Today's Tweet

Florida just passed a bill that would prohibit schools and private business from making white people feel uncomfortable when teaching historic racism.

"This bill and the purpose is white fragility personified," Jonathan Capehart says. https://t.co/IrOxjS0auZ

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) January 23, 2022

Today's Today

Internment ends

On December 18, 1944, the Supreme Court handed down two decisions on the legality of the incarceration under Executive Order 9066. Korematsu v. United States, a 6–3 decision upholding a Nisei's conviction for violating the military exclusion order, stated that, in general, the removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast was constitutional. However, Ex parte Endo unanimously declared on that same day that loyal citizens of the United States, regardless of cultural descent, could not be detained without cause. In effect, the two rulings held that, while the eviction of American citizens in the name of military necessity was legal, the subsequent incarceration was not—thus paving the way for their release.

Having been alerted to the Court's decision, the Roosevelt administration issued Public Proclamation No. 21 the day before the Korematsu and Endo rulings were made public, on December 17, 1944, rescinding the exclusion orders and declaring that Japanese Americans could return to the West Coast the next month.

Although WRA Director Dillon Myer and others had pushed for an earlier end to the incarceration, the Japanese Americans were not allowed to return to the West Coast until January 2, 1945, being postponed until after the November 1944 election, so as not to impede Roosevelt's reelection campaign. Many younger internees had already "resettled" in Midwest or Eastern cities to pursue work or educational opportunities. (For example, 20,000 were sent to Lake View in Chicago.) The remaining population began to leave the camps to try to rebuild their lives at home. Former inmates were given $25 and a train ticket to their pre-war places of residence, but many had little or nothing to return to, having lost their homes and businesses. When Japanese Americans were sent to the camps they could only take a few items with them and while incarcerated they could only work for meager jobs with a small monthly salary of $12-$19. So when internment ended Japanese Americans not only couldn't return to their homes and businesses but they had little to nothing to survive on, let alone enough to start a new life. Some emigrated to Japan, although many of these individuals were "repatriated" against their will. The camps remained open for residents who were not ready to return (mostly elderly Issei and families with young children), but the WRA pressured stragglers to leave by gradually eliminating services in camp. Those who had not left by each camp's close date were forcibly removed and sent back to the West Coast.

Nine of the ten WRA camps were shut down by the end of 1945, although Tule Lake, which held "renunciants" slated for deportation to Japan, was not closed until March 20, 1946. Japanese Latin Americans brought to the U.S. from Peru and other countries, who were still being held in the DOJ camps at Santa Fe and Crystal City, took legal action in April 1946 in an attempt to avoid deportation to Japan.

I Think I See The Problem

It's white people. Without white people, we'd still have people killing people, but at least there'd be a much better level of equity to it.

Bullworth had it right:

How Stuff Works

Trump rallies are pretty much exclusively held in Trump-friendly places. 

That's not to say he avoids the blue states. It's just that he goes where he's welcome - he stays in the red parts, no matter what.

And that little detail is kind of important.

NAACP reminds us of an interesting little tidbit, via Business Insider, as reported back in March of this year:

US counties where President Donald Trump held a campaign rally saw a 226% increase in reported hate crimes over similar counties that did not hold a rally, political scientists at the University of North Texas said in an analysis published in The Washington Post.

According to a study done by University of North Texas professors Regina Branton and Valerie Martinez-Ebers, and PhD candidate Ayal Feinberg, the scientists found that Trump's statements during the 2016 campaign "may encourage hate crimes" in the respective counties.

The study measured the correlation between counties that hosted a 2016 campaign rally and the crime rates in the months that followed. The scientists used the Anti-Defamation League's map that measures acts of violence and compared the counties that hosted a rally with others that had similar characteristics, including minority population, location, and active hate groups.

- and -

Branton, Martinez-Ebers, and Feinberg noted that their study "cannot be certain" that the marked increase was solely attributed to Trump's rhetoric. But they also shut down the suggestion that the reported hate crimes were fake.

"In fact, this charge is frequently used as a political tool to dismiss concerns about hate crimes," the analysis said. "Research shows it is far more likely that hate crime statistics are considerably lower because of underreporting."

