History Redux

Why do we study History?

Tim Wise, at UC Santa Barbara 5 years ago.

Today's Reminder

Ignore for a minute the privilege and the class stratification implied, and notice the straightforward racism couched in terms of American exceptionalism.

"If black people study hard and work hard, they stand just as good a chance of success as anybody else."

The implication being that since most black people are still having inordinate difficulty attaining the status and the wealth and the success that white people enjoy here in USAmerica, then there must be something wrong with black people.

But no - there's no racism here - certainly no systemic racism - we're not a society built on racist policies - blah blah blah.

Tim Wise: It's not a glitch, it's a feature. The system has not failed brown people - the system is working as designed. 

It Can't Be One Way

Tim Wise via Medium (this is the whole banana):

Much has been said about the need for liberals and progressives — or at least Democrats — to understand Trump voters. We are told we should learn to listen to their fears and insecurities. We are supposed to respect their deep sense of anxiety, born of job losses, dying small towns, and cultural transformation occurring at a pace with which they find it difficult to keep up.

Missing from these calls for civility and compassion are any comparable entreaties for the same from the other side. No demands that Trump voters seek to understand, or even respect the essential humanity of black people in large cities, asylum seekers fleeing violence, or immigrants from the global south seeking a better life for their children. For these, calls of “send them back” or “build the wall” will suffice, or perhaps endorsements of stop-and-frisk so as to catch the presumably dangerous criminals responsible for what the president calls “American carnage.”

We are to empathize with white folks in small towns suffering the ravages of the opioid crisis, in ways they were never expected to — and certainly did not — when the crack epidemic was wreaking havoc on urban communities of color. The very same white people who called for stiff prison sentences and three-strikes laws in the latter case now plead for rehab and treatment options for their cousins, their children, themselves. Meanwhile, they stare wide-eyed at the lack of such programs, oblivious to the irony: namely, it was their calls for a ruthless prosecution of the war on drugs that has left them, as with people of color, bereft of such options now.

These one-way calls for compassion infect 2020 election analysis. Democratic candidates are expected to pander to small-town whites and sit with them in diners across the fruited plain to mine the depths of their despair. Why? Because these are, or so we are told, the swing voters without whom they cannot cobble together an electoral college victory. Republicans, apparently, need not appeal to the so-called middle, or moderates, or swing voters. They need not find out what black folks are talking about in the barbershop, what Latinx folks discuss at the bodega, or what members of the Unitarian Church are thinking. No, outreach is only for liberals.

Enough of this.

As the administration launches ICE raids on hard-working parents in Mississippi, ripping them from their kids on the first day of school, all talk of compromise with these people is perverse. To speak of understanding those who sanction such evil is a sickness.

I need not sit around and discuss politics with people such as this as they wolf down their biscuits and gravy or sop up their toast in a cholesterol pond of runny eggs, while adjusting their dirty trucker caps and holding forth about the Mooz-lims or the Mex’cuns who have come to take their jobs. Especially when those they’d be griping about would already have been working for three hours while Billy Joe Jim Bob sat there telling me about how he can’t work anyway because of his disability. For which he receives a check, along with his Medicare. But he wants me to remember that he’s tired of people living off the government.

What. The. Fuck. Ever.

I understand these folks all too well. There is nothing more to learn.

They are scared, simple-minded people who believed, against all historical evidence to the contrary, that the world would stand still for them. They are people who assumed their coal mines would never close, that the economy would never globalize, that jobs would always be there for them, that their norms and beliefs would always be paramount in the culture, and that they would forever and always remain the very floor model of an American. In short, they fell for a lie that only they, as white people, could ever have managed to believe. And while that must be tough, I find it hard to cry tears for them now.

After all, what they have only recently discovered — that the system is a scam, that companies move jobs overseas for their own profits and don’t give a shit about you, or your diners, and that you can take nothing for granted — is stuff people of color already knew. It’s stuff those people of color had been insisting upon from the beginning, but which white Americans could ignore, because after all, what do black people know?

I’m sure the folks on the middle-to-upper decks of the Titanic also wondered what all the screaming from steerage was about. Meanwhile the ones below thought to themselves: “Oh just wait, you’ll see.” Because steerage knew the folks on the promenade well, and knew how few lifeboats there really were, even while the middling classes thought there would always be room for them.

When manufacturing jobs began fleeing the urban core in the 1970s, leaving blacks who had moved north for good jobs unemployed, these white folks who now moan about job losses in their towns showed no compassion. They told black folks to up and move; to go where the jobs were. If blacks were out of work and unable to find new jobs, it was their own fault. It was their pathological culture, their dysfunctional family structures. It was surely not a systemic problem.

But now, as their own worlds crumble around them, they sing a very different tune. Now, these same people demand that politicians promise to bring the jobs back to them. No insistence that they up and move, as they instructed people of color to do. If job creation has occurred mostly in large metropolitan areas as of late (and it has), one might think it would be incumbent upon these Andy of Mayberry types to get up off their asses and go where the jobs are. But no. They like their little small towns and by God, intend to stay there, and we should accommodate them.

But then, when they don’t line up to take those jobs at the meatpacking plant, or picking strawberries, or roofing new home builds — and the people who do get rounded up like cattle and separated from their families — they dare complain about how things are changing?

Bless…

It is not necessary to pander to people like this in order to win elections. They are not the key to victory for Democrats. Donald Trump is not president because bunches of these people once voted for Obama but suddenly switched to the guy who told them Obama wasn’t even an American. These are not people who voted for Obama and then turned around and voted for the guy who promised to take away the very health care Obama got for them.

