Tag: White Privilege

That ‘White Privilege/Supremacy’ Thing

The debate over CRT has brought the whole idea of ‘white supremacy’ to the forefront of the national dialog….some of the findings may surprise my reader…..

America’s battle over “critical race theory” reminds us of an ugly truth about the enduring white supremacy that’s long defined this country. In a potent racist backlash moment against the rising Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, many states have moved in Orwellian “Big Brother” style to entirely ban discussions of structural and institutional racism from K through 12 and college classrooms. And much of the public is on board with this agenda, as July polling from Ipsos reveals that 36 percent of Americans support “a ban on CRT in public schools.” This includes 23 percent of Democrats, 34 percent of independents, and 54 percent of Republicans. The opposition is based on toxic ignorance. In the case of the one group in which a majority supports the CRT ban – Republicans – only an average of 30% of respondents can provide correct answers across 7 factual questions that Ipsos asked about CRT. This is hardly surprising – when has bigotry ever been about being factually informed about the people you dehumanize

America’s culture of white supremacy is longstanding, and not confined to the Republican-right. Recent polling reveals that large numbers of Americans can be classified as white nationalists, including members of both parties. An October 2019 Associated Press poll found that 22 percent of Democrats and 51 percent of Republicans agreed that “a culture established by the country’s early European immigrants” is “important” “to the United States identity as a nation.” Such sentiment draws on classic white nationalist sentiments that identify white “European immigrants” as central to the national “culture” and “identity” and what it means to be American.

Similar to AP’s 2019 poll, a University of Virginia poll from 2018 revealed that 35 percent of Americans, including 26 percent of Democrats, 29 percent of independents, and 51 percent of Republicans, agreed that “America must protect and preserve its White European heritage.” The poll revealed much about American denialism, as only 8 percent of respondents were willing to admit in the survey that they support “white nationalism,” despite the alternatively worded question above serving as a functional equivalent for white nationalism, and demonstrating that 35 percent of respondents agreed that “America” as a nation should define “its” identity via “White European heritage.” Put another way, the discrepancy here suggests that while only 8 percent of Americans admit they are white nationalists, another 27 percent “fit the bill,” but are unwilling to openly identify as so for fear of the stigma that comes along with it.

Rise of the Right: White Supremacy and the Myth of the “White Working-Class”

Republican politics has jumped on the victim hood of white people since Trump made it fashionable…..

Republican politics have become so animated by white victimhood in the Trump era that any honest accounting of racial injustice in U.S. history is almost certain to draw conservative ire. Indeed, I found that the share of Republicans who think there’s too much Black history taught in schools increased by 30 percentage points from 2000 to 2018. But when you combine the rise of white identity politics in the GOP with its mischaracterization of critical race theory as tantamount to anti-white indoctrination, it’s even easier to see how a relatively obscure framework emerged as a leading issue in Republican Party politics. Moreover, the war on critical race theory suggests that the white grievance politics Trump helped activate isn’t going anywhere; rather, it’s a key part of the GOP strategy moving forward.

How The Rise Of White Identity Politics Explains The Fight Over Critical Race Theory

Like the article stated it is not just the GOP that is concerned over the loss of any power by whites…..but it seems to be more rabid within those that identify themselves as Repubs….even to the point of armed resistance…..

Nearly half of Republican voters believe there will come a time when the so-called “American patriots” will “have take the law into their own hands,” the findings of a new survey reveal.

The survey highlighted the following:

“Support for fundamental principles such as free and fair elections, free speech, and peaceful protest are nearly unanimous among both Democrats and Republicans. Their views on other democratic values, however, differ dramatically. Over half of Republicans (55%) supported the possible use of force to preserve the “traditional American way of life,” compared to 15% of Democrats. When asked if a time will come when “patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands,” 47% of Republicans agreed, as opposed to just 9% of Democrats.”

https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/gop-patriotism-survey/

That survey tells me that the GOP members are running scared for some reason….most of which is made up to energize an ignorant base.