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

Try To Remember

Mark Meadows Showed Us The Six Stages White Men Go Through When Getting Called Out For Racism

They generally follow a pretty strict blueprint that's become achingly familiar.

David Dennis, Jr.

1.The Racist Act

2. Shock and Outrage 

3. “I Know A Black” 

4. “No YOU’RE the Racist”

5. The revelation that the person so outraged at being called a racist (though he was never called a racist) has more evidence that he is, in fact, a racist

6. The Big Shrug

And like a whimper, nothing happens. Because what really ever happens to white men who reveal themselves to be racist. They do all that crying because the r-word to white men is their N-word. Why? Because white men will never have to face something as deadly, painful and hateful as the N-word. When in the end “racist” is just a mild inconvenience. Nothing substantial really happens to them. Sure, they may get fired eventually but they’ll find more jobs with no problems. They’ll find bigger fan bases who embrace their racism. They get to keep their jobs as governors. They become presidents. They throw fits on national television and get coddled into feeling like everything is okay. They learn nothing. They don’t grow. They get to continue to hate us. And all we get in the end is a shrug. 

And that’s what happens when white men get called racist.

As a reminder, Jay Smooth from many years ago:

That Northam Thing

As bad as it is already - and it's going to get worse the longer Northam delays his departure - one of the worrisome aspects is that it's giving the Press Poodles a chance to smash-fit it into their bullshit False Equivalence narrative.

WaPo:

Northam controversy threatens to complicate Democrats’ bid to draw sharp contrast with Trump, GOP on race

The headline is all that's needed for people to stay comfortably numb and disengaged - sitting conveniently paralyzed in the middle.

As Northam defied a nationwide chorus of fellow Democrats calling for him to resign on Sunday, party activists and officials struggled to move past the growing controversy.

“Without question, the longer he stays in, the more of a distraction it becomes and that’s not good for Democrats,” said Gilda Cobb-Hunter, the president of the National Black Caucus of State Legislators and a veteran South Carolina Democrat.
Buried 9 paragraphs deep:

Democrats argued Sunday that the Northam episode has also highlighted an important difference between the two parties. They argued that their swift and widespread calls for Northam to step down stand in contrast with the way Republicans have handled recent racial controversies in their own ranks.

Shouldn't the media's job include a way for us to keep score on this shit?

A Look Inside

Good Men Project:

We are at what Lisa Hickey rightly calls an inflection point in the United States. White Supremacists and White Nationalists are marching around the nation, ostensibly to protest things like the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, VA. It is time for every white person in this country to decide where they stand. It is far too easy to describe the torch-carrying Supremacists as some other sort of species, as monsters and not as humans.

We can create mental walls: They are them, and we are us. We’re not like them. But this is intellectually dishonest. These people are our co-workers, our family, and our friends. They’re people we pass on the street.

hat tip = Walker Thornton

Check in with Tim Wise.

My Go-To Tim Wise:

Tim Wise at Salon in June:

Anti-racist author Tim Wise: White America desperately wants to be numb, and Donald Trump “is a walking, talking opioid”

Some Hard Truth

The fight for what's right continues apace.

Adam Serwer in The Atlantic:

The strangest part about the continued personality cult of Robert E. Lee is how few of the qualities his admirers profess to see in him he actually possessed.

Memorial Day has the tendency to conjure up old arguments about the Civil War. That’s understandable; it was created to mourn the dead of a war in which the Union was nearly destroyed, when half the country rose up in rebellion in defense of slavery. This year, the removal of Lee’s statue in New Orleans has inspired a new round of commentary about Lee, not to mention protests on his behalf by white supremacists.

The myth of Lee goes something like this: He was a brilliant strategist and devoted Christian man who abhorred slavery and labored tirelessly after the war to bring the country back together.
--and--

There is little truth in this. Lee was a devout Christian, and historians regard him as an accomplished tactician. But despite his ability to win individual battles, his decision to fight a conventional war against the more densely populated and industrialized North is considered by many historians to have been a fatal strategic error.

