Reading these comments, it is gratifying to remember the times my mom's cousins would visit my family's multiracial but very affluent West Coast suburban neighborhood from West Virginia, Kentucky, or Arkansas and go from right wing nutjobs in the beginning to right wing nutjobs in the end but be very confused, deferential to the professionals they met, and ultimately ashamed of themselves along the way. I haven't met any group of people that are as absolutely sensitive to their status relative to everyone around them and as eager to be second from the bottom as they are. (Granted, I'm not all that worldly).
"Wait, so you'd rather have an immigrant doing that job than a real American?"
It's ok, she's white, and America, when it's great again, will be the Birobidzhan for white people.
So typical-
-"Perceived to be blatantly racist"
-I didn't mean to be racist. Those who know me know I'm in no way racist.
-I'm the real victim, the response to my statements is a hate crime.
"I have black friends. It's just that they wear flats."
"I'm not a racist. I just read sites run by racists and then paste the portions I find most amusing into Facebook."
I'm not racist. I hate everyone equally. Except white people -- they're okay. Everyone else.
It's almost as though the whole country used to be like, I guess I should tone down the outright racism and wait, now it's okay? WOOHOO BRING IT
10: "Almost"? No, it's this exactly. It's the culture of oppressive political correctness conservative whites have been complaining about for decades. What did you think the were referring to?
(Ok, pc culture isn't *just* having to hide racism. Conservative men have also been upset about not being able to openly degrade women.)
Trump represents, as much as anything, freedom at last from the weigh of the chains of pc culture.
He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.
11/12: that's pretty much it. But let's not forget the Jews.
I'm the real victim, the response to my statements is a hate crime.
Surely she could not have learned this riposte from America's college students, albeit filtered through the Great Sieve of Facebook?
I was going to make a post out of this idea: that the racist incidents in NYC and lefty cities are a lot more rattling than the racist incidents in the middle of Texas.
Well, sure. Racism is graded on a curve.
https://twitter.com/tyburr/status/798534798830698496
Trump/Pence: Making an end to Holocaust Denialism.
If I were on the other side of the water at this time, I would seek out the people who reacted to the result by forming a Jewish-Muslim joint action group and ask what, as a white atheist, I could do to help.
It's almost as though the whole country used to be like, I guess I should tone down the outright racism and wait, now it's okay? WOOHOO BRING IT
FWIW, to the degree this is more than twitterspasms and is becoming normalized, this is much different than the early sixties I remember and probably different than than the first half of the 20th.
Because there were more residual feudal attitudes; because colonialism was still a thing; before second-wave feminism and the civil rights era of the early sixties...
...there were still almost dominant elements of patronizing and protective attitudes, the affection of the wise master trying to find balance. Read some Wallace or French Algerians or South Africans.
There wasn't the overt hostility that is shown now, the hostility was directed at those who interfere in the fragile necessary hierarchical relationships. Outside agitators, organizers, communists.
There was of course more direct hostility shown in the 1920s (lynching) for instance, and differently in I think the 1880s, Daughters of the Confederacy was founded decades after the war; the Alamo was ignored til this period.
And there are some saying that even now the anger of WWC is less directed at the rich than at the managerial class, the interface between power and life: lawyers, doctors, professors etc and it is less the poor circumstances than being lectured to when down.
PS: Anti-semitism has a different history
I should slow down but what's the point
"dominant elements of patronizing and protective attitudes" should be "..."public expression or performance" or something. The hostility was there in everyday expression and action, but protection was the necessary performance.
Were those better times? A lot got done from a lower baseline.
Sometimes I think all I got is history, lots and lots of history. I need more theory.
Speaking of calling things early, it sounds like the Trump transition team is an unprepared and unprecedented shitshow as far as actually doing the work of governing. When they're not ready on Jan 20 I'm 100% certain they'll blame Obama and that various conspiracy elements will say, "See? Obama wants to be a dictator so he's refusing to let Trump take office."
They should steal all of the W's off the keyboards for old times' sake.
Especially if Trump is spending portions of the next two months in court with Judge Curiel.
Things we spent a lot of time talking about under Bush, where itnever seems to have done very much:
1. Operational incompetence
2. Hypocrisy
1 eventually came back to bite him (Katrina & response). But that took 6 years.
How did it bite him, exactly? It was a pretty small factor in the 2006 elections, I seem to recall - no Louisiana House races flipped, for example. And approval ratings are just part of the circus.
I think you can argue that operational incompetence helped flip Congress in 2006, even if it didn't flip things in places where the incompetence was most felt
2006 was overdetermined, but I suppose Iraq contributed a lot in the same way.