In the wake of a Virginia gubernatorial loss and Jersey near-miss that were, upon reflection, perhaps not so catastrophic as originally framed, there’s been a lot of talk about Democrats having a problem with suburban voters (read: white people). There’s also been much analysis of Republican efforts to scare white voters using the critical race theory framework and Democratic angst about how successful that might be in 2022 and 2024.
One of the reasons I’m a Democrat is because the party is strong on civil rights and social justice issues, and I suspect that’s true of most of the people who read this blog. But is an intense focus on social justice and an insistence on telling the truth about our national history antithetical to winning votes from white people, which we need to be able to do to win elections?
Joe Biden proved its not, according to a great WaPo column from Magdi Semrau.* An excerpt:
Some made cranky calls to jettison “stupid wokeness.” Others counseled the Democrats to confront Republicans about their racially divisive tactics and then “pivot” to discussion of topics on which different racial groups have shared interests — such as reducing economic inequality. Underpinning all this advice was the premise that Democrats are simply bad at talking about race, and that, one way or another, they need to change the subject.
That conclusion is hasty. The presumption that frank discussions of racial inequity will backfire on Democrats neglects one recent, prominent example: President Biden, who during his campaign and since then has spoken with candor about the challenging topic. Given his electoral success, he offers an example other Democrats might consider emulating.
Go read the whole thing. It’s good!
Semrau cited Biden’s speech on the Tulsa Race Massacre, and as a white person who is related to many other white people, some of whom vote Republican, this portion of the speech struck me as a particularly deft way to frame the issue:
We can’t just choose to learn what we want to know and not what we should know. We should know the good, the bad, everything. That’s what great nations do: They come to terms with their dark sides. And we’re a great nation.
Remember active listening, the communication technique where people share what they hear when someone else says something so they can get past misunderstandings, i.e., “When you say X, I hear Y”?
Well, when we say “America has a systemic racism problem,” lots of white people hear, “America is bad and irredeemably racist.” They reject that notion and tune us out.
Should white people who reflexively get their hackles up when race is discussed examine why that is and do the work of educating themselves about the country’s founding and the structural inequities that have persisted for centuries? Yes. Have they shown an inclination to do that? Not enough, no.
But as Biden showed in the speech excerpted above, there may be a way to short-circuit the knee-jerk defensiveness, and that’s to appeal to national pride. As Semrau observes, in the Tulsa speech, Biden doesn’t shrink from correctly identifying the race of the victims and perpetrators, and he calls for general and targeted remedies to alleviate economic inequality broadly and build black wealth specifically. He frames combatting racism as a patriotic duty that citizens of a great nation should undertake.
I’ve sometimes marveled at how Germany, a country that loosed Nazism on the world within living memory, was able to evolve into a largely egalitarian democracy within my parents’ lifetimes whereas people in my disreputable Florida backwater still fly Confederate flags and become enraged at the suggestion that we have a white supremacy problem in the U.S. more than 151 years after the end of our Civil War.
I think I know why. The Nazis were utterly defeated and their leadership decimated. There was no tolerance or space for a mainstream “Lost Cause” lie to take root. But anyhoo, I digress, and since we haven’t got a time machine handy for a Reconstruction do-over, we’ll have to forge a different path.
So to sum up, we know there are plenty of white people who are actively or passively white supremacists, and Democrats won’t reach them no matter what because the only other major party in the country actively caters to their fears and prejudices. We can’t reach them without losing our own soul, so to quote a great man, “fuck ’em.”
Demonstrably, there are also lots of white people who aren’t immovable on the topic, and Democrats don’t have to deemphasize our commitment to civil rights or change the topic when race comes up to reach them. So let’s do that.
*Semrau is on Twitter at @magi_jay and is one of the best writers to follow on the platform, IMO.
Matt McIrvin
But Biden’s poll numbers are down, so nobody is going to use him as an example–the narrative is he’s a loser now. Everything has to be an extremely short-term reaction.
Baud
Sounds like it boils down to “messaging.”
One thing we should be prepared for is a series of fake GOP created litmus tests that the media says we need to pass go prove we don’t hate white people. That’s a standard tactic in these sorts of situations.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: And bad-faith leveraging of corner cases–someone points out that in the most literal sense, Lincoln was a white supremacist, and that creates an opening for someone to go “how dare you, this is insane, are you saying we need to pull down all his statues” and push anyone who cares about honesty into an impossible corner where they’re defending something that sounds bad either way.
japa21
Well said, Betty. And Biden is doing the right framing. And this doesn’t apply only to racial issues, but also to issues on religion, etc.
Roger Moore
That’s certainly at least somewhat true. But I think there’s another reason we really need to look at as part of any attempt at racial reconciliation. The foreign powers who defeated the Nazis were quite committed to anti-fascism. Yes, there were a few westerners, even a few with positions of power, who were fascist sympathizers, but there was a broad and deep commitment to crushing fascism and not letting it start again.
The Northerners who crushed the Confederacy had a core of radical abolitionists, but they weren’t by any means a majority. There was a large minority of Copperheads who were sympathetic to the South, and also a lot of people who wanted to defeat the Confederates but were pretty squishy on abolitionism and even squishier on giving blacks equal rights. That made the Reconstruction coalition shaky right from the start. When there was serious pushback the people who had never been committed to equal rights gave up very quickly.
Baud
Whatever messaging we land on, we’ll also have to have the confidence to stand up (respectfully) to people who hate it because it’s too “timid.” It’s hard for us to find a consensus framing of an issue (across a whole host of issues) because of our philosophical and intellectual diversity.
Marmot
A thousand times yes. We *can* fix this, it’s our duty to.
Urza
Germany also outlawed the ideology and symbols. They weren’t allowed to use free speech arguments to show off the hate and bring in converts.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Biden doesn’t talk like a twitter-activist. That’s one of the big reasons he’s President.