To describe this man as American hero requires ignoring the immense suffering for which he was personally responsible, both on and off the battlefield. It requires ignoring his participation in the industry of human bondage, his betrayal of his country in defense of that institution, the battlefields scattered with the lifeless bodies of men who followed his orders and those they killed, his hostility towards the rights of the freedmen and his indifference to his own students waging a campaign of terror against the newly emancipated. It requires reducing the sum of human virtue to a sense of decorum and the ability to convey gravitas in a gray uniform.

There are former Confederates who sought to redeem themselves—one thinks of James Longstreet, wrongly blamed by Lost Causers for Lee’s disastrous defeat at Gettysburg, who went from fighting the Union army to leading New Orleans’ integrated police force in battle against white supremacist paramilitaries. But there are no statues of Longstreet in New Orleans; there are no statues of Longstreet anywhere in the American South. Lee was devoted to defending the principle of white supremacy; Longstreet was not. This, perhaps, is why Lee was placed atop the largest Confederate monument at Gettysburg in 1917, but the 6’2” Longstreet had to wait until 1998 to receive a smaller-scale statue hidden in the woods that makes him look like a hobbit riding a donkey. It’s why Lee is remembered as a hero, and Longstreet is remembered as a disgrace.

The white supremacists who have protested on Lee’s behalf are not betraying his legacy. In fact, they have every reason to admire him. Lee, whose devotion to white supremacy outshone his loyalty to his country, is the embodiment of everything they stand for. Tribe and race over country is the core of white nationalism, and racists can embrace Lee in good conscience.

The question is why anyone else would.

It's Gotta Be Mutual

Tim Wise on Facebook:

The task is to empathize with the very real class pain of working class white folks, beaten up by global capitalism, while NOT pandering to their racialized sense of specialness, and actively confronting and condemning their bullshit diagnosis for that pain. But it MUST be reciprocal. If working class white folks want sympathy for their very real struggles they MUST empathize with folks of color who have always struggled under white supremacy. And if they are not willing to do this, I believe in steamrolling them, without sentimentality. I do not believe POC owe white people ANYTHING, including sympathy, until and unless those white folks are prepared to relinquish their/our addiction to white normativity and relative privilege. And to disagree with this is to prioritize the needs and concerns of white people, which is to reinforce white supremacy by definition...I will have none of it...white working class folks have benefitted more from white supremacy than POC have benefited from the class system, so the former must make the first move in terms of empathy and outreach...not the other way around...

Visit TimWise.org

Today's Tweet

@ResolutePleb2 @jpbrammer Yes. Let's pretend white genocide isn't some shit a white dude made up because his ex likes black dick. 😂😂

— Jetstream Rev (@JetstreamR3V) December 26, 2016

Joy In The Morning

I learned a new one today - Acute Discrimination Envy.

If the video feed isn't working, it's because Google is playing their shitty little games - trying to push everybody to their Chrome Browser thingie - and anyway, click here:

AMJoy at MSNBC

Silence Can Be Deadly

When there's an incident of somebody "going off", I try to remember that such behavior is often the language of repression (MLK's "language of the unheard") - it's a reaction to thinking you've been ignored for too long; or told to shut up; or that your needs are not being met and nobody seems to give a fuck, so "dammit, somebody's gonna hear about it one way or another".

New Republic:

Another week, another racist rant from a Trump supporter going viral.

This time it’s the white woman at the Michaels crafts store in Chicago, who, after she was apparently asked to buy a $1 bag for her bigger items, proceeded to berate black employees, with an onlooker capturing the incident on video. The ranting woman repeatedly claimed she’d been “discriminated against” because of her race and presidential preference (“I voted for Trump—so there”) while attacking the “black women” workers and calling one “an animal.”

This was only the latest of the viral videos showing white Trump supporters going off in public places—most notably, a racist ranter at a Starbucks in Coral Gables, Florida, and a sexist Trumpeter on a Delta flight. There’s been widespread agreement about what these videos mean: “more evidence that Trump supporters are emboldened by his victory,” as the website Mic called the Chicago ordeal. And on the surface, they do look (and sound!) like the fulfillment of countless campaign predictions about Trump normalizing bigotry, evidence of the “trickle-down racism” that Mitt Romney, of all people, warned us about. “Trump victory would embolden the bigots,” CNN warned on November 7, summing up the long-running meme.

