I haven't read all of NickS's link yet but this piece an online friend wrote about leaving her white church after adopting black children has been getting some attention lately and seems like an obvious complement.
God yes to heebie's point #2. That's a very good way to state what I've been feeling.
Not being Christian, I am not bound to be charitable, so:
But at the time, when discussing the black community's struggles with poverty and crime, he emphasized individual moral failings and theological shortcomings in the black church more than historic, systemic causes.Almost as if his church didn't care about poor people. Almost as if it lacked certain beliefs associated with the teaching of Christ.
[...]
"It's the idea that if you start talking about so-called social issues, which -- how do you define that? -- then you automatically have stopped talking about spiritual or 'gospel issues,' salvation and things like that," he said.
If blacks and whites who are brothers and sisters in Christ cannot reach across the racial divide, what hope is there for the nation as a whole?Because co-religionists are of course renowned for their solidarity, coherence, and lack of infighting.
"I lived and worked as an educator in the Mississippi Delta for seven years. The Black community there is bruised by generational poverty, lack of education, poor health care, single parent homes, apathetic men, and nearly every other social ill that exists. Yet the norm for my students and their families was to attend church. As I daily encountered the fruits of these dysfunctions I asked myself, 'Where is the Gospel transformation?'"Seven years in the Mississippi Delta to figure that out. I submit that, (1) evangelical* Christians are moral monsters, and (2) non-racist evangelical Christians are still moral monsters.
[...]
"I was searching for a way to communicate biblical truth to my students [schoolchildren, in charter schools, of which he was a proponent] and their families in the Delta. I erred first by thinking they weren't getting this truth in the first place and second by thinking that Reformed theology as formulated by white men was the solution.
But are they established moral monsters.
What does "legalism" mean in this context?
Fortunately, Wikipedia means I don't need to read A Little Princess to follow this conversation.
5: Writing on yellow paper that's too long to fit in the filing cabinet.
Honestly, the wikipedia page on "Legalism (theology)" is very helpful. I knew the concept but not the term. Basically, it's what Jesus said about the Pharisees.
I just want to remind everyone that this (from the article and quoted in the post) is not how streets/sheets sentences are supposed to go: The racial venom in our streets and our discourse grieved both of us.
The article was better than Wikipedia pages. The line how white people confuse "white emotional catharsis with racial justice" strikes me as particularly apt.
3: it's ambiguous in your excerpt, but the second paragraph of your first quote is him saying what people in his church believe, not what he believes.
10: yes! I'm so sick of "inspirational" glurge from evangelical types. It mines the lives of people who lack privilege as sources for quick hits of dopamine but ignores the rest of their thoughts and experiences, especially anything that might raise uncomfortable topics about systemic oppression.
On the topic of racial reconciliation and reaching across the divide, he's pulling back a bit but still thinks it's work that needs to be done. I'm trying to understand how that relates to this article:
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wjx9m4/speaking-at-a-trump-rally-made-this-blm-activist-an-outcast
Was the problem that it was a Trimp rally or that it was a white-nationalist rally? Admittedly there's negligible difference, and I totally understand not providing a fig leave for white nationalists, but if the problem was "holding white babies" with Trump supporters, that doesn't leave much hope for ever making progress.
The quote more accurately and with context:
"It seems the brother has an ambition problem," said El. "He wants to be on CNN and see his face on the media. It's good to be ambitious if your ambition is to free the people, but how are you moving as a pan-Africanist at a Trump rally shaking hands, picking up white babies?"
Seeing the guy as untrustworthy or attention-seeking is understandable, but I don't know what to do with the second part.
White babies aren't that bad. Sometimes they have leaky diapers and sometimes they scream, but otherwise they're fine.
I'm glad they didn't get you on decapitate-white-people day.
Me in particular? Is this antifa-Passover?
If you put blood on the door frame and then varnish it, you don't need to replace it often.
Not being Christian, I am not bound to be charitable,
I am sympathetic mostly because the author of the article is sympathetic (while clearly thinking that his new position makes more sense than his old position), and it becomes an interesting story in which to talk about the challenges of dealing with racial issues generally. For example (picking a quote largely at random) this is the sort of thing that you see a lot of people saying
"I think a lot of us are realizing that without losing any love for our white brothers and sisters, it is taking our limited time and energy and resources to constantly address and educate them," he said.But it's striking to hear it from somebody who is described as having had a lot of energy to reach out to a largely white community. It reinforces how exhausting the process must be.
(18.last is me, I just forgot to close the quote)
Imagine how much energy such engagement would take and then imagine putting forth all that effort, in spite of Trump and all that has happened since the election, Alex Jones undoes your work by alleging that antifa is going to kill lots of white people on November 4th to start a civil war.