Jamelle Bouie said something years ago on twitter that has stayed with me: To too many white people, racism is just bad manners. He was specifically talking about white people in politics and political media, but I think it applies to the population at large. My own corollary to that: For nice white people, it’s not racism if you’re not using That Word. So birtherism, the issue that made trump a Republican celebrity, was really very tacky, racially-tinged, even “provocative”. But racist? Well, we can’t see what’s in his heart. It got a little better with the media under his actual term in office, but it took Charlottesville, “shit-hole countries”, et cetera, to get them to move on it.
Baud
We do have a bad habit of being obsessed with the people who hate us the most.
Matt McIrvin
@Roger Moore:
My impression was that it was much more than a few, and had Roosevelt not been President and had the Japanese not attacked Pearl Harbor, the US siding with Hitler would have been a very open possibility. Is that wrong?
Of course, once we were committed to war, being openly pro-Nazi became unpatriotic and events took on an inertia of their own.
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Maybe the key is to convince people that such behavior as bad, immoral, or disrespectful before trying convince them that it’s racist, since that term gets their hackles up.
Roger Moore
@Baud:
That can be a strength as well as a weakness. Speaking with a single voice is powerful, but it lacks nuance and can scare away people who aren’t happy with what that one voice is saying. By having a diversity of opinions, the Democrats can pick someone whose opinion is a good match for their voters. AOC doesn’t agree with Joe Manchin on everything, but that’s OK they aren’t courting the same voters. They’re each matched to the voters they’re trying to win over in a way they couldn’t be if they had to stick to nationalized messaging.
Frankensteinbeck
I don’t think Democratic message is relevant here and now, except in the sense that we had not yet passed an infrastructure bill and I’m sure that dampened enthusiasm. Republicans continually rebrand their racism, with caravans, ebola, birtherism… I can barely remember a fraction of them, it happens so often. They hit on a very effective one with CRT, and there is absolutely nothing Democrats can or could do about it. The words ‘critical race theory’ and the idea it is being taught in school hit all the right white fragility buttons and give the assholes an excuse to scream at people who can’t answer back. Hate is a drug, and Republicans are in the middle of a major rush right now. ‘CRT’ and ‘Democrats can’t get anything done’ were the only messages anyone is paying attention to. The thing is, the CRT rush will fade, exactly like a drug fix, and whatever they find next is not likely to be as good. Democrats finally did pass something, and when the financial effects start hitting regular people, the depression on our side will lift. Fuck Manchin for stopping that from happening soon enough for Virginia.
All of that may be moot. 2020 and 2021 are freak elections. I don’t think we can learn anything from either of them. Off-off-year elections? Always too weird. And we’re never going to be in the 2020 situation of who is voting under what motivation in what voting systems again. Right now, any political prognostication is idle speculation.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
I don’t think the Japanese mattered. We were never going to side with Hitler. At most we would have stayed neutral. FDR always preferred the UK.
MattF
@Matt McIrvin: I think US neutrality was a real possibility until Pearl Harbor.
Baud
@Roger Moore:
Except Joe Manchin drives some AOC fans away from the party, and AOC drives some Manchin-type moderates away from the party. A lot of voters today unfortunately don’t focus on their own lanes.
Roger Moore
@Baud:
I think part of the story has to be focusing on “that’s racist” rather than “you’re racist”. The goal should be on judging actions and consequences rather than trying to figure out what’s going on in someone’s heart.
Old Man Shadow
If someone’s reaction to an electoral setback is to throw Black people under the bus, that tells me more about them than about our future chances.
What’s the goddamn point of having power if we don’t use it to make everyone’s life better?
Old Man Shadow
Duplicate post.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Baud: I’m no historian, but those cultural affinities mattered, I think, especially to the governing classes of the time. And we were barely twenty years removed from “liberty cabbage” and people kicking dachshunds in the street (in Molly Ivins’ bone-dry drawl the one time I was lucky enough to see her live, “You’ll notice they never kicked a German Shepherd….)
Major Major Major Major
Yeah. The first step is to address the issue, like at all, in a coherent and somewhat sustained manner. Obama’s Rev. Wright speech required a special kind of talent, but you don’t actually need that caliber or length of speech.
Bad-faith sound bites will always make the rounds on cable news, but the thing is, nobody actually watches that.
Matt McIrvin
@Old Man Shadow: Or the gays, or the women, or the immigrants, or the trans people etc. etc. etc. They’ve always got to find some member of the coalition we can jettison like a spent booster rocket.
J R in WV
Open Thread? Good !!
Still contributing to potential Democratic office seekers!
Have been prescribed compression stockings to combat swelling and sores developing on my feet. Not cheap, hope the insurance will pay for them.
Septic tank waste disposal system overflowed, pumped nearly 2,000 gallons out Monday, need a new pump installed to push liquids over to the dispersal field which isn’t far enough below the house for a gravity feed to work well. Have a guy lined up for early next week to do that work.
Have two cats 15 years old… one is a chow hound, was starving when Wife rescued her from a multi-flora rose choked culvert, 6 months old, yet the size of a chipmonk, will over eat multiple times a day if at all possible. Other cat has never been hungry like that, both have thyroid issues. Punkin (the big fat cat…) seems to be doing well on the thyroid diet treatment.
Spike has never been an overeating cat, and in fact was once medicated to enhance her appetite. Now she’s losing weight, even tho she gets handed kibble all day and all night. Will take her back to the vet Friday, as I expect it will be really crowded tomorrow as it’s a holiday for lots of people.
I took the Pew quiz, I’m Progressive Leftist… Shocking, I know. Some of those questions, tho… Spike is sitting on my chest, which makes it harder to type well.
Baud
@Major Major Major Major:
That would destroy our brand.
japa21
@Old Man Shadow: Who is suggesting throwing Blacks under the bus?
Kay
I’m glad we’re talking about it. This guy should not be directing liberal or Democratic politics:
The elite intellectuals may want some nuanced discussion, but the political arm is pure hard Right. I think I know which group prevails.
Roger Moore
@MattF:
The US didn’t officially declare war until the end of 1941, but we had given up neutrality long before then. We had been providing weapons to Germany’s enemies through Lend-Lease since early in the war, were in the middle of a rapid military build up, and were actually fighting Nazi ships in the Atlantic as part of Lend-Lease. Part of the reason Hitler was willing to declare war in December 1941 was because he thought we were already de facto at war anyway.
Kay
It just feels so familiar to me. “We didn’t want book bannings!” Yeah, I know. But that’s what happened and I think you had a CLUE when they laid it all out for you in the magazine article.
Baud
@Kay:
Agreed. Trump isn’t the only dignity wraith out there.
ChuckInAustin
apparently the nazi child is testifying.
Hungry Joe
@Matt McIrvin: We were already leaning heavily toward the Allies — lend-lease, for example. Roosevelt was pretty much looking for any excuse to jump into the war in Europe, and most likely would have found one sooner or later. Hitler’s declaring war on the U.S. a few days after Pearl Harbor took care of that.
But no way would have teamed up with the Nazis. Philip Roth’s novel was an intriguing but ultimately fanciful thought experiment.
patroclus
The U.S. was only really “neutral” from 1935-38. In a reaction to events, the Neutrality statutes were gradually weakened and exceptions were enacted. After the Marco Polo bridge incident, Congress passed the Vinson Act authorizing a big Navy “notwithstanding the provisions of the 1922 Washington treaty” which had limited the amount of capital vessels – this was clearly aimed at Japan and also at Germany who had just renounced the Anglo-German Naval treaty. After the outbreak of war in Europe in 9/39, Congress passed the cash-and-carry amendments which allowed the U.K and others to purchase arms if they could transport them and pay for them (Germany and Japan couldn’t). After the fall of France in 6/40, Congress passed the Two-Ocean Navy Act, which authorized a massive navy which ultimately won the war. During the Battle of Britain, Congress passed a peacetime draft. And authorized massive defense appropriations. In early 1941, Congress passed Lend-Lease, which paid for all Allied arms purchases by America and this was extended to the Soviets after Operation Barbarossa commenced. Congress extended the draft in August ’41 while FDR and Churchill were meeting at Placentia Bay. Soon thereafter, Congress passed another amendment to the Neutrality laws authorizing convoys and aggressive naval action to protect them. Using TWEA, Japanese assets were frozen and all oil shipments were prohibited. All of this took place before Pearl Harbor. The U.S. was clearly engaged in the “war” – just not the “shooting war.” This was well known by all at the time.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@ChuckInAustin: IANAL, but given what I’ve been hearing and reading about that trial, is that a sign of confidence on the part of his lawyers?
Major Major Major Major
@Frankensteinbeck:
Now imagine if the Democratic response had been “there’s no caravan approaching the border, most of them are on foot.”
Betty Cracker
@Old Man Shadow: Agreed, but it’s rarely that cut-and-dried. To use the example David Shor offers for his “popularism” theory, the Obama administration analyzed how immigration policy was playing with voters during the 2012 campaign and found it was unpopular, so they stopped talking about it. Didn’t change the policy, just stopped talking about it.
I think that’s more along the lines of what was discussed in response to CRT, at least that I saw. Anyhoo, I know there’s no “one weird trick” that will work everywhere. Regions and candidates and times change, and you have to adjust for that. But I thought it was a great piece and worth highlighting here.
Also, I’ve seen how white folks get triggered all my life — and have experienced it myself as a white person getting triggered. Yes, we should work on that, and it’s an ongoing process. But politicians can and should avoid pitfalls. They shouldn’t rely on voter self-improvement to make them more receptive to the message.
different-church-lady
I haven’t seen Carvell’s comments in context, but I do wonder if was using stupid as a modifier, rather than a description. I other words, was he saying “wokeness used in a stupid way” rather than “all wokeness is stupid”.
Undoubtedly there’s an extremely large contingent of white people who do that very thing. But the problem is compounded by a lot of “stupid” liberals who say and mean exactly the second thing. (Loomis at LGM is a like a thrice-daily example.) That kind of shit got weaponized against us, and nobody should be the least little bit surprised.
Nukes.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Very much on topic: JD Vance wants to make Kyle Rittenhouse into his Horst Wessel
lawless thug rioters, lawless thug prosecutors, “wolves” vs human nature
different-church-lady
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
That’s the biggest reason Twitter-activists wish he wasn’t.
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
“Stabbed in the back.”
ETA: Last I heard, even the racists realize Vance is a fraud.
HinTN
I found the extended discussion of Reconstruction in McCullough’s Grant to be extremely informative.
Matt McIrvin
@different-church-lady: America could just have a systemic racism problem. I fear that because of the very phenomena we are talking about here, America is, in fact, bad and irredeemably racist.
West of the Rockies
Messaging is complex. Biden’s share of the Black vote declined compared to Clinton and Obama, but he still won probably over 90% of the Black vote. His share of the Latino vote declined compared to Clinton, but he still won a substantial majority. More whites voted for Trump, but Biden received tens of millions of white votes.
All of those votes were essential. Those groups all have shared and distinct needs and wishes. I didn’t even mention Asian, Native American, Pacific Islander, etc. voters or groups by religious affiliation.
We can’t afford to chuck any group under the bus. People are not monolithic, and thinking all Blacks want X, all Latinos prefer, all whites are Z… that doesn’t work.
Zelma
Semrau is absolutely right about how Democratic politicians have to approach the issue of race. Opposition to racism has to be tied to American ideals. Obama did it by talking about “a more perfect union.” I’ve long thought that the Dems ought to use the slogan “Liberty and Justice for All.” Where I live, there’s scarcely a public meeting that doesn’t begin with the Pledge of Allegiance. It was quite a culture shock when I moved here and discovered that even the garden club recited it. Obviously my largely Republican and possibly racist neighbors have never truly internalized the meaning of the words they say so thoughtlessly. Making them confront what those words really say could be an interesting approach.
trollhattan
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I’m sorry, did somebody endure a violent attack while he was carrying an AR-15 on a city street? On what planet does this occur?
Kay
@Baud:
It’s always been part of Democratic politics on the more educated end. “I see your point” to the intellectual Right. Then the political Right come in and rip offf his head.
different-church-lady
@Matt McIrvin: Well, let’s just give up then, because the bad guys aren’t going to. No sense in putting up a fight, the cake is baked.
Peale
@Kay: We thought it was just going to be the books about transexuality and anti-colonialism. We didn’t realize that it would be all of OUR liberal books, too.
Cameron
@Matt McIrvin: Didn’t Churchill toss out the possibility of aligning with Hitler to overthrow Stalin?
Kay
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Clumsy, JD. No wonder the wingnuts aren’t buying him. Couldn’t get through the performance without the phony overreach.
Mandel is better at it. He has really become his character.
Major Major Major Major
@different-church-lady:
Exactly this. The mainstreaming of academic noises has not been great for our side. Even Obama the professor understood this. Of course, he’s persona non grata for a lot of the left now too.
trollhattan
@Peale: “Chicago Manual of Style” you’re going down! Rules are for losers, and style is right out.
Roger Moore
@trollhattan:
On a planet where the other guy has a gun, too.
ETA: This is the problem with open carry. As soon as two people who have guns run into each other, they can both claim self defense for trying to kill the other.
guachi
There is so much gerrymandering in states that in order for the Democrats to ever have a majority they will need to run far more conservative candidates in a number of districts. NC, FL, TX, OH are now massively tilted to the Republicans.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
This is all the Lost Cause BS and butt hurt over RE Lee’s sacred statue being pulled down.
Kay
@Peale:
“History of the KKK”. I feel like I would recognize that book from my 6th grade library. One of those slim kid history books you read and go tell your parents this amazing historical fact :)
We had KKK here but it’s overwhelmingly white so they focused on Catholics. It’s wild to read in the context of the current political alignments.
Brantl
Look up Smedley Butler AND BBC for an interesting special on American Fascists who intended to overthrow the FDR presidency, prominent among them Grandpappy Prescott Bush, and Henry Ford.
Cameron
@Roger Moore: I think this suggests one of the weaknesses we see with a two-party system. For it to work, we need two parties with great internal diversity, without which the parties will be unable to collaborate (no meeting of the minds at any level). What we have is a Democratic Party that fits the bill, but a cultish single-minded Republican Party. I don’t see any good results for anybody here, unless there’s a way to disintegrate Republicans.
Tony Gerace
Critical Race Theory being taught to five year-olds! The latest manifestation of the ooga-booga tactics that were perfected by Nixon and Reagan a couple of generations ago. I have yet to see a clear explanation (from either side of this fake “controversy”) of how this nefarious plot would actually change the way that elementary school, middle school and high school students would be educated. I suspect that this is because the whole thing is make-believe — like the urban legends from fifty years ago about dirty hippies spitting on Vietnam veterans. I understand that the idiots who are freaking out about “Critical Race Theory” are not very bright and are unlikely to change their minds, but it would be helpful if “the media” would do a better job of communicating — with clear examples — exactly what, if anything, would be changing in kids’ education. Of course, the lousy corporate media are a big part of the reason why this country is in its current lousy shape.
ChuckInAustin
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: very likely. I have very little expectation that he’ll be convicted of anything. Punk little cosplayer went out and killed 2 people. SMH
topclimber
@Matt McIrvin: Lincoln could learn and he did. Racist assassin made sure we could never know how much
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Roger Moore: It has seeped into my consciousness that Rittenhouse fell down while was running away and someone kicked him in the head?
Geminid
Magdi Semrau recently started tweeting under her name, and explained that “Mangy Jay” was a nickname given her by children she was teaching.
Ms. Semrau is very insightful and clear thinking. She also has a good sense of humor that she sometimes employs. In the thread before this I quoted a couple of funny responses she made yesterday to a Jacobin article on working class politics. Those Jerkobin guys are really full of themselves and need to hear things like that.
Usually, though, Semrau is sober and dispassionate in a way that makes her arguments more persuasive, at least they seem so to me. A good model.
Major Major Major Major
@ChuckInAustin: he’ll walk on any serious charges. From what I’ve seen, testimony has been very favorable to the defense, and the evidence was IMO always too fog-of-war-y to support anything above like man 2. But IANAL
Baud
@Major Major Major Major:
I agree.
Major Major Major Major
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: they recently saw testimony by one of the guys Kyle shot. IIRC the beat by beat was “shootee points gun at Kyle while Kyle on ground, lowers gun, raises it again, gets shot”.
ETA yeah here it is
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/08/us/kyle-rittenhouse-gaige-grosskreutz-testimony.html
Roger Moore
@Cameron:
This isn’t really a problem with a two party system per se. This is a problem with a two party system in which you get inconclusive election results, e.g. split between the presidency and Congress, between Houses, legislation blocked by filibuster, etc. People vote for whichever party they prefer, they think their party has won, and then nothing happens because there are so many veto points that let the party that supposedly lost keep stuff from happening.
lowtechcyclist
Thinking about evangelical in-laws who might bring up CRT at Christmas.
I think my response will be to ask them: what should we teach them about America’s racial history?
Should we teach them about the 250 years of Negro slavery?
Should we teach them about another century of Jim Crow? Should we teach about, or skip past: lynchings? The Tulsa massacre and the dozens like it? ‘Sundown towns’? Separate and very unequal schools? Racial covenants in property deeds? Unequal access to credit? Redlining?
Then I’d ask: why should white children take it personally when learning about this history? Kids have a sense of fairness that sometimes we lose as adults. I was old enough to be reading the front section of the newspaper as the march to Selma approached, and could only wonder why nobody was stepping in and keeping Sheriff Jim Clark and his minions from attacking the marchers with dogs and clubs, as promised.
I didn’t feel bad about being white, and I was eleven years old, and that was in real fucking time. I felt outraged that this was happening, and disappointed that nobody at some higher level was stepping in and preventing the violence.
Nobody wants to make your kids feel bad, I’d tell them. But our history shouldn’t be, um, whitewashed. How can we move forward until we’ve come to terms with the past?
Matt McIrvin
@different-church-lady: I think Loomis is a little like a neo-Confederate in that he has a fondness for being on the side of lost causes, so declaring them lost kind of makes him feel better. I get that way sometimes myself but it’s more the fear that it’s already too late.
Ruckus
@Baud:
Most of us are, after all, human.
Besides that we have a political party that makes as one of it’s prime concepts, that anyone different from them is wrong and bad. It’s like the “cool” kids club in jr high and you aren’t in it.
Baud
@Roger Moore:
The problem is with the concept of a “two-party system.” The U.S. really doesn’t have a “party system,” in the way that parliamentary systems do. Our parties have always been loose coalitions. But nowadays, U.S. voters think about voting for a party rather than a candidate, and that leads to unrealistic expectations under our system.
Matt McIrvin
@lowtechcyclist: There’s this distinction that always needs to be made between guilt and responsibility. A white school kid didn’t do any of this, and should have zero guilt about it. But they should grow up with the knowledge that they’re responsible for helping to make amends, because who else is going to do it?
And if they grow up actively helping to perpetuate the inequities inherited from past injustice, they should feel some guilt about that.
Citizen Alan
@Matt McIrvin:
Biden’s numbers are down because institutionally, the media is in the tank for the GQP and more specifically Trump. And I really think it’s time we stop dismissing the problem as “Republicans working the refs” and start considering the possibility that the media is just as riddled with fascists and white supremacists as the Republicans they carry water for.
Relatedly, are Peter Baker and Susan Glasser still salty that no more Afghanis are dying for their entertainment?
Major Major Major Major
Speaking of annoying leftists, a lot of people on Twitter are mad that there’s a warship named after Lieutenant Harvey Milk now, having apparently been unaware of the lieutenant part. There’s this belief that all LGBT people must be like the activist fringe.
Citizen Alan
@Roger Moore: And sadly, that included the asshole who became President after Lincoln was shot. I genuinely think America would be a better place today if the Radical Republicans had succeeded in impeaching Johnson and his successor subsequently unleashed the Union Army to annihilate the KKK while it was still in its infancy.
Brantl
@Major Major Major Major: I have heard, but haven’t seen documented that he shot one of the people he killed, in the back. I that right?
Woodrow/asim
…and to be White, when doing so.
Look — I love y’all. Yet: there’s a generational defect around talking about race in America. “CRT” panic hits well because it plays right into the same space that allowed Lost Cause-ism to direct decades of small talk and academic discourse, feeding into each other.
That’s not a messaging issue, exactly. You’ve not gonna dig out from that deficit via Carville/Begala-style antics. The Progressive infrastructure isn’t built to carry messages like the Conservative one is, nor do we have the experience/funding in that area.
What Biden did, he did solo. There’s no team backing his play, there. The Party isn’t making “appeal to national pride” around race, it’s standard. Nor are Progressive groups, doing the same — as I noted yesterday, they have a number of issues to address, unlike their Conservative “peers”. Conservatives have developed triggers for their people to flood systems, and gain the advantage in local media reporting — among many points. And not all of that is a “White People Protesting” situation.
I think all the above, is fixable. But it takes money, and time, and work. Why? Because Modern messaging doesn’t work in a vacuum. Unless you’re very good and pretty lucky, you won’t “go viral” without a campaign and hard (but subtle) effort to get your message out. And even then, you’re not going to see people go to the mat, the way we see Conservatives do, without a major effort — such as the work activists did to leverage BLM tragedies into action, or the dividends coming from getting Georgia in play.
So I’d first want to see how we’re going to solve that issue, how we’re going to get a consistent process for disseminating messaging, out before trying to do another round of “what’s the best message?”
Citizen Alan
@Matt McIrvin: I am 100% certain that, had Hitler played it smart and used Pearl Harbor as an excuse to break his alliance with Japan and declare himself neutral in any US-Japanese conflict, the Republicans of the day would have successfully blocked FDR from getting us into war in Europe and the whole continent would have fallen to fascism. And then, the bastards would have started clamoring for it over here (to the extent they weren’t already doing so).
Baud
@Woodrow/asim:
I love you too, man.
Major Major Major Major
@Citizen Alan: Biden’s numbers are down because of Afghanistan and inflation I think. And a general inability to wave a magic unicorn wand and fix everything. Whether you think that’s fair is immaterial.
Major Major Major Major
@Brantl: we don’t really know for sure and the defense was easily able to make it sound inconclusive on cross. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/kyle-rittenhouse-fatally-shot-man-was-horizontal-position-kenosha-prot-rcna4959
Kay
It sounds like they didn’t find any books to ban on the shelves so they went to the digital library app to hunt them down, so the planned book burning may not take place. The book they’re banning won an award in 2004 so not “CRT”, I would think.
Once again, ONE parent:
Roger Moore
@Major Major Major Major:
Biden’s numbers are down because the media has chosen to run with inflation and Afghanistan as the most important issues of the day. They could choose to make rising wages and declining unemployment the issues of the day, but they don’t want to do that because they are always looking for how the Democrats have failed rather than how they succeeded.
Major Major Major Major
@Roger Moore: I mean it’s not like inflation is fake and I assume most people aren’t getting raises to keep pace. As for Afghanistan, the media was really crappy, but also people just don’t like the consequences of getting what they want.
Fox News isn’t what’s making people notice the price of beef, rent, restaurants, vehicles.
People have agency!
Zelma
@Cameron:
Nope.
Peale
@Major Major Major Major: I really do like that the “Lesbian but not trans” and “Gay but only binary” types think that by starting a “panic” that young people are trying to conduct a non-binary genocide against lesbians that they are standing up against “wokeness” and that they are in some kind of secure position. Uh Hun. Well, good luck with that.
Betty Cracker
Redacted: M4 got there first.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Major Major Major Major: yeah, gas prices have in fact gone up, and most people don’t watch cable news or read the New York Times and they don’t pass big signs posting the unemployment rate five times on their way to and from work
PJ
@Roger Moore: It also helped de-Nazification efforts that the Nazis had only been in power for 12 years at the end of WWII. Slavery, and its defending ideology, white supremacy, had dominated American politics for over 200 years at the end of the Civil War. That kind of deep and lasting belief takes a corresponding deep, sustained, and lasting effort to extirpate. If we’re lucky, we’ll get there sometime in the next 100 years.
Kay
@Peale:
The banned book is about a gay teenager.
It’s for 15 and older and was apparently acceptable in 2004 but is now not. The kids must be amused. Every single one of them is carrying a cell phone. I think they can access gay teenager content.
UncleEbeneezer
@Baud: Very true. One thing about doing the work of trying to help white people be better on race: you will get told you are doing it wrong from alot of people on our own side. Some of them, very prominent speakers on issues of race. They will call you names and say that you are just coddling white feelings etc. It is a thankless job. You have to build a thick skin against fragile white people AND the most performative/strident Black activists. For the latter, you have to learn to tactfully ignore them and follow the guidance of People of Color who you trust, to tell you when you’re really screwing up. Because frankly, there are alot of anti-racist activists who will never be satisfied no matter what you do or say.
gwangung
Children don’t get that defensive about race, but adults do. And white adults are the ones who hear, “America has done racist things in the past” and think “They’re saying America is irredeemably racist.”
Citizen Alan
@J R in WV:
I am apparently a “Democratic Mainstay,” but I was struck by the hidden biases of the poll designer. Consider the following questions:
That, IMO, is a meaningless question because whatever you think can land you anywhere on the political spectrum. There were plenty of people who are offended by Confederate flags and found it offensive when Trump said most Mexican immigrants were rapists. And there were plenty of people who are offended by their kids having to read Toni Morrison in English class and found it offensive when Obama said he thought that cop who arrested Henry Louis Gates “acted stupidly.” Those two groups of people are at the polar opposite of the political spectrum.
Same problem. People on the right think that street crime is a massive problem and we should have longer sentence across the board. People on the left think that most nonviolent jail terms are too long, BUT they might also be outraged when privileged white people get a slap on the wrist after pleading guilty to rape.
Major Major Major Major
@Peale: the magical vanishing lesbian is a pretty interesting phenomenon.
I just wish the pride flag didn’t look so hideous these days. It’s actually a good microcosm of the leftist-vs-liberal divide I was trying to articulate yesterday. Liberals came up with the rainbow flag because it abstractly includes everybody. Modern activists think we need to add black brown and trans stripes because the rainbow doesn’t pointedly include them. It’s not enough to represent everybody in this symbol for an extremely diverse community: we also need to represent some people more than others.
Major Major Major Major
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: “I had to completely change my family’s consumption habits but my neighbor got a big raise so it’s ok! Thanks Biden!”
Geminid
@Cameron: I don’t think Churchill would have countenanced allying with Germany against Rusia. In fact, in the leadup to the notorious Munich agreement where Chamberlain sold out the Czechs, Churchill advocated forcefully in Parliament for taking up the Russian offer of an anti-Nazi pact.
For a long time, though, Churchill’s view was not shared by the majority of his Conservative Party colleagues. Many of them regarded Bolshevism as a mortal threat, and alliance with the Soviet Union as anathema. In the summer of 1939 the possibility of an alliance came up again, and the British and French actually sent teams to Moscow to work out an alliance. The French were serious, but Chamberlain told Admiral Drax basically to stretch things out. Stalin understood, and after talks dragged on for ten days he invited Hitler’s Foreign Secretary to Moscow. Then the Ribbontrop-Molotov Pact was negotiated and signed in less than two days.
A couple days later Hitler attacked Poland, and nine months after that France’s defenses collapsed. Then the British chose between two paths: accommodation with Lord Halifax as Prime Minister, or resistance with Churchill as PM. They chose resistance, and in retrospect it seems like they could not of done otherwise. But it was a real choice, and there were elements of British society, particularly in the upper class, who would have preferred accommodation.
Leto
@Kay:
Bold is mine. Idk, at what age do we think it’s appropriate to discuss anything? Are kids not allowed to learn about anything in the world until they’re 18, then just set loose into the world just as dumb as when they entered? Also the fact that we’re living out part of the plot of Footloose on a national scale is just a hilariously depressing thought. It’s Tipper Gore and the parental ratings for music sticker shittery all over again. If we’re lucky we’ll get that for books. It drove sales for music, should drive sales for books. “Oh, this is “adult” reading! Don’t let our parents catch us! Hey, mister! Can you buy this copy of “Beloved” for me?”
UncleEbeneezer
@lowtechcyclist: Another, less-diplomatic approach is to point out that Black kids feel bad when they read about slavery too. But it is the truth about our history and every child needs to learn the truth so we can all make America better.