Donald Trump is president because the Democratic base did not turn out in sufficient numbers in 2016. Obama voters didn’t switch to Trump so much as they stayed home. In Wisconsin, for instance, Trump got fewer votes than Romney; but depressed Democratic turnout and a significant vote share for third parties catapulted Trump to victory in the state.

One does not need to kiss the ass of people who chant for the building of walls, for the deportation of congresswomen, or cruelty for cruelty’s sake.

One need not appeal to the worst this nation has to offer.

One need not negotiate with terrorists.

One need only trust that there are more of us than there are of them, and then act like it.

And then, once we win, we can drag the rest kicking and screaming to universal health care, affordable college, and a cleaner environment.

At which point, all we will need to say to them is: “You’re welcome.”

The Coming Campaign

Tim Wise on MSNBC



Here's the beginning of the Tweet thread Joy mentioned:

1/ Just a reminder that the folks who refuse to call Donald Trump a racist, thought Barack Obama was one. Why? Here's a short list: 1) Because of a small tax on tanning bed visits (bc "only white people" use these)...https://t.co/5BHRtJDVfqhttps://t.co/k8JuCboqOC

— Tim Wise (@timjacobwise) July 28, 2019

On MLK Yesterday

Tim Wise, at Univ of Michigan:

The Baldwin quote (Jet Magazine, 1965):

People who imagine that history flatters them - as it does indeed, since they wrote it - are impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin, and they become incapable of seeing or changing themselves or the world. This is where it appears to me most white Americans find themselves - impaled. They are dimly, or perhaps vividly, aware that the history they have fed themselves is mainly a lie. But they do not know how to be released from it, and they suffer enormously from the resulting personal incoherence.

If we want the world to be a better place, the first thing we have to do is to stop insisting that it can't be.

When A Cigar Is Just A Cigar

Tim Wise at Medium:

For several days conservative commentators suggested or even outright insisted that the bombs were likely hoaxes sent by liberals or antifa so as to discredit the right in time for the mid-terms.

Among the right-wing pundits pushing this line were Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Mike Flynn Jr., Frank Gaffney, Kurt Schlichter, Candace Owens, Lou Dobbs, Laura Loomer and Dinesh D’Souza, among others.

Limbaugh, for his part, went further than merely denying the conservative provenance of the recent bombs, actually suggesting that bombings and terrorism are things that right-wingers simply don’t do. Which is totally true, except for:

Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols

Or Eric Rudolph

Or Joe Stack

Or Lawrence Michael Lombardi

Or anti-abortion extremists like Michael F. Griffin, Paul Hill, John Salvi, Robert Dear, James Kopp, Justin Carl Moose, Scott Roeder, Shelley Shannon, Paul Ross Evans, Matt Goldsby, Jimmy Simmons, Kathy Simmons, Kaye Wiggins, Patricia Hughes, Jeremy Dunahoe, Bobby Joe Rogers, Francis Gradyand Ralph Lang among others

Or anti-Muslim arsonists like Bruce and Joshua Turnidge

Or James David Adkisson

Or neo-Nazi Wade Michael Page

Or Byron Williams

Or the right-wingers involved in at least 60 bombing, shooting and/or terror plots in the ten years following Okahoma City, including:

Charles Ray Polk

Willie Ray Lampley

Cecilia Lampley

John Dare Baird

Joseph Martin Bailie

Ray Hamblin

Robert Edward Starr III

William James McCranie Jr.

John Pitner

Charles Barbee

Robert Berry

Jay Merrell

Brendon Blasz

Carl Jay Waskom Jr.

Shawn and Catherine Adams

Edward Taylor Jr.

Todd Vanbiber

William Robert Goehler

James Cleaver

Jack Dowell

Bradley Playford Glover

Ken Carter

Randy Graham

and the list goes on.

The problem is not “angry rhetoric on both sides.” It is not a generic “incivility.” And no, being spoken too harshly or made to feel unwelcome in a restaurant is not remotely equivalent to receiving a bomb from someone who wants to kill you.

The problem is a president who has normalized a rhetoric of demonization and dehumanization since the day he launched his campaign.

When you start your political career generalizing about Mexican migrants being rapists and drug dealers, and you say during that campaign that you wish to shut down all immigration by Muslims, and you suggest your opponent should be jailed for using an unsecured e-mail server (even as you have continued to use an unsecured cell phone), and you refer to the media as the enemy of the people such that your most loyal fans verbally assault reporters at your rallies, you are the problem.

You, and all who empower you and embolden you.

It is time to put an end to this foolishness, beginning on election day and every day afterwards.

The Cost Of The Benefit

Tim Wise at NCORE 2018:

Some notes and highlights:

When you raise the expectations of marginalized people, and you don't deliver, you can expect an explosion.

If you take people who have always had high expectations, and you don't deliver what they're absolutely sure they're entitled to - the explosion can look a lot like Cult45.

Wanna look at the rather frightening mortality trend among Non-College-Educated Working Class White People?

The 3 most often cited causes of 500,000 excess premature deaths in that cohort over a period of 14 years (1999-2013) were Opioids, Suicide, and Alcohol-Related Liver Disease.

We now have some new terminology - Deaths of Despair.

What's driving that trend is not the convenient and intellectually lazy concept of Economic Anxiety.

The hate mail - 😂

The pain is real, but we have to insist on a diagnosis that's not bullshit.

Tim Wise

Make the connections between Racism, Homophobia, Xenophobia, Misogyny, etc.  There're reasons we encounter these things (often) in the same places, and just as often expressed by the same people.

A take-away for me: It must really suck for you to have been told your whole life that the world belongs to you and you get to take whatever you want from it, only to find out that you were lied to, that the world is not really that way, and you won't be getting every little thing after all.