This is disturbing….and I fear for this country as it has been in the past….the future without change of thought is heading for a fall…..and that fall has come from internal strife….we can blame NO ONE but ourselves.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Defending White Privilege

NO I am not writing about defending white privilege….it is about the events that surrounded the breach of the Capitol on 06 January.

This is nothing new that appeared with the election of Trump….it has been with us for many many years….after decades even a century of slow simmer it has finally come to a violent boil on 06 January 2021.

A look at the slow simmer that erupts into the boil…..

As an outgrowth of the establishment of a regime of social control that attempted to incorporate all whites into a relatively privileged space vis-à-vis Native people and people of African descent, the politics of whiteness represent a long, albeit contested, institutional and ideological legacy. Whiteness, therefore, has a long history of being weaponized in order to terrorize and otherwise dominate racialized others in the United States and abroad. A review of some of those instances should underscore the point made by Kai Wright in his 2017 essay, “White Identity Politics and American Terrorism,” in The Nation: “There is no road forward for progressive politics without confronting white identity politics…(including) owning the legacy of white terrorism.”

The institutionalization of settler colonialism and racial capitalism in the colonial past appropriated resources and labor, allocating hierarchical value on the basis of social constructed racial categories. While the Indigenous suffered dispossession by white settler accumulation, Africans were possessed, increasingly through torture and rape, in order to accumulate profit. Hence, white settler expansion throughout the 18th and 19th centuries unleashed white supremacist terror against racialized others.

White Chickens, Coming Home to Roost

Look at these protesters….what is it that they want?

The US has given them just about everything they desired and yet they still want to destroy the very system that has provided them with benefits.

Why?

Just what is it that these morons want?

Is it about country and its people or just selfishness?

They claim to be law and order supporters…and are very vocal about the treatment of the police in other protests and yet there has been NO condemnation of the people that brought about the death of a police officer on 06 January….or the injuries their insurrection brought about on that day.

The political philosopher, John Locke, added to the notion of white supremacy…..

Locke’s influence went beyond serving as foundational for capitalism and the property regime. The Lockean notion of labor creating private property rights is intertwined with another equally deeply embedded Lockean legacy: the unequal racial access to property and liberty.

In this way, Locke’s liberalism was also of foundational importance when it came to racism, to white supremacy.

“In the beginning, all the world was America,” Locke famously wrote, imagining what he called the “state of nature” before the creation of political society. In advancing his theory that it was the mixing of one’s labor with land that created private property, Locke saw the Native Americans as creatures who could not be considered property owners since they merely inhabited the land and forests but did not cultivate the soil.

John Locke and the Roots of White Supremacy in the US

These days tumultuous days the debate on white supremacy and the sound of crickets is deafening.

This notion of white supremacy needs to die….there is NO time like the present.

But sadly the this sickness is on the rise….

 

White supremacist propaganda across the US reached the highest level in at least a decade last year, according to a report from the Anti-Defamation League. It describes 5,125 cases of hateful messages targeting people who are non-white, Black, Jewish, Muslim, or identify as LGBTQ, spread through physical materials, up from 2,724 cases in 2019. It adds the messaging, including phrases “Black Crimes Matter” and “White Lives Matter,” often appeared as “veiled white supremacist language with a patriotic slant,” per Reuters. Online propaganda cases likely number in the millions, the report adds. “As we try to understand and put in perspective the past four years, we will always have these bookends of Charlottesville and Capitol Hill” but “there’s a lot of things that happened in between those moments that set the stage,” CEO Jonathan Greenblatt says, per the AP.

Christian Picciolini, a former far-right extremist who founded deradicalization group Free Radicals Project, says “the pandemic, job loss, a heated election, protest over extrajudicial police killings of Black Americans, and a national reckoning sparked by our country’s long tradition of racism has created a perfect storm” for extremist recruiters, who “use the uncertainty and fear caused by crisis to win over new recruits to their ‘us vs. them’ narrative,” per the AP. The ADL traces the propaganda to at least 30 groups but says 92% of activity came from three: the New Jersey European Heritage Association, Patriot Front, and the Nationalist Social Club.

Just how much of this manure does this country and its people tolerate?

I say enough is enough!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”