Peale
@Kay: It must be the transexuals banning those books for promoting concepts like “gay” and “bi-sexual” that inappropriately imply that sexuality isn’t a fluid spectrum. Yep. That’s why that list of 750 Critical Race Theory books out of Texas includes those LGBT friendly YA books. Even the ones that were made into movies!
Served
@Major Major Major Major: So you’re saying….All Lives Matter?
UncleEbeneezer
“Demonstrably, there are also lots of white people who aren’t immovable on the topic, and Democrats don’t have to deemphasize our commitment to civil rights or change the topic when race comes up to reach them. So let’s do that.”
HEAR HEAR!!
One thing that has been driving me bonkers is seeing so many “White people will never change. They’ll always side with Racism” defeatist comments. I mean I get and share the overall sentiment, but it’s especially frustrating that these are often the same people who push Restorative Justice, a concept built around the belief that people can always do better, change for the better. I believe people can and do change for the better and I’ve seen tons of improvement on Race, Gender, LGBTQ issues etc., in many people I know in the past 10-15 years. Not just having better attitudes/understanding of those issues but also understanding Systemic Oppressions based on them, and specifically voting with those things in mind.
Leto
@gwangung: Not just “America is irredeemably racist” but “All of my relatives were irredeemably racist.” They lack the ability to understand that, maybe your relatives (dad, grandpappy, further back) weren’t racists but they benefitted through racist policies that have existed for the past N of years. We can’t get people to understand current examples of racism, I have even less belief on trying to get them to understand the impact of systemic racism. Jesus, can’t even get them to learn basic geography. Their, there, they’re is too complicated for most of them. Moving along…
Major Major Major Major
@Served: clearly this is the only possible interpretation of my words. Well done!
It would be more like if we had an LGBT Lives Matter organization that rebranded as LGBT, Black LGBT, Brown LGBT, and Trans Lives Matter.
WaterGirl
@Major Major Major Major:
Afghanistan? I can’t imagine that even 1% of the population is giving any thought at all about Afghanistan now that it’s not in the news.
Citizen Alan
@Major Major Major Major:
But it started with Afghanistan, which, IMO, was entirely media driven. The airlift was one of the most extraordinary achievements in contemporary military history. If it had happened under a GOP president, he’d have been compared to Churchill. But it was a Dem who got us out of Bush’s war after twenty fucking years, and our blood-soaked ghoul media hates him for it.
Major Major Major Major
@WaterGirl: it tends to be cumulative when bad things keep happening.
Baud
@Major Major Major Major:
Bad things will always be happening.
Peale
@Major Major Major Major: yeah. Its an issue that I think we should keep within the family and not going looking to outsiders to resolve. Amongst the people who talks about these things, the common approach has been to just recognize and extend. In my own college L&G group, the debate freshman year was whether it should be the Gay and Lesbian Alliance or the Lesbian and Gay Alliance. Didn’t really matter to me. I was just glad to meet people. By senior year, they were already onto whether Bisexuals should be included. Those were rather toxic discussions, as was the discussion about Queer when I was in grad school. But since graduating, I have to admit that I’m relieved not to have to go round and round about it. Let the young students figure it out. But for heaven’s sake, don’t go running to the Moral Majority in a panic asking for help.
Kay
@Leto:
I just love how quickly it went from “we found this slide about CRT at a continuing ed class for teachers” to “ban all access to these books on the library app”.
The next stage of this is the liberals who backed it blame other liberals for inciting it. “If you had denounced the CRT slide this never would have gone this far!” That’s how panics roll. You can’t negotiate your way out of one, though. It isn’t transactional. You can’t give them CRT in exchange for banned books and they’ll settle. They don’t have any incentive to settle, now. They can 1. get everything they want or 2. settle. They pick 1.
Citizen Alan
@WaterGirl: It doesn’t matter if it’s in the news; it’s “received wisdom” now. The fact that “Afghanistan was an utter disaster and it was all Biden’s fault” is not just an underlying assumption in the minds of a large percent of the country if not the majority.
Darkrose
@Major Major Major Major: I like the Progress Pride flag. It’s making a conscious effort to represent Black and Brown queer people, who have been written out of the narrative for far too long. It’s also explicitly including trans people, which is especially important given how much pushback there is on trans rights in the US and especially in the UK.
I remember going to Pride events in Boston in the ’90’s and feeling like the proverbial chocolate chip in a bowl of milk. The vibe was all about gay white men having fun, and maybe a few lesbians if we didn’t get too rowdy and start taking off our shirts.
The 6-stripe flag is a redesign from the 1978 original, which included pink and turquoise stripes for sex and art. Since then, there have been so many changes in what it means to be queer. A symbol that was originally meant to be inclusive has changed as the community has changed, and I think that’s a good thing, especially since not everyone felt included due to racism and transphobia within the community. I’m sorry you think it’s ugly; I look at it and see myself represented, and I think it’s beautiful.
Roger Moore
@Leto:
Or maybe your ancestors were unequivocal racist slave owners. That doesn’t mean you have to continue to fight against racial equality today to avoid admitting your ancestors were wrong.
Darkrose
@Major Major Major Major: Just to add…queer POC’s and trans folks have often felt explicitly excluded from the community. Again drawing from my experience, Boston is hella racist, and the gay community there reflects that. Hell, it was just 2008 when Dan Savage and Andrew Sullivan were loudly blaming black voters in California for passing Prop 8, and not the Mormons, who poured money into the Yes on 8 campaign, or the No on 8 campaign that didn’t think about Spanish-language messaging in California. I also remember how Barney Frank kept trying to pass the Equality Act in Congress by throwing trans people out of the coalition. I don’t see why explicitly including people who have been implicitly excluded for years is a bad thing.