There’s unquestionably some truth to that. But what the viral videos of Trump supporters gone wild reveal is actually more complicated—and fascinating. The closer you look, the more you listen, the clearer it is that these bigoted ranters aren’t so much empowered as they are fragile and pathetic. And what’s gone largely unnoticed is the reactions that the other people in the videos have to their bigoted ravings—reactions that hint at something to be kinda, sorta hopeful about—that non-racist whites have also been woken up by the Trumpian surge of white nationalism.

Important also to remember the White Anxiety angle when we're talking about Repressed thinking.

More Silly Video

hat tip = Facebooker Vicki W-E

Fuckface von Clownstick

Today's Keith

Watch this video on The Scene.

The Closer with Keith Olbermann

Fly Paper

HuffPo:

WASHINGTON — House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) had harsh words Tuesday for Donald Trump‘s comments about Judge Gonzalo Curiel, calling out the presumptive GOP nominee for racist comments while simultaneously reaffirming that his endorsement of Trump stands.

At an outdoor press conference set up to discuss the rollout of an anti-poverty plan, Ryan was asked if Trump’s repeated statements that Curiel should be disqualified from overseeing a Trump University case because of his Mexican heritage had made him regret his recent endorsement of Trump.

“I disavow those comments. I regret those comments that he made,” Ryan said.

“Claiming a person can’t do their job because of their race is sort of like the textbook definition of a racist comment,” Ryan said. “I think that should be absolutely disavowed. It’s absolutely unacceptable.”

But Mr Ryan has decided to stay with his endorsement of Donald Trump, even as he condemns what Trump said for being something very typically racist.

So this is basically Paul Ryan trying very hard to be very nuanced in his positioning - he's trying to peddle nuance to voters who've been trained for 35 years to reject nuance as something weak and wishy-washy and all like Libtard-y and icky.

I sure hope Hillary's bunch knows enough to make Trump stick to every Republican in every race. Every Dem candidate should be calling out every GOP candidate, constantly pushing them all to declare publicly where they stand.  

You take one of their favorite tactics - the False Dichotomy Fallacy - and you use it against them. "It's all and only one way or it's all and only the other way" - "You're either with Trump or you're against Trump" - "You can't have it both ways" - "It's all or nothin' at all". 

Go get, 'em guys.

Out In The Open Now

via HuffPo:

WASHINGTON — Republican senators are rushing to condemn Donald Trump’s statement that a Mexican-American judge can’t be impartial because of his ethnicity. They’ve called his comments “wrong,” “offensive” and the “definition of ‘racism.’”

But they’ve just put themselves in a bind: those same senators are still arguing, somehow, that Trump is the best person to fill the Supreme Court vacancy, along with dozens of other federal court seats they’re holding open for the next president.

Acknowledging that Trump's comments are pretty horrible, but then continuing to stand up for the guy - well now, that's not exactly what anybody has in mind when they think of the word "integrity", fellas.

Watching a long segment replay from Joe Scarborough about the Judge Curiel thing struck me as pretty wild.  First, the GOP does not - THEY JUST FUCKING DON'T - get to play this like they never saw it coming and nobody ever tried to warn them.

They won't let me embed the video, so here's the link to the MSNBC page. (check for the date: June 6, 2016)

A little horn tooting might be in order here - libruls have been trying to tell us this was happening for years.  A blogger named driftglass (eg) has been saying this is what's going on. The podcast he does with Blue Gal every week has been laying this out for a good 200 weeks or more.  

Who's been right about this shit all along, and who's been fucking wrong?

Second, reports of the GOP's demise may be premature, but it gets harder and harder not to visualize it circling the drain.

New One For Me

From a guy named Chauncey DeVega, Tim Wise talking about Brain Studies and Trump voters - starting at about 33 minutes:

Today's Larry

hat tip = Crooks & Liars


And here's your visual: