The Privilege Of Privilege

Chock full of good stuff.

Stacey Patton, Dame Magazine:

There’s a scene in the film The Color Purple—based on Alice Walker’s 1982 Pulitzer-winning novel set in 1930s-era rural Georgia—that has been coming to mind far too often lately with all the BBQ Beckys and Permit Pattys having their moment. In it, the town mayor’s wife Miss Millie, a white woman, walks up to Sofia, a Black woman who is out enjoying life with her children while her husband is pumping gas. Miss Millie, in a moment of peak caucasity, walks up to these Black children, squeezes their faces and kisses them, and compliments Sofia on how clean they are. Then she asks if Sofia would like to become her maid.

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I think of Miss Millie every time I hear another story about one of these white women who has been accosting or calling cops on Black people for simply living and breathing, whether it’s mowing lawns, or selling candy, or families having barbecues, or an Ivy League student napping in the library. These Permit Pattys are living archetypes of white females lording their privilege over Black people.


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These hashtagged Beckys are contemporary versions of the plantation mistress and Miss Millie from the Jim Crow era. The growing list of white women calling the police today reminds us that they feel entitled to have a say in and control over Black people’s lives, reinforcing their entitlement by calling in the law when they feel offended. While a few police officers are exhibiting a rare common sense by not attacking or arresting the Black victims, they remain the exception to the rule. The risk of danger is ever-present when a white woman takes out her entitled fingers to dial 911.

If white women decide that they feel uncomfortable, upset, or threatened—again, without any cause or provocation—they know they can always call in the white patriarchal soldiers to back up their racist suspicions. They make those calls with the expectation that they will be believed and the Black person will be “put back in his or her place.”

We’ve seen a lot of think pieces about the “angry white man” in the era of Trump. But what do these stories tells us about white women’s state of mind?

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As Tommy J. Curry, author of The Man-Not explains: “Historically, white women have acted as the triggers of white male patriarchal violence. They establish the racial proxemics within societies. For centuries, the alleged hyper-vulnerability white women have had to racialized men and their discomfort around raced bodies has served as the justification for segregation and apartheid in colonized spaces the world over.”

Curry also asserts that the discrimination white women face limits their individual aspirations and controls their bodies in exchange for the safety from and superiority to racialized groups. This gives white women an extraordinary managerial power over Black lives.

But because white women today are also in this place where they don’t feel privileged because of a combination of sexism and general economic crap affecting all but the one percent, they flex what power they do have in weird ways, so they’re less inclined to imagine themselves as oppressors. Their sense of trumped-up fear and vulnerability against people of color, especially Black people, has been historically validated—rarely if ever challenged or questioned—and so if and when they call the police or the mobs to exact violence, they know they will rush to their defense.

In times of national distress, white women need Black people, especially Black women. They are longing for someone to take care of them and they resent that they can’t command that any more. These police calls are tied up with them missing their sense of power.

Today's Tweet

It's almost as if the self-described greatest negotiator in the history of all mankind is in fact a blithering dimwit, a credulous boob, a man easily overcome by inanimate objects and frequently outwitted by household appliances.

-- Rick Wilson

Commencement

Cody Keenan - 2018 at Northwestern University.

He reminds:

• There are poor people who won't be fed because there are rich people who can't be satisfied.
• There's a feeling of safety in being cynical.
• Idealism is not thinking the world has to be perfect; it's insisting that we work to make it better.

A Reminder

Worth repeating.

Today's Product Showcase

Buy this immediately:

Available in a variety of forms - T-Shirt, Wall Art, Sticker, Coffee Mug, etc.

TEEPUBLIC.com

Perfect gift idea - especially for any Display Window Christians on your Christmas card list.

Today's Tweet

Seems obvious

The judge in Paul Manafort’s trial has granted immunity to 5
witnesses. That’s how you know the Russians washed their hands of him: there are 5 living witnesses.

— Bette Midler (@BetteMidler) July 26, 2018

 

On Being An Ally

NPR:

White people policing black presence is not new. I think it's safe to say it had been tamped down a bit, but lately it seems to be making quite the comeback.

And I don't think it's just because we can be made aware of it more easily. SPLC documents a pretty significant rise in the incidence of "hate crimes", coinciding neatly with the growing popularity of  - oh, I dunno - Donald Fucking Trump(?)

Anyway, "If you see something, say something" is a favorite meme of the Daddy State. We can flip that script and use it to hold these authoritarian assholes accountable.

