As valued commenter Kay has pointed out, self-proclaimed wingnut messaging guru Christopher Rufo‘s “war on woke” as a GOP electoral strategy didn’t resonate with voters much outside of already red states like Florida. But is the anti-woke crusade spent as a cultural force? I think you can make the argument that it succeeded in that realm as conspicuously as it failed in electoral politics.
Example: to activate Rufo’s cynical anti-woke strategy, FL Gov. Ron DeSantis made the Left Coast-dwelling Rufo a state college trustee to help dismantle famously liberal New College of Florida. DeSantis also signed a slew of constitutionally questionable culture war legislation that disrupted schools and businesses — and cost taxpayers many millions of dollars to defend in court.
Angry Boots hoped to push future convicted felon Donald Trump aside and march triumphantly into Iowa on the strength of actions like that, i.e., to reap the electoral benefits of the anti-woke agenda. But DeSantis crashed and burned, immolating hundreds of millions of GOP donor funds along with his national political future as anti-woke as an electoral force proved a dud even with Iowa’s conservative GOP base.
Still, we shouldn’t overlook the real-world consequences of the anti-woke push where wingnuttery already holds sway. The transformation of New College from an academically over-achieving hippie haven into a space that caters to meathead conservative jocks is proceeding apace. And the anti-woke agenda has successfully rolled back a lot of the progress (or at least made dead letters of pledges to make progress) in the corporate and academic worlds too.
NYT columnist Michelle Goldberg addressed this in a May essay (gift link) that reviews a book written by cancel culture-obsessed journalist Nellie Bowles.
“At various points, my fellow reporters at major news organizations told me roads and birds are racist,” [Bowles] writes. “Voting is racist. Exercise is super racist.” Even allowing for 2020’s great flood of social-justice click bait, these are misleading and reductive caricatures. It’s hardly revisionist history, for example, to point out that Interstates were tools of racial segregation.
But my biggest disagreement with Bowles lies in her insistence that the movement she’s critiquing has triumphed. She describes the New Progressivism as the “operating principle of big business,” as well as the tech sector and academia. This week, speaking on the podcast of her wife, the Times Opinion writer turned heterodox media entrepreneur Bari Weiss, Bowles said, “The revolution didn’t end because it lost. It ended because it won.”
It didn’t, though. Even at the zenith of the George Floyd demonstrations, the corporate social-justice stuff was mostly window dressing; the operating principle of big business is and always was the pursuit of profit. And now, we’re in the middle of a furious reversal.
Goldberg is right about the reversal. As she notes, corporations and institutions are jettisoning diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies as fast as they adopted them in 2020. Elite colleges are cracking down on protesters. States and institutions are banning consideration of environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance in investment decisions.
Maybe it’s the inevitable backlash that arises to vociferously oppose every scrap of social progress, however modest and necessary and overdue. But it also looks like a partial victory for the Rufos, Bowles and Weisses of the world. We shouldn’t expect them to recognize that since their cashflow depends on monetizing nonexistent conservative victimhood. Luckily for them, it’s an inexhaustible resource.
Open thread.
Mr. Bemused Senior
Water is still wet and Generalissimo Franco is still dead.
Andrew Abshier
New College’s graduation ceremony was decidedly testy this year. I suspect as more of the “before” students graduate or transfer that that will go away, and it will be sad.
They’re also demolishing trees on campus to make athletic facilities. Sarasota objected, but then caved.
Betty Cracker
@Andrew Abshier: Ugh. Meanwhile, GOP operative/college president Corcoran is collecting a ridiculously large salary, housing stipend and car allowance. I wish more attention were paid to the ideologues’ corruption, but it barely seems to register.
Kay
My favorite was how they promised they would get rid of legacy admits once they gutted affirmative action…
then they didn’t get rid of legacy admits
Success!
They’re absolutely full of shit. Anti woke is hypocritical and incoherent – there isn’t a single thing they say they stand for they have been consistent on.
I knew they’d lockstep support shutting down students political speech and suppressing Pro Palestinian views, and they are. Columbia is actively censoring the law review.
Kay
What gets me is what garbage the anti woke “public intellectuals” churned out
It’s clear to me none of these people were promoted on merit. Their work is junk.
clay
I am literally at this moment on a tour of Florida Polytechnic with my daughter. One of the selling points they mentioned is that Florida’s college system has been ranked #1 for three years running.
So of course Ronny D is determined to fuck it all up! Seriously, why mess around when things are working?
Sure Lurkalot
I for one applaud the goose step march to becoming and hopefully being the nation with the shittiest human beings on earth.
Go ahead, hate your neighbor!
Baud
@clay: Ranked by whom? It’ll be hard to convince people Florida colleges suck if they don’t actually suck.
Kay
Here’s the entire anti woke project :
”the only political speech that should and will be suppressed is Left wing political speech”
liberals who fell for it are easily bamboozled dopes
TBone
Tom Sullivan is riding on the Buck the Eff Up! train. All aboard!
He is a good cheerleader. More at the link.
digbysblog.net/2024/06/05/heroes-of-your-own-stories/
Betty Cracker
@clay: I think it’s two things: educated voters lean Dem, and there’s lots of money to steal.
TBone
Hubby just received an important-looking, thick envelope from Dotard. Will report back soon (as soon as I’m done laughing and burning it in effigy).
Baud
@TBone:
Call the bomb squad.
TBone
@Baud: 😆
On second thought
White
PowerPowder alert 👀There are two return envelopes, each helpfully marked “June” and “July.”
Letter reading commences.
Aaaaand that’s going up in flames! 🔥 Nothing new under the sun, same old Festivus as always. 🙄
RaflW
I gather that the Washington Post is in an uproar because of the response to falling subscriptions and a halving of engagement since peak COVID + J6 + general purpose Trumpenflappen. A woman was pushed out (or ‘chose to resign’ depending on one’s spin) of the top editor slot and replaced with a g.d. ex-WSJ dude.
And he hired two other white men to lead the re-vamp with him. Today it was said that he was asked in a staff meeting what he did to evaluate any women or POCs for these two jobs and he bullshitted like mad but the upshot is, he good ol’ boy’d and did fuck all to look at anyone not a white guy already in his phone’s “favorites” category.
Woke is indeed flat busted. And I’m furious.
gvg
@Baud: Mostly US News and world report survey that goes back decades.
The University of Florida has just landed it’s most diverse class yet to start in fall, with a higher than usual acceptance of offers this year. This has been a years long development project. We don’t go after minorities specifically as that has been legally forbidden by the state for over a decade. We go after low income which results in more minorities and also picks up a bunch of lower income white students (mostly first generation). We have been trying to get 1st gen for well over a decade. I think its great that we also get poor whites, after all this is a state public school and I think that is in the public interest. We also try to mentor 1st gen as they need a little help with learning the systems. As far as I can tell we are mostly ignoring the state government except when they make a big fuss about some small piece. I think the strategy is keep a low profile and keep doing the work,
Everything about our success has been decades building. Some of it started in the 70’s and my mother worked on a committee for instance that started the common course numbering system which relates to a lot of academic success by making transfer easy and also easy to go back years later to finish a degree.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: I distrust ranking outfits in general, but FL really did have an excellent state uni system. It will take a while for wingnuts to degrade it, but the project is well underway. It’s a sad thing for those of us who valued it.
Sister Golden Bear
I wouldn’t say it’s dead — e.g. Republicans are still passing laws intended to drive trans people back in the closet — but it does seemed to have reached a crest for now. E.g. only a comparatively small number of the 500+ anti-trans bills introduced this year passed. Likewise, there were fewer forced birth laws passed. OTOH, it’s partly that so laws already on the book, that remaining attempts were so extreme that it was harder to get them passed.
But I think we’ll continue facing the “Cuban sanctions” dilemma. I.e. both types of laws are actively supported by a small, but extremely vocal and motivated slice the population. But while the majority of American aren’t supportive, they aren’t actively opposing these laws either. So they end up passing, as Republicans cater to their base.
Plus needless to say it’s going to take years, if not decades, to undo the damage already done.
wjca
I guess I’ve been living under a rock, because I’ve never encountered that before. Or anything like it. Anyone want to educate me?
Steve in the ATL
In case this hasn’t been discussed here (and it’s on topic!), there are two conservative–or perhaps revanchist is more accurate–groups attacking DEI. Blog favorite Stephen Miller is of course involved. From the Bloomberg Daily Labor Report (what–you don’t all read that?):
Nukular Biskits
This is why I love your writing.
I’d like to borrow that, purty please!
smith
Here’s another pep talk:
The Shallow State @OurShallowState
And from the same source:
RedDirtGirl
Speaking of New College, I have a friend who is a Hampshire graduate. She told me that when DeSantis gutted that school Hampshire guaranteed admission to any New College students that wanted to go there. I thought that was really wonderful. Apparently 88 students have transferred so far – 12% of the student body.
Betty Cracker
@gvg: Thank you (and your mom) for fighting the good fight. Great news about the incoming class!
Baud
@gvg:
@Betty Cracker:
Thanks. I think that situation makes it hard to convince people of the damage that DeSantis is doing. YMMV.
ETA: Outside of people who already care.
Dave
@Kay: “The roads” thing from so called intellectuals is damned disingenuous. Its not hard to explain or understand so presenting it as “I was told roads were racist” is fundamentally dishonest if it comes from anyone other than the loud mouthed numpty at the end of your local dive bar. Or more charitably someone who has only heard of it presented in that manner.
They want to disagree with that fine make the argument but instead they choose to be “cute” while pretending to be reasonable.
Kay
In addition to NOT ending legacy admits, the “liberals” who supported this promised “real” action on opportunity for POC and women – then did absolutely nothing.
Suckers.
stinger
@Sure Lurkalot: Go ahead and cheat a friend.
TBone
@wjca:
npr.org/2020/07/05/887386869/how-transportation-racism-shaped-america
Tony G
@Andrew Abshier: My older sister got a degree from New College back when it was the hippiest of (academically rigorous) hippie heavens in the mid-seventies. She’s none too happy about the DeSantisizing of her alma mater.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
I still hold to the opinion that DeSantis’s strategy depended on Trump having self-destructed by February at the latest, at which time going all-in on anti-woke would attract Trumpists who were suddenly no longer able to vote for their God-King and would supposedly view DeSantis as the best alternative catering to their views. When Trump selfishly failed to go either up the river or six feet under, the DeSantis strategy was toast; the anti-woke crusade benefited its grifters, who didn’t need DeSantis any more.
TBone
@stinger: Billy Jack is my hubby’s spirit animal. He knows the entire song by heart.
Baud
@Steve in the ATL:
Thanks for pointing that out. The 1981 claim recently got a favorable decision from the 11th circuit. I think the defendant was doing more than DEI though.
TBone
@smith: 💙💙💙✊
Kay
@Dave:
It’s also fucking dumb. Are these people capable of looking around? Can’t they see which neighborhoods highways destroyed? They really can’t tell that some neighborhoods have trees and others do not? They haven’t noticed where the polluting or ugly business and utilities are?
Why do they think that is? Black people are anti tree? Black people asked for the refinery in their backyard?
These people are supposedly our elites and they’re dumb as rocks. They can’t make the simplest connection without specific instructions.
wjca
@TBone:
It’s a long way from “the way Interstates were routed in urban areas was racist” to “the Interstates were tools of racial segregation.” A very long way.
pika
@wjca: Here’s just one example from Rochester, NY. Rochester: City of Quality is a corporate propaganda film from RGE, the area power corporation. Note the triumphant/sweet music for cars, whiteness, suburbs, and “clean” things; ominous music when “tough” “surgery” is needed for a tree or a city. The city’s “inner loop” was cut right through Black neighborhoods; interstates did the same thing to Syracuse.
zhena gogolia
@smith: Thanks!
Kay
Just FYI – Black people can point to incident after incident where they were denied housing or had their property devalued by real estate and finance people. Not in 1956. in 2024.
Have any of the anti wokers mentioned this, or does it get in the way of their beliefs? It’s fact.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
The Bari Weiss’s of this world live in liberal NYC. They aren’t worried that any of their liberties will be taken away from them by redneck MAGAts. That isn’t real to them because they just don’t encounter those people in their daily lives. Instead, what is real to them is being critiqued by friends who are more liberal for lots of things they say. If they say ‘Yes mam’, one friend will point out you can’t assume gender without asking. If they say something about Columbus Day, one friend will point out he was genocidal. If they criticize Hillary Clinton, someone will talk about how they are buying into misogynistic framing. If they say that Biden is too old, someone else will call them ageist. At cocktail parties, there’s always someone going off about institutional racism, etc. Bowles and Weiss find this stiffling and annoying and are now profiting off of that because there are plenty of other people out there who feel the same way. The MAGAts naturally exploit this because they will use anything against us they can and have no core prinicipals.
eclare
@Betty Cracker:
I was at UT in the late eighties. Outside of Vandy, which I don’t really consider SEC, everyone knew UF was the best. And this is a Vol saying this! It’s such a shame, lesson infinity that elections have consequences, some of which fly under the radar until it’s too late.
Dave
@Kay: Exactly I can understand the initial “what?” from Joe random who hasn’t encountered it before and never really given it any thought but if you claim to be an intellectual or hell even just a journalist you are admitting to either being dishonest or dumb as a stump.
We are finally tearing down the interstate that drives through the heart of our city and played a role in completely devastating black communities. Good riddance I say. On it’s own its not sufficient but it an important step.
TBone
@wjca: did you read that? Skimming is not the shortcut you think it is.
gene108
@Steve in the ATL:
Some rich asshole is providing the funding for these groups, or else they’d have to spend less time suing people and more time fundraising.
wjca
Cannon, and others who worked hard to delay TIFG’s trials, really messed that up for him. Not that I’m convinced he would have been the one picked as the alternative anyway.
rikyrah
@wjca:
If you find an interstate, look closer and you will find a PREVIOUSLY THRIVING BLACK NEIGHBORHOOD.
Time and time again.
waspuppet
Do Nellie Bowles and Bari Weiss ever take one moment to consider that if it weren’t for the ideas they deride as “woke” they would at best not be allowed to be married, and worst physically attacked on a regular basis?
No; of course they don’t. Because then they’d have to consider the possibility that they aren’t victims, and that their mediocre-at-best accomplishments in the real world are because they’re stupid.
wjca
@TBone:
I did read it. And was underwhelmed on that specific point.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: I agree. It’s like predicting Boeing’s decline after the MBAs took over. Takes a while for the panels to start blowing out. Folks like gvg give me hope that people who care about education can thwart the vandals.
Baud
wjca
Perhaps my problem is that I see the Interstates as the national transportation network that they are. And were intended to be. Rather than focusing on their routing thru urban areas. Which, to be frank, was bad even when it didn’t involve black neighborhoods.
TBone
@wjca: pull your slip down, your privilege is showing.
Kay
There’s an Instagram post that is popular among conservatives. It’s a view of a tall white man walking away from the camera and he’s saying “I’m a straight, white Christian male. That means I’m public enemy Number One”.
Just the self pitying whining. Ugh. Who raises these men. I’d be ashamed if I had. They’re all like Alito now “oh, poor ME! I own and run everything but you also have to LOVE me!” Yuck. No wonder they marry weirdo lunatics like Ginni and Martha-ann. No one decent would have them.
smith
@pika: In Chicago, the routing of highways was an early version of “Build the Wall.” Black neighborhoods were hemmed in, making the demarcation between Black and white neighborhoods stark and immovable.
Baud
@wjca:
Well, true that most highway miles are not in urban areas. Not sure why that matters for purpose of assessing design choices in urban areas.
opiejeanne
@clay: California’s college system would like a word.
clay
@Baud: US News, I think it was
rikyrah
@smith:
There is a reason why the highways go SOUTH and WEST in Chicago (Black neighborhoods.)
There is a reason why we DO NOT have a SOUTHWEST HIGHWAY – until recently, only White people.
The North and Northwest Highways – they needed a pathway to O’Hare. Lower class and industrial were eliminated to make them.
wjca
@TBone:
That, or growing up in a (suburban) area with no black neighborhoods, where the routing of the local Interstate also trashed neighborhoods and otherwise left a lot to be desired. Not arguing that route selection in urban areas wasn’t racist. Just that routing, especially but not exclusively near the ends, routinely ignored local conditions.
And that the primary focus wasn’t to enable segregation. It was to get stuff across the country.
Soprano2
@Kay: Just wait until the verdict in the Hunter Biden case happens. If he’s convicted, all the people who’ve been screaming about how the whole justice system is corrupted will be crowing that “justice was done”, and I doubt many of the TV or radio hosts interviewing them will have clips cued up of what they said after the TCFG verdict came down, because we all know it’ll be the opposite. If he’s found not guilty, though, look for the caterwauling to be 10 fold what it was last week.
Soprano2
@Kay: Of course they lied about getting rid of legacy admits, although I have to say as more and more of the legacies are not white kids they might reverse course on that.
gene108
@wjca:
From what I have read the routing of the interstate system through urban areas was intentionally done to keep cities segregated.
There’s a good argument to be made that interstates never should have been routed through urban areas to begin with. Running a highway around a city could have been an option. Use the interstate for long distance travel rather than a way to commute to and from work.
zhena gogolia
I just got a robocall from the Repugs. That AI bot got an earful!
Elizabelle
@Dave: If I may, which city? Interesting.
TBone
In DelCo there is a Superfund cleanup in Darby (whypipo land). All the toxic substances were dumped on the lowest income whypipo. It’s not merely racist, it’s structural. But we all (well, almost) knew that.
response.epa.gov/site/site_profile.aspx?site_id=5864
Betty Cracker
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
You nailed the dynamic. What gets me is how cowardly it is. Language and social values evolve. We’re all part of that process, if we’re capable of growth.
At times in my life, I’ve found the push toward change obnoxious, and I said so. Sometimes — often, even! — I was wrong, and eventually I had to own that and change my ways. It’s nothing special or noble; it’s part of being human, and it’s a never-ending process.
We don’t get to pour amber on the world as it existed when we were young and cool and freeze it in place forever.
Scout211
My husband got one, too. His turned out to be a promo for a Trump gold coin or some such nonsense. But he was picked out personally for that unique special opportunity.
TBone
@zhena gogolia: feels good to be gangsta
MisterForkbeard
@Steve in the ATL: It’s all so DUMB
Every DEI program I’ve ever been associated with just has stuff like unconscious bias training and similar items, and documenting that you made an effort to get a diverse talent pool for hiring instead of just relying on friends, people with similar racial/sexual/education backgrounds to yourself, etc.
DEI is the next/current primal scream that brown/female people are getting anything and the moment I hear anyone complain about it I immediately lose all respect for them
Elizabelle
@Soprano2: I hope Hunter is not convicted. It’s such an obvious political case. I think he has suffered enough.
TBone
@Scout211: 😆 🤡
Dave
@Elizabelle: Syracuse; it’s massively segregated by race and if you can see the difference in the neighborhoods and how the highway as a major impact on that.
There is of course much whining about this
They are expanding 481 which routes around the city and turning it into 81. If it was up to me I’d get rid of 690, where it runs through the city as well but I can understand why that might be a bridge too far.
I’m sure it isn’t the solution but I do think it’s a necessary first step. Also sure there is going to be a reactionary backlash from a lot of the people that are afraid to even drive through the city streets but I’m very over caring about their opinions.
Fortunately once it’s gone it’s not something you can just rebuild on whim.
clay
@Kay:
—John Mellancamp, 40 damn years ago
Betty Cracker
@eclare: Whoa, high praise from a Vol! ;-)
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Betty Cracker:
Exactly. The only constant is change. I try to be mindful and adapt.
rebelsdad (aka texasboyshaun)
@TBone: I needed this today, and not for my political junkie side. Thank you.
Baud
zhena gogolia
@TBone: Would have been more satisfying with a person.
jonas
@Betty Cracker: As we all know, only Democrats get held accountable for corruption. It’s almost a brand identity for Republicans. Grifting is their game and shamelessness is their superpower.
wjca
In general, yes. Although, since Eisenhower’s focus was enabling transport for military logistics, they would have needed to get to the ports once they reached the coasts. Which mostly would have involved going thru the cities which had long since grown up around said ports. And, with poor neighborhoods typically being the ones closest to the docks, those would inevitably gotten trashed.
eclare
@gene108:
An extension of I-40 here in Memphis split a Black neighborhood in half. The extension was then supposed to go through a park, the zoo, and a really nice White neighborhood. That neighborhood sued and stopped it.
The whole idea was stupid to begin with (a four lane highway over a zoo?), but the damage was done to that neighborhood. The main street in that neighborhood is now hip and trendy, but the surrounding housing/neighborhood has a long way to recover.
eclare
@Betty Cracker:
One of the things I love about Joe: he evolves.
jonas
@Kay: When I first moved to upstate NY some years ago, I was in downtown Syracuse getting off the I-81 and asked myself why the heck would they build a public housing complex right under either side of an elevated freeway. Then it hit me….
Long story short, that elevated interstate is now coming down in an attempt to alleviate traffic and restore the neighborhood feel and interconnectivity of the area. There’s still a long ways to go in unfucking that whole situation for the south side of Syracuse, but it’s a start.
TBone
@wjca: again, this phenom is not solely about our system of transportation. Your narrow focus is obstructing your ability to see the huge dynamic at work here. I almost can’t say anything else if you keep insisting on highways being the subject of the discussion.
See, for instance, my comment at #65
From the link (there are so many details to know, but this ongoing cleanup is mired in corruption).
smith
First WaPo, and now The Daily Beast (?!!)
Clearly, the paucity of RW viewpoints in the media must be addressed.
UncleEbeneezer
Thing is, so many boys/men simply can’t/won’t or are incapable of having meaningful, respectful, platonic friendships with 50+% of the populace (girls/women, non-binary) that this is not a big surprise. They spend their existence seeing women only for their romantic/sexual potential and thus miss out on all kinds of great friendships and support they could’ve had. I look back on my own experience and so many great women that I’m friends with now, I never bothered to be friends with when we were kids. All because I wasn’t physically or romantically attracted to them. It was so dumb and misogynist and I deeply regret that I missed out on knowing them back then. I hope more boys/men understand this nowadays, but the amount of willing gender segregation I see among my students and the popularity of online spaces that purposely exclude (or bash) girls/women doesn’t fill me with much hope.
Baud
@smith:
They need to defeat Biden.
TBone
@eclare: AMEN
wjca
Sorry. But the discussion, for me, started when I asked specifically about the assertion that the Interstate highways were tools of racial segregation.
