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You are here: Home / Civil Rights / Racial Justice / Post-racial America / I’d like to know completely what others so discreetly talk about

I’d like to know completely what others so discreetly talk about

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A surprisingly good piece on the role of race in politics, from John Harwood at the Times:

In the 11 states of the Confederacy, Mr. Romney outpolled Mr. Obama by nine percentage points. Elsewhere, Mr. Obama won by 10 points.

Against that backdrop, Congressional Republicans have pursued cuts in food stamp spending, and Republican-controlled state legislatures have enacted voter-identification laws. A Republican official in North Carolina recently resigned after telling a “Daily Show” interviewer that ID cards could diminish voting by “a bunch of lazy blacks that wants the government to give them everything.”

And over at the Monkey Cage, a study shows a strong correlation between the racial resentment index of a Congressional district and the way the district’s Congressional representative voted on the shutdown.

At the national level, American politics is primarily about race. Full stop.

Political operatives have known this for years, but establishment media usually avoids mentioning it publicly, because it’s more fun to pretend things aren’t so sordid.

Reader Interactions

119Comments

  2. 2.

    Jewish Steel

    I’m an incrementalist and a compromiser by nature. Let’s start by giving Texas back and see how that goes.

  3. 3.

    Jim, Foolish LIteralist

    At the national level, American politics is primarily about race. Full stop.

    Yup. The entire takers-makers debate, the shift from Roosevelt to Nixon among the Reagan-Archie Bunker generation has race at its core.

    And I’m only surprised that Harwood mentions race explicitly. I’ll read the whole piece later, but I’ve always thought he was one of the more honest brokers among the big name reporter/pundits

  5. 5.

    crosspalms

    OT, but am I the only one who read the “invitation to a dialogue” letter in the Times today and thought “the Times has been trolled by DougJ”?
    And they ran the letter on the same day Peter Baker found a right-wing Republican willing to go on the record as being unhappy with Obama. Which made it front-page news. As someone who voted for Obama twice, I am very disappointed in the quality of non-sequitur being peddled in the pages of the NYT.

  6. 6.

    KG

    @Jewish Steel: nah, giving Texas independence means a new member of OPEC and a country that’s going to want to swing it’s member around for a bit. Better to give them Alabama and Mississippi, maybe the Florida panhandle too… I’m sure there’d be a Galtian migration there.

  8. 8.

    Jewish Steel

    @sparrow: Sure. Austin Free City.

    New Orleans, Athens and wherever Betty Cracker lives too once my Fire Sale America plan gets rolling. Sorry, Corner Stone!

  9. 9.

    srv

    “a bunch of lazy blacks that wants the government to give them everything.”

    When did those people take over all those tobacco farms?

  10. 10.

    sparrow

    @Jim, Foolish LIteralist: There has been an extended quote mentioned at various times by BJers, I don’t remember who it was attributed to, but basically went like “At some point they couldn’t say n****r anymore, so they started talking about bussing…” and basically the point was that by forcing the rhetoric to be dog-whistles, it lessens it’s effect.

    I think this is true based on my personal history, but I wonder sometimes if I’m an outlier. I grew up in a totally white, middle-class suburb of a medium-sized Heartland city. I never heard my parents use any derogatory language towards any groups (minorities, gays, athiests, women, you name it). In fact they never cursed and rarely talked about politics at all. They were also quite good about pushing us to volunteer and help the poor and homeless. Growing up in that white bubble, I basically never encountered other races, or even any ideas about them, outside of the hispanics I worked with at my restaurant job (and I like them a lot). So it wasn’t until I was a much older adult, and I asked “why are my parents still voting republican?” and I realized it’s because in their hearts they are in fact racist. They just didn’t talk about it.

    So I guess the good news is that if they felt ashamed to talk about it, at least on the upside they didn’t pass their negative views on to me or my siblings. That’s progress.

  19. 19.

    Scott S.

    @Jewish Steel: Why on earth do y’all want to keep doing exactly what the wingnuts want you to do?

    I sweartagraud, we keep talking about improving America, and then we decide we want to do it by throwing out perfectly good Americans because their leaders are dumbfucks.

  25. 25.

