smiling murderers are shared or nooses are displayed, then noose-threats are part of lynching and where we find threats that refer back to racist murders in order to create fear in a community, especially (though today arguably not only) a black community, then you have lynching occurring right here, right now.
But the actual murders have always been more rare than the terrorizing references to those murders, whether photos or other records, or less linguistic symbols such as publicly displayed nooses. This both assists some in discounting the threats inherent in those records and symbols and also helps to convince people that lynch murders no longer happen or don’t happen “here”.
This, of course, is not true. But today it’s my tragic duty to inform you of a particular racist hanging in New Hampshire. Angela Helm of The Root, relying in part on the reporting of NH1 and the Valley News, tells the story:
[A] Claremont, N.H., boy had to be flown to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center after one or more teens decided to hang him from a tree with a rope.
…
[The boy’s grandmother] told the Valley News that the incident was, in fact, racially motivated and “intentional.”
[She] said that she was able to recount what happened from her grandson’s 11-year-old sister and other children present (there were no adults): Her grandson and some teens were playing in a yard on Aug. 28 when the teens started calling the little boy “racial epithets” and throwing sticks and rocks at his legs.
Some or all of the teens allegedly stepped up on a picnic table and grabbed a nearby rope that had been part of a tire swing, [she] said.
“The [teenagers] said, ‘Look at this,’ supposedly putting the rope around their necks,” [she] said. “One boy said to [her grandson], ‘Let’s do this,’ and then pushed him off the picnic table and hung him.”
I risk quoting the entirety of Helm’s piece, and I do wish that you would go there to read the rest if you can, but there is one other piece of this story too vital to leave out. The local police chief is (appropriately) declining to share information on the kids who perpetrated this racist attempted murder. While withholding the name of 14-year-olds in this case is justified and may even be required by New Hampshire law, it stands in contrast with how so many black children accused of crimes are treated. That contrast was heightened by statements of the Claremont Police Chief, Mark Chase:
[Chase] would not comment on the specifics of the case, saying only that they were still investigating and that those involved are juveniles, prohibiting him from specifically making any comment. Chase also said that the kids being investigated (who knows if they’re charged?) should be “protected.”
“Mistakes they make as a young child should not have to follow them for the rest of their life,” Chase said.
Notice how he called these predators “young children,” infantilizing the white teens. Conversely, teens like Trayvon Martin are made out to be hulking, menacing adults. Chase seems to be centering the perpetrators’ feelings and futures, all but forgetting about the trauma of a little boy who had his so-called friends hang him from a tree to the point where he had to be medevaced to a hospital.
It is a fact of our current social context – one we should seek to change, but that cannot be ignored in this moment – that if the names of the perpetrators of this crime were released, they would be targeted for abuse by scattered, horrible people. Though these people are nowhere near the majority, when stories reach a wide audience only a tiny percentage need react with insults and threats to create an intolerable, life-affecting stream of abuse. I do not want even racist, violent children to be subjected to that. So I’d like us not to focus on the protection of the racist aggressors’ identities as an evil, but rather as appropriate treatment that is too often denied to other children, and which is disproportionately denied to children based on racial and racist categorizations and perceptions.
In particular, I’d like to call attention to that last bit of Chase’s statement:
Mistakes they make as a young child should not have to follow them for the rest of their life,
Yes. Yes they should. They should never forget that day and the choices that they made. What shouldn’t happen is the public shaming of a child. There is such a thing as unjust sentence inflicted after a just conviction. We can argue about what the consequences should be for children who choose, as teens, to attempt murder on an 8 year old child while shouting racial epithets at the poor kid. I won’t argue with anyone who thinks that this is something that a teen should be able to forget or leave behind at some age of majority.
But even more than that, when is this the attitude of public figures towards Black and Latino and other racialized children, especially boys? I can think of only one context, and it’s not one that gives me hope: sexual assault. Think of the Steubenville rape case. One of the rapists in that case was a Black teenager, and when convicted appeared to be included in mass-media’s public mourning on no less a basis as the white teenager convicted of the same crimes. That doesn’t make me more optimistic that the accused will be judged on the basis of their actions and not on the basis of their identities. Rather, it merely shows that at least in the context of sexual assault, it’s possible for gendered classifications to be more important than racial classifications in determining the treatment of the accused. Judging by the Steubenville and Claremont examples, however, both are still more important than the actual behaviors involved.
If there are any more ways a lynching can break your heart, I cannot think of them.
Sorry for the inability to get much written lately, folks.
Also, I’ve redacted the grandmother’s name. It’s all over those other stories, and if you have a reason to need to know it, I’m not preventing anyone from finding it, but enough has happened to this child and I’m not at all interested in spreading his identity even more widely. Though the other posts and articles on this lynching omitted the name of the boy, printing the names of family members makes their efforts ineffective. Thus I’m opting not to print those names more widely even though the story itself is important.
However, some redaction has been performed at those other sites, mainly of the names of children. Confusingly, then, when you see “[she]” in reference to the grandmother of the boy who was lynched, that is my redaction. While “[teenagers]” and “[her grandson]” are redactions made in the original article at The Root.
It has been noted many places, not least of which being this prestigious blog, that Donald Trump and cohort have labeled his opponents a “lynch mob” and declared the effort to investigate Russian electoral-interference schemes to be a “witch hunt”. Donald Trump himself said that he could assert “with surety” that he was the victim of the worst treatment and most unfair treatment of any politician in the history of the world in which Donald Trump invented the phrase “priming the pump”.