At a certain point, you start to think of the problem not as "various wealthy and powerful people are using lies mostly about racial issues to scare comfortable white people into voting for literal evil" but that there is demonstrably nothing too fucking stupid for it to not work.
Lee Atwater did this kind of stuff and he used his brain so much it got a tumor. Now the Republicans don't even have to put any effort into it to get the same results.
Yes, yes, yes to OP.last. And unfortunately, I'm finding myself feeling similarly (though way less extreme) about some of my "liberal" neighbors and friends.
11.1: I know, and the subject of my comment immediately following the quote is his church, not him. That said, these are again the fellows he traveled with for at least seven years; at the very least, his own priorities must be have been questionable.
18: Basically, the guy is a fool, and I don't suffer fools. If his current position is less foolish than his old one, great, progress; but that it took the election of a fascist clown (as opposed to living amid centuries-deep systemic oppression in the delta) to break the deal for him tells me that he is still a fool.
25: his reaction seemed very "white" -- the white, vaguely liberal but apathetic types I know were all shocked whereas many African Americans were not, because they already had lived experience of the sickness within the US. Speaking of which, this guy was black in the Delta, but it took the shooting of Michael Brown and election of Trump to wake him up? What was his own lived experience like before that?
How does this guy pre-waking-up compare to Ben Carson, who is Seventh-day Adventist? Maybe some people are just really good at filtering their own lived experience through an ideological lense and seeing things as personal rather than systemic.
There's something I've been feeling over this year, but I hadn't articulated it until that conversation, which is this: being in a red state now is different (and harder) than it was pre-Trump.
I read recently - can't remember where - that the Trump election has strained personal relationships primarily because Trump haters have come to doubt the decency of their Trump-voting friends. That animosity, however, is not returned - the Trump voters's opinions of their centrist-leftist friends hasn't changed.
This is absolutely the case in my own life. I've blocked some people on Facebook and limited my exposure to some in real life. But they can't imagine why they have lost friends over this.
My Fox news watching father just asked me about the recent developments in KSA. I responded at length and then mentioned this excellent article on KSA and the Gulf in Jacobin and it's truly one of the best explainers of the political economy of the Gulf states than I've ever read. I prefaced it by saying if you can stomach a far left journal I highly recommend this. He responded that he's familiar with far left news sites like the NYT, WP, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, etc, with a sop to needing to see all sides and using common sense. I replied that those were centrist mainstream establishment news sources by any reasonable metric but I was talking about Jacobin, an unabashed socialist journal. To his credit he said he'd give it a read. But the divide, the very realities we inhabit are just almost completely different.
That probably should have gone on the epistemology thread.
That animosity, however, is not returned - the Trump voters's opinions of their centrist-leftist friends hasn't changed.
Maybe, but a fair number of Trump voters already had an extremely low opinion of centrists and leftists. They just weren't the kind to have kept them as friends.
26
Speaking of which, this guy was black in the Delta, but it took the shooting of Michael Brown and election of Trump to wake him up? What was his own lived experience like before that?
From the article:
Tisby was raised outside Chicago in a middle-class home and after college at Notre Dame moved to Helena in 2003 as an idealistic Teach for America recruit. He took up the cause of charter schools, starting as a sixth-grade teacher and then moving on to be the middle school principal at a KIPP charter school.
I hesitate to say this because second-guessing the experience of a minority about racial issues is fraught for many, good, obvious reasons, but it's easy to imagine him growing up like Carson Banks with a little Ned Flanders sprinkled on top.
I once had a co-worker who was pregnant with twin boys. She did not enjoy my repeated suggestion that they should be named "Rod and Todd."
Those boys are now old enough to vote. I'm really old The Simpsons has been on the air a really long time.
33: I'm sure that's part of it. My own anecdata make me wonder if Trump-types had become more-or-less accustomed to getting along in a world where the educated folks thought they were rubes, and now that the tables are turned, they expect the rest of us to take our defeat with the same good grace that (they believe) they did.
I certainly took many of the votes for Trump from the suburban and rural areas around Pittsburgh as a deliberate attempt to tell the more liberal eds and meds part of Pittsburgh to go fuck itself. I have inchoate reasons for thinking that, but I'm still convinced.
But you certainly do have people who say the agree with every word of an article which both celebrates the Holocaust and counts the number of deaths so low as to be Holocaust denial and then wonder by everybody is upset about their views. (I no longer care whether these people are lying or not. It makes no functional difference.)
I feel kind of bad about myself for this, but while I was shocked by Trump getting elected, I was shocked that the power structure let it happen, not that people were shitty enough to vote for him. I pretty much thought that anyone depraved enough to vote for George W. Bush had already maxed out on the shittiness scale.