    Botsplainer

    Haha…

    http://www.engadget.com/2013/10/30/facebook-considers-tracking-mouse-cursors-and-screen-views/

    It’s no secret that Facebook likes its targeted advertising. However, that affinity may soon blossom into a full-fledged love affair. The social network’s Ken Rudin tells the Wall Street Journal that his company is testing a system which targets ads based on where users’ mouse cursors hover; it can also tell whether or not mobile users see their news feeds. Neither tracking technology is new, but the scale of behavioral data collection would be unprecedented when Facebook has almost 1.2 billion users. Don’t be too quick to close your account in protest, though. Rudin notes that there won’t be a decision on the technology for another “couple of months,” and it may never see the light of day. If you don’t like the idea of Facebook monitoring your on-screen habits, we’d suggest making yourself heard.

    Pertect mah prahvacy! Qwee-it watchin’ me, Obama an’ the NSA!!!!!!!!1!!!

  27. 27.

    shortstop

    Jewish Steel is on fire today. As he is most days.

    When Mexico reabsorbsTexas (while we take back NASA and military bases and put them elsewhere), all those rugged, armed Tejanos can see how their manly gunfighting skills stack up against drug cartels.

  30. 30.

    Botsplainer

    @shortstop:

    All those rugged, armed Tejanos can see how their manly gunfighting skills stack up against drug cartels.

    My money is on the cartel gun thugs regardless of how well armed the Tejanos are. Cartel gun thugs tend to be lean and able to run more than 10 yards without collapsing into a a wheezing, oily, sweaty heap of pastyfaced racial entitlement in a pitched battle for the territory surrounding a McMansion.

  31. 31.

    agrippa

    This country will be living with the race issue for a very long time.
    Racial prejudice – whites prejudiced against blacks, first and foremost – is alive and well.

    It is. also, bad form to be openly prejudiced. It has to be disguised. But, it remains.

    There are other forms of prejudice; but, whites prejudiced against blacks is the number 1 prejudice.

  33. 33.

    hoodie

    Had a lengthy discussion about this with a friend who is a recovering northeastern Republican and a transplant to the South, a place he really doesn’t understand all that well since he didn’t grow up here. He still suffers from after effects, particularly stuff relating to government debt, a resistance to recognizing the racism that underlies much of the obsession with “fiscal responsibility.” The analogy I used was that the rank and file in the GOP are like the Jeff Goldblum figure in The Fly. He enjoys the new found abilities he gets from the fly DNA, but eventually the fly DNA takes over and he finds himself doing increasingly disturbing things without being completely conscious of it. A lot of folks in the GOP might not have started out as overt racists and certainly did not see themselves as such, but they enjoyed the power they got from allying with more open racists and other bigots, whom they euphemistically cast as the salt of the earth, e.g., “hardworking Americans” and “Values Voters.” Eventually, they subconsciously internalized a lot of the premises of those bigots to the point that they’re functionally indistinguishable from the rebel flag waivers and bible thumpers they bred with. His response was that he wasn’t happy those guys “are on my team,” i.e., his imagined Team Fiscal Responsibility, but the reality is that it’s their team, not his, and the team isn’t playing the game he thinks it is. GOP leaders outside of the south either haven’t figured that out yet or they’re too craven to admit it.

  36. 36.

    Napoleon

    @Belafon:

    Are you sure there is a video? My best recollection is that a professor from Case Western Reserve University here in Cleveland got that quote from him and in the last few years when questions were raised about its accuracy his widow went public that she had an audio tape of it from an interview her husband did with him for a book or project or something.

  38. 38.

    prufrock

    @Botsplainer:

    Cartel gun thugs tend to be lean and able to run more than 10 yards without collapsing into a a wheezing, oily, sweaty heap of pastyfaced racial entitlement in a pitched battle for the territory surrounding a McMansion.

    Well of course. They do have calves the size of cantaloupes, don’t you know!

    D’oh! Roger Moore just beat me to it!

  42. 42.

    Danack

    Assuming that in the next Presidential election, the Democrats select someone who isn’t even slightly brown, it’s going to be interesting to see if the racists come back to the Democratic party, or if they stay with the Republicans.

    If they stay with the Republicans, then the Republicans would probably stick with their not so subtle strategy of blaming the countries problems on the ‘uppity ni-bongs’. That will lead to them doing ‘ok’ for the foreseeable future, but have very little chance of actually winning any national elections, but not being wiped out.