Today's Divide-N-Conquer

Christian Science Monitor:

If you search Twitter for the hashtag #FamiliesBelongTogether, a tag created by activists opposing the forcible separation of migrant children from their parents, you might be in for a pop proofreading quiz.

That’s because, in some locations in the United States, the top trending term, the one that Twitter automatically predicts as you type it, contains a small typo, like #FamiliesBelongTogther.

The misspelled hashtag, and others like it, have enjoyed unusual popularity on the social platform.

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This is not an accident, say data scientists, but the result of a deliberate, automated misinformation campaign. The misspelled hashtags are decoys, aimed at diffusing the reach of the original by breaking the conversation into smaller groups. These decoys can dilute certain voices and distort public perception of beliefs and values.

“This is becoming more like a mind game,” says Onur Varol, a postdoctoral researcher at Northeastern University’s Network Science Institute. “If they can reach a good amount of activity, they are changing the conversation from one hashtag to another.”

It's a very old problem-solving metaphor: Try to eat the whole steak all at once, and you choke on it. So you cut in into bite-sized chunks - and enjoy your meal.

hat tip = Blue Gal

Show Up Or Shut Up

The Brennan Center For Justice (PDF):

On April 19, 2016, thousands of eligible Brooklyn voters dutifully showed up to cast their ballots in the presidential primary, only to find their

names missing from the voter lists. An investigation by the New York state attorney general found that New York City’s Board of Elections had improperly deleted more than 200,000 names from the voter rolls.

In June 2016, the Arkansas secretary of state provided a list to the state’s 75 county clerks suggesting that more than 7,700 names be removed from the rolls because of supposed felony convictions. That roster was highly inac- curate; it included people who had never been convicted of a felony, as well as persons with past convictions whose voting rights had been restored.

And in Virginia in 2013, nearly 39,000 voters were removed from the rolls when the state relied on a faulty database to delete voters who allegedly had moved out of the commonwealth. Error rates in some counties ran as high as 17 percent.

These voters were victims of purges — the some- times-flawed process by which election officials attempt to remove ineligible names from voter registration lists. When done correctly, purges ensure the voter rolls are accurate and up-to-date. When done incorrectly, purges disenfranchise legitimate voters (often when it is too close to an election to rectify the mistake), causing confusion and delay at the polls.

Ahead of upcoming midterm elections, a new Brennan Center investigation has examined data for more than 6,600 jurisdictions that report purge rates to the Election Assistance Commission and calculated purge rates for 49 states.

We found that between 2014 and 2016, states removed almost 16 million voters from the rolls, and every state in the country can and should do more to protect voters from improper purges.2

Almost 4 million more names were purged from the rolls between 2014 and 2016 than between 2006 and 2008.3This growth in the number of removed voters represented an increase of 33 percent — far outstripping growth in both total registered voters (18 percent) and total population (6 percent).

Some of the more egregious highlights (per The Root):

• In June 2016, the Arkansas secretary of state gave a list of 7,700 names to county clerks to be removed from the rolls because of supposed felony convictions. That list included people who had never been convicted of a felony and formerly convicted persons whose voting rights had been restored.
• In 2013, Virginia deleted 39,000 names from its voting roster. In some counties, the mistakes on the list were as high as 17 percent.
• A federal court halted a purge after Hurricane Katrina after justices found that one-third of the purged names came from a majority black parish in of New Orleans.
• After the Shelby v. Holder decision, Texas purged 363,000 more voters than it did the election cycle before the case. Georgia purged 1.5 million more voters.
• Alabama, Indiana and Maine have illegally instituted the widely ridiculed Crosscheck system (on which Charles D. Ellison previously reported on for The Root) that purges voters without federally-mandated notification.
• In 1986, one Louisiana official remarked that a voter purge effort “could really keep the black vote down considerably.”
• Instead of checking out inequities, Jeff Sessions’ Department of Justice has been urging states to do more purging.

Making a habit of voting every chance you get is sine qua non in a democracy. Now you have to make it a habit to check to make sure some asshole Republican isn't rat-fucking you out of your right to self-government.

vote.org

"Nobody will ever deprive the American people of the right to vote except the American people themselves, and the only way they could do this is by not voting."

--Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Tech Update

People "in the professions" - ie: Lawyers, Doctors etc - are often notoriously Ludite-ish.

It's good to see a guy like Michael Cohen keeping up with some of these fast-moving developments.

hat tip = Bob Cesca's podcast