To spin it out more, I spent the five or six years after the Iraq War started arguing about political stuff online with rightwingers where I could find ones who would talk reasonably about disagreements, largely because I felt as if dismissing all of them as complete shitheads on political issues couldn't be right. And I never heard a damn thing from one of them that moved me off my position that they were complete shitheads on political issues. There were variations of openly hateful; dishonest; maybe straightforwardly stupid; but nothing that made me think that a decent person who had a solid understanding of the important facts could be supporting Bush or the war. And I tried hard for years. After all that, I figured someone who was voting Republican in 2004 didn't have a point below which they were unwilling to sink.
There are rightwingers I have liked personally, to varying extents, but they're all in a couple of categories; excusably ignorant/deluded for personal history reasons but gradually coming around; people whose political beliefs are essentially frivolous bullshit, and for some reason they're likeable enough that I don't care that they're frivolous on important issues; and people who are genuinely terrible but who argue in a way that I find satisfying to engage with.
I don't know who wrote 40, but to 40.3 I would add "people who I don't talk about politics with because I know they will visit my mom when I can't".
Then that makes sense because you don't even know my mom.
Otherwise, there was a small but non-zero chance you were one of my siblings.
The funny thing about all that pointless engaging with conservatives I did in the '00s is that to get a rightwinger to talk to you about what they believed in at all, you had to listen to an incredible amount of whiny bullshit about how closed-minded and hostile liberals were. My mind wasn't closed at the start of that process, but engaging as honestly and respectfully as I could with the conservatives who would talk to me sure as hell closed it.
34: Sure, "all my skinfolk ain't kinfolk" has been around for practically a century to describe a recognized dynamic
I certainly took many of the votes for Trump from the suburban and rural areas around Pittsburgh as a deliberate attempt to tell the more liberal eds and meds part of Pittsburgh to go fuck itself.
Yeah, me too. But of course, we are Trump-haters and haven't got the mature, detached, above-it-all view of the Trump supporters that I'm talking about.
I'm still trying to work this out, but I think many Trump folks have always understood themselves to be part of a different tribe -- and part of a tribe that has been smacked in the face consistently for decades. They watched the election of a black man as president and didn't end any friendships over it -- at least, not abruptly. They don't understand why we don't show the same grace.
(40 pretty closely resembles my own thoughts/experiences, too.)
I'm very mature.
But I don't think you can say that they watched the election of a black man as president and didn't end friendships over it. They watched the election of a black man as president and deliberately elected Republican candidates who, among all the Republican candidates on offer, promised to do the most to block any and all compromise that might have let Obama's policies take root. And then very deliberately dared people hurt by these actions not to hate them.
One of several things I am procrastinating on right now is responding to a longtime colleague (wingnuttian* in his politics) about a proposed dinner date. He was someone for whom I was a mentor and worked closely for 20+ years and yet it now seems much more fraught after Trump. He had missed my retirement shindig so I feel somewhat obligated; there probably will be enough work and kids-type content to get us through but still not comfortable...
*I suspected he was but had managed to avoid any confirming discussions. However, the day after Palin's convention speech in 2008 another cow-orker made some anodyne remark about the speech and he exploded back with "She has more managerial experience than Obama!"
The truth of 49.2 is not dependent on the truth of 49.1.
45: an incredible amount of whiny bullshit about how closed-minded and hostile liberals were
48: and part of a tribe that has been smacked in the face consistently for decades
I probably did woefully underestimate the depth of grievance despite much personal evidence such as 50 (and the whole grievance-laundering right-wing media industry of course).
Bazz-fazz.
49.2: One of the most incisive pre-election commentaries I read was one an HRC canvasser in Dayton reported hearing from a black woman he talked to.
Look, I get it, you white people had a hard time with Obama being president so you need to racist president. I get it. I don't like it but I get it. But what I don't get is why you needed a racist who is so goddamn crazy and stupid! Couldn't you find a racist who could actually know how to run the damn government? I mean, I wouldn't vote for him-he'd still be bad for people like me-but at least he'd know what he's doing? What good does it do the damn white people when Trump shits the bed? It's not like there's some other special country they move to when he takes this country down. We get a black president and he does a pretty good job, and your response is murder-suicide? You white people need to get smarter about how you do this racism thing.
I've seen that here before and I think of it often.
I don't know why this conversation is making me angry (not at anyone participating, at Trump voters and their ilk), there's nothing particularly new about it and I've been mostly calm. But this:
I probably did woefully underestimate the depth of grievance
drives me insane. Not that you underestimated how strongly those people feel, your underestimation was perfectly reasonable. But because their feeling of grievance, as directed toward left wing political positionsns, is utterly, absolutely unjustified. It's hard to believe its as strong as it is because the only motivations for it that aren't completely incoherent are disgusting.
Justification has nothing to with it.
53: I hadn't seen that, and it's fantastic. It does kind of sum up the difference between the Reagan/Bush I/Bush II moral nightmares and the Trump moral nightmare -- Trump's going to break everything, rather than successfully targeting the devastation.
56: Right, but it makes it really hard to empathize with. And I mean empathize in the sense of understanding well enough to predict what people like that are likely to do next.
54: Probably because I posted it here just before the election (search worked on this one). Trigger warning: Do not read the thread it is in (from the weekend before the election and we were all "fuck this fucking shit but I'm cautiously optimistic about the results").
53 is great, thank you. I don't remember seeing it before. I don't think I can stand to read my old optimism.
59: oh my gaaaaawd, I'm such an arrogant over-confident ass in that thread. Where's my crow.
I feel pretty good about what I said in that thread. I noted the stronger-than-you'd-think possibility of a Trump electoral-only win, and the meaningfulness of moving from dog whistles to human-audible whistles.
I think the Herzog/volcano part of that thread holds up pretty well. I'm not going to reread the rest.
Under no circumstances should Megan ever look at that thread.
Wait a second. "Sam Wang's estimated probability for the Dems taking the senate has jumped from 61% a few days ago to 77% today" -- was there any postmortem on this, amid all the presidential election polling postmortem? Did we discuss it at all?
Oh, fuck Sam Wang and his 99% probability and bug eating.
Is it completely insane to speculate if the Russians could have somehow hacked any of the major pollsters? And tipped them more favorably towards Clinton?
Probably there'd have been a rumor of it by now.
Probably there'd have been a rumor of it by now.
Well there is now if there wasn't before.
67: I have no beef with the various 60-80% chance estimates for Prez/Senate given the pop vote and structure of the EV victory. Nate Silver in particular had repeatedly described a scenario that was close to how it played out.
But Wang's 99% BS, jeezus. (Also the HRC campaign's "big data"-ish rhetoric*.).
*And their misguided get out the vote strategies. >See Alcee Hastings here from late September 2016. (Probably don't actually read the article as it will induce harmful flashbacks.) My two real beefs with the campaign.
[before seeing 75] I had actually forgotten that there were polling errors for the congressional elections as well. The presidential polling got, you know, raked over the coals with a fine-toothed comb and two hands and a flashlight; I don't know if a) there were more off results for the Senate than Wang's or b) if the errors could be attributed to the same factors that skewed polls for the presidency. Presumably, right? If party-line voting is still typical...?
It's minor, but also minimally justifiable for a one-year-on retrospective. So I thought. Maybe "looking back at the congressional races" would be a novel anniversary post topic, if it's gotta happen.
Nate Silver came out of it looking pretty good. He trusts his numbers and has the strength of will to stick by them. This is, what, the fourth presidential election he's been the closest?
Now to find that article that was written a few days before decrying Silver as needlessly (and perhaps maliciously) scaring people, leading to Silver replying in an impassioned tweet storm that he was serious.
76: Polls not overly skewed for the Prez race. (Unfortunately there was a real lack of good polls late in PA, WI and MI).
They were just wrong in the wrong direction where it mattered.
The most shocking single result to me was how badly Russ Feingold got whipped in Wisconsin. Most disheartening to me other than the Presidency was McGinty losing to Toomey here in PA (by a slightly larger version than HRC).
70: I have word-for-word the same thought whenever I think of Wang.
Regarding Trump-voter-hatred, Pollitt gets it.
I don't just hate Trump voters, though. I hate alleged liberals like Peter Beinert, too.
Based on the evidence, I must hate Unfogged, too, or I wouldn't have posted that Beinert link. Here's a little sample, posted as a warning not to follow the link:
Conservatives need liberals to stop abusing their cultural power. Although conservatives dominate America's elected offices, liberals wield the greater power to stigmatize.
Regarding Trump-voter-hatred, Pollitt gets it.
That is very good, thanks.
That's was in the Tax Bill thread about an hour or two ago.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but I think in this paragraph, Beinart refutes his own argument.
Is it politically shrewd for an ambitious Republican like Rubio to admit these ugly truths? Maybe not. But American debates over race, gender, sexuality, and religion have become as noxious as they are because Donald Trump took risks. By nakedly appealing to white rage and fear, he risked alienating moderate voters. His risks paid off.
Of course it does. But to notice that would require him to notice that he was wrong (in print) for over a decade.
87: He admitted he was wrong about Iraq. He should be used to it by now.
Beinart is probably in a better place than many commentators. I don't think The Atlantic would fire him if he didn't fill their "libertarian" slot with completely orthodox libertarianism. If David Brooks ever pulled his head out of his ass, he'd not only have to confront being wrong, he'd probably lose most of his income since "establishment conservative with head up his ass" is his actual qualification.
First you get the columns about family values, then you get the money, then you get research assistant young enough to be your daughter helping you write columns about family values for your second wife.