    If some of them come back to the Democratic party, then the Republicans could start easing off their racism, but will be absolutely devastated in the polls for a couple of elections, until minorities, women, and people who are neither batshit crazy, nor fond of racism start considering to vote for Republicans again.

    I think I may need to buy shares in popcorn for the next couple of House elections. At the moment, there is a good reason for the GOP to stick together – to try to keep control of the House. As soon as it looks like the GOP will lose control of the house, the national GOP committees, their Wall Street donors, and other Republican people who are not insane or racist will suddenly shift from needing to at least nominally support the TeaBaggers, to it being in their interest to get them out of the party as quickly as possible.

  43. 43.

    kc

    I’ve known conservative white people who are actively accepting government benefits but who don’t hesitate to rail about the lazy black culture of entitlement, etc.

    They really just don’t get it.

  44. 44.

    Botsplainer

    @hoodie:

    Had a lengthy discussion about this with a friend who is a recovering northeastern Republican and a transplant to the South, a place he really doesn’t understand all that well since he didn’t grow up here. He still suffers from after effects, particularly stuff relating to government debt, a resistance to recognizing the racism that underlies much of the obsession with “fiscal responsibility.” The analogy I used was that the rank and file in the GOP are like the Jeff Goldblum figure in The Fly. He enjoys the new found abilities he gets from the fly DNA, but eventually the fly DNA takes over and he finds himself doing increasingly disturbing things without being completely conscious of it. A lot of folks in the GOP might not have started out as overt racists and certainly did not see themselves as such, but they enjoyed the power they got from allying with more open racists and other bigots, whom they euphemistically cast as the salt of the earth, e.g., “hardworking Americans” and “Values Voters.” Eventually, they subconsciously internalized a lot of the premises of those bigots to the point that they’re functionally indistinguishable from the rebel flag waivers and bible thumpers they bred with. His response was that he wasn’t happy those guys “are on my team,” i.e., his imagined Team Fiscal Responsibility, but the reality is that it’s their team, not his, and the team isn’t playing the game he thinks it is. GOP leaders outside of the south either haven’t figured that out yet or they’re too craven to admit it.

    This perfectly describes my New England born, armed forces veteran father-in-law that moved to Hilton Head.

  45. 45.

    Corner Stone

    I wish Texas would secede, just so stupid fucking threads like this would go meta-meta on the chortle factor and auto-erotically self-asphyxiate themselves.
    The next fucking time I hear some idiot say Texas has to go but “what about Austin!” I swear I’m going to tie these tubes into the mother of all ligations.

  49. 49.

    Botsplainer

    @Corner Stone:

    I wish Texas would secede, just so stupid fucking threads like this would go meta-meta on the chortle factor and auto-erotically self-asphyxiate themselves.
    The next fucking time I hear some idiot say Texas has to go but “what about Austin!” I swear I’m going to tie these tubes into the mother of all ligations.

    I internet hate you, but my God, that was magnificent.

  50. 50.

    shortstop

    @Corner Stone: I agree. Austin is overrated; let it go with the rest.

    @Botsplainer: Psssst….that was sort of my point. Still, a good three-starch meal at Luby’s sometimes results in bursts of refined carb-fueled bravado. Anything could happen.

  51. 51.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    @Corner Stone: Don’t worry, this thread is about Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, and the NSA.

    Every thread is, at least according to one commenter here.

    It reminds me, who was that who used to post “Wah, it’s RAHM’s fault!” up and down every thread, especially the ones that had zero to do with the subject?

  52. 52.

    Belafon

    @Napoleon: Yes, his son or some other relative released the video.

    Here it is. At least I think it’s a video (I can’t see if the embed is a video from work).

  53. 53.

    David Koch

    Code Pink asshats tried to heckle President Blackua during a healthcare speech about…. wait for it… keystone pipeline.

    President said, “you’re at the wrong rally”

    These dumb mutherfuckers. They think cuz he’s black they can corner him, and he always makes a monkey outta them.

  54. 54.

    johnny aquitard

    @Napoleon: There’s audio. The interview mentioned earlier was published without naming Atwater as the source but the audio of that interview wasn’t released until last year.

    Until that audio was released conservatives insisted Atwater was misquoted, taken out of context, or that Lamis just made it all up as a partisan hit piece, yada-yada-yada, the usual conservative song-and-dance of victimhood/it-ain’t-what-you-think-it-is when they get caught with their dick in the babysitter.