Major Major Major Major
@Darkrose: I absolutely understand the rationale and recognize that I am privileged and all that. I just don’t think that changing an abstract symbol into an abstract symbol with specific symbols stapled to it is that great. Like I said, this is microcosm of a long-standing tension between left and lib. I appreciate the counteragument but it’s not convincing to me, as it applies to this one symbol. Adding more letters to QUILTBAG+ doesn’t bother me for example.
All that aside I really do think it looks like a test pattern and that that’s a shame. There are better ways to do it I’m sure. We have a lot of artists in the community!
Roger Moore
@Darkrose:
The underlying problem is that explicitly including some people implicitly excludes everyone else who doesn’t get the same treatment. For example, they’ve added black and brown stripes to represent black and brown people. But what about AAPI people? Why don’t they get a stripe? How about Native Americans? People from MENA? How many stripes do we need to add to cover every ethnic group? Similarly, adding a stripe for trans people implicitly excludes non-binary people, and so on. You’re stuck in a position of needing to enumerate every kind of person who needs representation and coming up with a color to add to the flag to represent them.
UncleEbeneezer
@Darkrose: Well said.
Iirc, wasn’t there a whole to-do about a Pride event just this year in a major city because the original organizing group was upset that it was going to also feature nods to Black, Transgender and Bi members of the community? I know I read an article about it but can’t seem to find it.
Uncle Cosmo
Um…no. Lend-Lease began on 11 March 1941, over 18 months after the invasion of Poland and less than 9 months before Pearl Harbor. Before that the policy on armaments sales was “cash & carry” – any nation could buy from us, even the Axis powers, but they had to pay cash and ship the stuff in non-American conveyances. This was easier for the British and French, but even so…
In fact the Lend-Lease Act was a response to the dwindling of British overseas assets, that were being cashed to pay for US arms. FDR wasn’t willing to just give the Limeys the goods while they still held significant funds in overseas accounts, but he damn well wasn’t going to turn them away once they were on the verge of tapping out.
Kay
They have convinced this kid he is the victim. There’s no accountability in this world they have created- none. Can you imagine all the young Righties watching this? Travel to shoot and kill people, and you have somehow been victimized. They’re gonna be ALL fucked up, those boys, and it isn’t because they read a YA adult novel with a gay teen in it.
This is the obscene content for teenagers. This is what they’re raising.
Major Major Major Major
@UncleEbeneezer: Meanwhile some cities don’t want to let LGBT cops march, which seems sort of rude.
billcinsd
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: But our leaders abandoned this kid’s community to lawless thug rioters,
Rittenhouse wasn’t from the area where he killed the people, so is it really his community? IIRC, he said he went there to shoot people or at least get in a fight
Darkrose
@Roger Moore: Then maybe we need to reconceptualize the flag to better reflect the community as it exists today, instead of sticking with a symbol that was designed in 1978 by one person.
I’m currently neck-deep in the diversity, equity, and inclusion discourse as it applies to academic libraries, and academic in general. I’ve heard the slippery-slope argument that we shouldn’t address historical inequities for specific groups because then other groups will feel excluded, and we don’t have the bandwidth or budget to do justice to all marginalized groups.
I’d argue that you have to start somewhere. The Progress Pride flag is a response, but it doesn’t have to be–nor should it be–the only one. What’s not okay is to shrug our shoulders and say that nothing has to change.
Roger Moore
@Darkrose:
The flag has the advantage that nobody can complain about lack of resources! It’s still just a flag, so it doesn’t cost meaningfully more to make a complex one than to make a simple one.
I can understand the basic argument when it comes to representation. One side says wants to do things very abstractly by coming up with a representation for “everyone” as a concept, while the other wants to give a symbol to each group that was previously ignored so they can feel seen and included. The first approach has the advantage of conceptual simplicity, while the second has the advantage of being explicit.
I like the rainbow flag because I understand its symbolism, but I’ll admit that I’m not from a historically ignored group, so I don’t feel the pain of feeling excluded even by symbols that are supposed to be inclusive. If you feel left out by that supposedly inclusive symbol, it’s a sign that it isn’t doing its job, and I need to respect that. That said, I think it would be better to come up with a new approach rather than try to fix a broken one.
different-church-lady
@Major Major Major Major: Why, I do believe this is an example of what “stupid” wokeness might be all about. Yeah, I had no idea that each individual color on the pride flag stood for an individual group. And neither did anyone else until someone decided to overthink it.
different-church-lady
@Peale: At high temperatures sexuality stops being a fluid which seeks its own level and becomes a gas, which attempts to evenly distribute itself.
This shit would be so easy to mock if it weren’t for the extremely real oppression these groups face.
different-church-lady
I get the feeling punks and Nazis are gonna beat up trans people no matter how many stripes the damn flag has.
UncleEbeneezer
@Major Major Major Major: That’s a tough one. I understand why, but personally I think having more connection and solidarity between police and marginalized communities is ultimately better for both groups.
Fair Economist
@Roger Moore: I always thought the point of the rainbow flag is that a rainbow encompassed all colors, so all are included. I agree identifying individual colors with individual groups is implicitly exclusive, and it also destroys the symbolism of “we’re all in it together”.
Fair Economist
@Leto:
Typical. It’s OK for kids to read about murder by white cis guys in high school staples like The Outsiders and Lord of the Flies; but when minority or queer characters do bad things its “oh noes, think of the CHILDREN!”
Kalakal
@Matt McIrvin: A really critical event was Hitler declaring war on the US shortly after Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt, the Chiefs of Staff etc. all ( correctly ) saw Nazi Germany as the greater threat but without Hitler’s declaration the Germany first policy would have been almost impossible to achieve domesticly
Kalakal
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: The English got round the pitfalls of kicking German Shepherds by renaming them Alsations during WW1 ( they tried out Belgian Police Dogs first ). Also applied to disease – German measles for Rubella
O. Felix Culpa
@Darkrose:
Hear, hear! My observation also at Pride even in later decades.