  55. 55.

    Patricia Kayden

    So a Republican Official goes on television and calls Blacks lazy? Were there any consequences? Did he have to issue an “apology”?

    Wow. Just wow. Great minority outreach Repubs have got going for them.

  59. 59.

    geg6

    At my major public university branch campus that is about as diverse a place as you would ever see in this part of Pennsylvania, some of my co-workers and I were sitting around at lunch talking about movies we wanted to see. They were all hyped up over some stupid piece of garbage by the guy who was involved in Jackass. When they asked what I was excited to see, I said “12 Years a Slave.” There was complete silence for a few seconds and, in unison, they all said “But why?”

    The only co-worker from my department who wasn’t there was the African-American guy. I wonder if they would have reacted like that if he’d been there. I somehow didn’t think so.

  60. 60.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    @JC: If they used cameras it must have been Operation Holy See.

    If not, just Holy Hear, I guess.

  65. 65.

    Roger Moore

    @kc:

    I’ve known conservative white people who are actively accepting government benefits but who don’t hesitate to rail about the lazy black culture of entitlement, etc.

    You just don’t understand. They’re OK people who are just down on their luck and are getting temporary help until they can get back on their feet. Those People are lazy moochers who have turned the safety net into a hammock.

  66. 66.

    shortstop

    @Patricia Kayden: Yes, he was forced to quit the next day, at which time he called the rest of the GOP “gutless” for not backing him up in what everyone is supposed to know is true.

  67. 67.

    Botsplainer

    @shortstop:

    Psssst….that was sort of my point. Still, a good three-starch meal at Luby’s sometimes results in bursts of refined carb-fueled bravado. Anything could happen.

    I would watch it on pay-per-view, and it would beat the shit out of any of that MMA garbage that’s running now.

    “On this end of the block, we have Luis and Cesar, brothers who were raised on a diet of tamales and beans by a widowed mother in the outskirts of Nuevo Laredo, both of them now reputed to be the fiercest enforcers of the Cartel within a 5 square mile area. The brothers are armed with machetes and Glocks. Thirty yards away, defending his bored, cheating wife Cindy and the virtue of his out of control teen daughter Jennifer (his son having drifted off to get stoned at the SXSW festival in Austin 3 years ago), we have 295 pound insurance salesman and caged trophy hunter Steven Burns. Steven is armed with a Bushmaster, a riot gun, a .44 magnum pistol, three glocks, and that is just his outdoor arsenal. Indoors, in his redoubt, he has 6 more Bushmasters, 2 Sig Sauer 9’s, 7 S&W .41 pistols, a .30-30 and his great, great, great grandfather’s civil war rifle, with blackpowder and ball. He’s already angrily told Cynthia to ‘git yore useless ass back in the house unless I call you, woman, I got this’. What Steven doesn’t know is that Luis and Cesar are going to be joined by three more cartel gunmen in two minutes; this might make that triple cheeseburger combo he had at lunch seem to be less than a brilliant idea. Steven may get some help from his neighbor Danny Jones (320 pounds, owns a title insurance company, shoots left handed), so long as Danny wakes up from his nap after the 7 beer steak lunch he had in honor of his 3rd month of separation from his wife Carla. If Danny can actually see well enough to turn the safety off of one item in his formidable arsenal, he might be able to help Steven live for another 15-20 seconds before going down in a hail of gunfire himself.”

  71. 71.

    Napoleon

    @Belafon:

    Thats one of those audio tracks someone post as a video. You know, since they don’t have actual video they use still pictures and written words and stuff in place of the missing video. Still I did not realize that the audio had even been made public.

  72. 72.

    David Koch

    He is smarter than you. He is luckier than you.

    Whatever you think is supposed to happen, the reverse opposite of that is going to happen.

  73. 73.

    Belafon

    @Napoleon: It had been a bit since I had listened to it, which was probably this, and I couldn’t remember if it was an actual video or just audio with pictures.

    But he did say it.

  75. 75.

    johnny aquitard

    @kc: I don’t know of any conservative whites who are sucking at the teat of gub’mint but not full of resentment for blacks and hispanics for receiving the same.

    There are lots of white people who accept gub’mint bennies but who aren’t all “Those People getting something on my dime!”. But those whites vote Dem.

  77. 77.

    drkrick

    @Scott S.:

    sweartagraud, we keep talking about improving America, and then we decide we want to do it by throwing out perfectly good Americans because their leaders are dumbfucks.

    Their leaders and most of their neighbors. Sometimes addition by subtraction is the only way. I’m sure we’ll be generous about refugees with proper vetting.

  78. 78.

    johnny aquitard

    @Botsplainer: That’s effin’ brilliant.

    I can totally see the pine straw layered neatly under the bushes and around the landscaping of Steven’s and Danny’s mcMansions.

  79. 79.

    Mnemosyne

    @Scott S.:

    I couldn’t find the clip on YouTube, but for some reason I flashed on the scene with the garbage men in Better Off Dead: “It’s a shame when people throw away a perfectly good white boy like that.”

  80. 80.

    piratedan

    @schrodinger’s cat: maybe if he wore some hipster glasses they would be more accepting of his “aloofness”. Somehow I get the impression that the President still ends up with more interactions with real people than your average NYT Op Ed writer does.

  81. 81.

    Botsplainer

    @johnny aquitard:

    Imagine Steven wheezing and waddling from poor cover position to poor cover position outside, sweatily reaching for different firearms while making up his mind about which one works best, all as Cynthia screams at him for breaking her Trellis and imploring him to watch his step around the begonias. Danny wakes up red faced and oily, still thinking off his hot secretary that he had been screwing (which was why Carla left, particularly after he made the hottie start coming to adult Bible Study), steps over to the window to check out the commotion….

  82. 82.

    Chris

    @agrippa:

    It is. also, bad form to be openly prejudiced. It has to be disguised. But, it remains.

    In practice, the “disguising” is mostly limited to prefacing racist statements with “I don’t want to sound racist, but,” “I am not a racist, but,” or “I know it’s not politically correct to say, but” and then going ahead and saying everything you would otherwise have said anyway.

  83. 83.

    Mike in NC

    A Republican official in North Carolina recently resigned after telling a “Daily Show” interviewer that ID cards could diminish voting by “a bunch of lazy blacks that wants the government to give them everything.”

    So did some stage hand slip truth serum into this clown’s coffee cup?

  84. 84.

    pseudonymous in nc

    At the national level, American politics is primarily about race. Full stop.

    Honestly, I disagree: it’s about class, but class in Dixie is often a tight overlay on race. I’ve long been a fan of this line from (of all people) Charles Barkley in ’07, because he talks about the divide and conquer at work:

    America is divided by economics strictly. You know, people always talk about race, and we have racial problems in this country. Of course we do. But the real issue is the rich against the poor. We’ve got to get poor white people and poor black people and Mexicans to realize they are all in the same boat.

  85. 85.

    johnny aquitard

    @Roger Moore: Not even that. See, they don’t admit they’re down on their luck and they need the government to help.

    Instead they insist they earned it, they’re just getting a little bit back from all the taxes they had to give to the government, so they’re entitled to whatever they can get.

  86. 86.

    GHayduke (formerly lojasmo)

    @Davis X. Machina:

    I was thinking Agnew.. Oh well.

    Laundry, gutted the pumpkins, de-cluttered the basement, replaced the kid’s rear tube on his dirt jumper, walked the dog, and had lunch with a friend.

  87. 87.

    LanceThruster

    If we’d have kept the vote limited to white male land owners, this wouldn’t even be an issue.

    I want to say this about my state. When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years either. ~ Trent Lott

  88. 88.

    pseudonymous in nc

    @kc:

    I’ve known conservative white people who are actively accepting government benefits but who don’t hesitate to rail about the lazy black culture of entitlement, etc.

    That’s because they don’t get Black Welfare, which provides free iPhones, Cadillacs and a T-bone for every meal.

  91. 91.

    GHayduke (formerly lojasmo)

    @Mike in NC:

    It was painful. He was basically “of course we want less lazy black people to vote“…as if it was self evident.

  92. 92.

    Cermet

    @kc: Hate to tell you but most of the takers are thugs! What do you think all those corperate farmers are? Or the investors in all those firms that feed off the DoD tit? All those old white farts that have enjoyed far, far more medicare than they ever paid in or even the long lived SS payee’s who are on welfare – far too many are vote thug, too. They, if their low IQ minds could wrap around the concept, would just say they earned the benifits by past hard work unlike those “others”.

  93. 93.

    Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism

    @Mike in NC:

    So did some stage hand slip truth serum into this clown’s coffee cup?

    Nope. He’s a local radio/TV personality. There’s a reason he’s called the Rush Limbaugh of Western North Carolina.

    The Daily Show chose well.

  94. 94.

    eemom

    @LanceThruster:

    IIRC, and to the credit of something or somebody, Lott caught all kinds of shit over that statement.

    btw, as if on cue, the Newsmax headline reads:

    NYT: Obama Struggles to Stay in Command

  95. 95.

    srv

    @Botsplainer: I can’t wait for the next chapter.

    Danny woke up from his combat wank with Blondie from Bible Study to the sound of a 9mm and more than one 45 outside his window. Realizing the great, final, apocolyptic invasion from the south was finally at hand, he rolled his naked, oily body out of the bed and onto the floor. Having always slept with his Danner Kinectics on, he only had to roll into his 8 mag bandalier, pull the Kel Tec SU16 from under the bed and pull his helmet on. He had long practiced this move, but Carla’s absence was already being felt as his 320 lbs of manfluence landed on a few dozen Miller Lite bottles, crushing some.

    Screaming with pain, he frantically pushed the bloodstained bottles away and pulled the bandalier on. Reaching for the KTec, he knew he’d already sustained a few Purple Hearts before even firing a shot. Stumbling low to the window as he had been taught in gaming, he peeked up to raise the vinyl blinds to assess the now even more feverish battle. Carlalessness landed upon him again as the never dusted blinds shed their months of Lucky Strikes grime into his dry eyes.

    As luck would have it, Steve had not been hit, with his frantic serpentine retreat being so hilarious that Luis and Cesar could not shoot strait through their laughter. This had always been a weakness with the brothers – once one began laughing like a tickled otter, the other would break down like their favorite character Horshack from the Univision dubbed Welcome Back Kotter.

  96. 96.

    Mnemosyne

    @agrippa:

    The truly insidious thing about race in the US is that the slavery system was created to encompass both class and race so that black people were automatically lowest on the class totem pole based on their race. It was deliberately done that way to prevent the underclass whites in the South from getting too interested in figuring out who was really controlling everything since they always had someone to look down on. Even the most toothless, broken-down, ignorant old redneck could force a college-educated black man to defer to him, because of skin color.

    That’s still our base-level, knee-jerk reaction to race today: someone with dark skin must be of the lowest class. That’s why it’s automatically suspicious for black people to make purchases at Macys or Barneys — you can see they don’t belong there, so they must be there to shoplift or use a stolen credit card or launder drug money.

    That’s why other immigrants have been able to move up the social ladder but African-Americans are still stuck at the bottom. Our system was created that way 400+ years ago.

    ETA: For some white people — mostly, but not only older ones who grew up when segregation was still in full force — they need the security of knowing who they’re better than. If they’re not automatically better than the black family next door, then what do they have? Their own accomplishments?

  99. 99.

    Botsplainer

    @srv:

    Yer killing me. I made the mistake of reading as I walked to my car in the garage, and people are wondering what I think is so funny.

  101. 101.

    gogol's wife

    @crosspalms:

    You’re not the only one. I was going to comment about it, but the whole thing is so depressing I decided to just ignore it. I used to write to the Public Editor about these things, but the present one doesn’t even try to hide her wingnut sympathies (on Sunday she was concern trolling about whether an article about Gov. Christie’s cronyism was fair to the poor widdle guy).

  103. 103.

    johnny aquitard

    @Botsplainer: Danny grabs his AR customized with a 100-round saddle magazine, picatinny rails, tactical light and flashhider, then opens the window and yells at Steven to look out for the messicans sneaking up on him.

    Steven turns to the sound of Danny’s warning just in time to see Cesar’s thrown machete, flying end over end, bury itself to the hilt in the front of Danny’s stained and sweaty shirt. A big red bubble in Danny’s mouth pops as he reflexively triggers half a mag of surplus 5.56 NATO SS109 rounds into his own feet.

    He slumps to the floor with his last vision on earth of Luis swinging his machete at Steven who is desperately trying to backpedal out of the descending blade’s arc while bringing up his Kimber Pro-Carry. The machete misses Steven’s head but not his overhanging belly, neatly slicing off a sixty-pound slab of blubber from man-boobs to oversize belt buckle.

    Cynthia’s scream rises to a shrill ululation as she realizes his death-struggles are trampling her begonias.

  105. 105.

    johnny aquitard

    @johnny aquitard: Oh damn. I killed them off too soon. There was lots of comic potential yet to be rendered from their suety arses, and I kinda got carried away and blew it. Killed the fatted goose for the golden egg, or something like that.

    Anyhow, my sincere apologies, let’s just call it non-canonical and ignore that development. Continue the saga of Danny and Steven with aplomb, for they live still!

  106. 106.

    Chris

    @Mnemosyne:

    That’s why other immigrants have been able to move up the social ladder but African-Americans are still stuck at the bottom. Our system was created that way 400+ years ago.

    Just wondering – how does the white immigrants/nonwhite immigrants dichotomy fit into this?

    For that matter, from my understanding most immigrants weren’t considered “white” (not “really”) originally. But for a lot of them, that changed over time. How does that work? How is it that the Irish, the Italians, the Poles, even the Jews were able to “become white” as far as society was concerned – but black people never got the opportunity, and for that matter, neither did immigrants from Asia or Latin America?

    (Especially Latin America, you’d think there’s enough European heritage down there…)

  108. 108.

    Mnemosyne

    @Chris:

    For that matter, from my understanding most immigrants weren’t considered “white” (not “really”) originally. But for a lot of them, that changed over time. How does that work?

    There have been quite a few books looking at that question. The best answer I’ve seen about Asian/Pacific Islander and Latino immigrants is that they, too, will eventually become “white,” while leaving African-Americans on the bottom of the heap.

  109. 109.

    pseudonymous in nc

    @Chris:

    How is it that the Irish, the Italians, the Poles, even the Jews were able to “become white” as far as society was concerned

    Yeah, lots of books on the topic. Living in cities and having enough people to elect “their own” to run them helped a fair bit. Followed by the benefits of the WW2 settlement: moving out to Levittown tract houses, going to college alongside WASPs.

    A million black soldiers were entitled to a federally-subsidized mortgage through the GI Bill, but weren’t able to buy a home because developers wouldn’t sell. The segregation of suburbs (condoned by the federal government) in the late 40s and throughout the 50s meant that the GI Bill translated into a very different gain in net worth for white and black families. The segregation of schools and colleges played its own part.

  110. 110.

    Jamey

    Everyone knows that liberals are the real racists. They’re the ones always bringing up race…

  113. 113.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Belafon:

    I can’t get on youtube at work.

    So funny. I can get on YouTube, no problem, but I am blocked from two or three (that I know of) classical music sites.

  114. 114.

    Jeremy

    @Mnemosyne: I think it’s because they aren’t white. The reason why the Europeans immigrants were able to become “white” was because they were white.

    I don’t see those groups becoming the new “white” based on the fact that they are not white.

  115. 115.

    Thymezone

    Luckily, America has been Gerrymandered into states so that all the stupid people are trapped and can’t get out.

  116. 116.

    Plantsmantx

    At the national level, American politics is primarily about race. Full stop.

    …and we’re not much more than 10 percent of the population. There’s something hilarious about that.

  118. 118.

    Mnemosyne (iPhone)

    @Jeremy:

    The reason why the Europeans immigrants were able to become “white” was because they were white.

    Here’s a picture for you.  When you see that girl, is your first thought that she’s white, or that she’s Latina?

    “White” is relative.  Jews weren’t white, until they were.  Russians weren’t white, until they were.  Armenians were declared white by the Supreme Court.  The “one drop rule” that made someone legally black in America if they had any African ancestry at all didn’t exist until the 1900s, more than 50 years after the Civil War ended.

    You look at certain people and decide that they’re “white” based on our current culture.  But 100 or even 50 years ago, those same people would not have been considered “white.”

  119. 119.

    dww44

    @hoodie: Great post with great insight. As a lifetime Southerner, you’ve made me see the underlying racism in many of the cliches spouted with such authority by those around me. Although, until more of Americans accept the sheer unadulterated cruelty that is the present-day GOP, including its non-Southern components, I don’t see a real shift in the country’s direction.

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