Bill Arnold
@Baud:
Thanks. That one is better, though it doesn’t show receipts. The NPR piece basically didn’t address (racial) segregation.
eclare
@clay:
Wow. He knew what was going on.
Baud
@UncleEbeneezer:
The lonely man thing is big on reddit. But they’re more inclined to blame liberals and feminists than recognize they’re creating their own problems because they can’t stand up to right wing culture.
a thousand flouncing lurkers (was fidelio)
@wjca: Typically, the urban stretches of interstate highways were routed through Black neighborhoods, often leaving them disconnected with no good way to get from one portion to the other.
This happened far less often with White neighborhoods, even White working class neighborhoods.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Yep. They don’t like that he is reversing decades of trickle down economics. But lefties who supposedly care about these issues have abandoned labor issues and become foreign policy experts off late
I am hoping that labor unions will have Biden’s back.
Dave
@wjca: Certainly there is always a tradeoff and some routing through is probably more or less unavoidable.
It sort of breaks down into three categories and there are always other factors and this isn’t limited to the Interstate system but roads and infrastructure in general.
Intentionally racist: this did and may still happen see some of the roads built in Long Island that were designed so that busses couldn’t utilize them mostly to keep segregated (there may well be a class component as well)
Unintentional racist: The impacted communities are poorer and as a result of that and much less likely to have any influence regarding the placement of interstates and other roads and so they would be more likely to be built in those areas. This is why we have intersectionality because there will be a class element as well.
And than just getting it wrong either not being aware of the impact these projects would have or believing they would be beneficial to the local communities and not detrimental.
Most of these other than the first (and it did happen) don’t require someone gleefully enacting an intentionally racist policy but the impact of the policy was more likely to have a negative effect on minority urban communities as opposed to others.
eclare
@smith:
WHAT???
Dave
@jonas: The impact on neighborhoods in Syracuse is so stark you have to actively try to avoid seeing it.
TBone
@wjca: that “underwhelming” fact is part of a much larger dynamic and shouldn’t be separated from it. It’s too easy to trivialize that way.
wjca
No. They need to:
a) Elect Trump. (Actually, any Republican). Which would be true, no matter who the Democrats nominated.
b) Defeat Harris, lest she become the nominee in 2028.
Biden is merely the convenient fig leaf. The things he has accomplished, and that he is the one who accomplished them, is a distant third in their minds.
p.a.
Segregation by Design youtube channel.
Soprano2
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: I think it’s hilarious how many of the Bari Weiss’s of the world wax rhapsodic about the virtues of “red America”, yet choose to live in places like New York City or Los Angeles. It seems that they understand the limitations of “red America” and don’t want any part of them. If they were true believers they’d move to places like where I live, where 65% of the voters chose TCFG and are represented by MAGAs like Eric Schmitt, Josh Hawley, and Eric Burlison. No one at a cocktail party here would correct them if they said “ma’m” to someone or wished someone a happy Columbus Day, but then what would they have to be butthurt about? They won’t live the reality they want for everyone else.
Baud
@Soprano2:
As I’ve noted before, you will never see Trump is a close social setting with his MAGA supporters. He addresses them from a stage, and that’s it.
Dave
@UncleEbeneezer: The flip side of this is they also don’t know how to have intimate genuine relationships with other men either. So they get it from both directions for a variety of often less than admirable reasons.
I have similar issues I’ve done classically masculine roles in my life but I genuinely don’t know how to connect with other men in the current environment outside of ones I formed bonds with under extreme circumstances. There is a lot of toxicity out there and much of the media aimed at men acts as a vector for it.
UncleEbeneezer
@Dave: The greatest trick Racism ever pulled in America was getting us all to obsess over whether something was intentionally racist or not. It is the same mindset that CJ Roberts used to gut the VRA, Affirmative Action, uphold the Muslim Travel Ban, etc. Using apparently color-blind methods to achieve racist results has been the proven formula for racist policy in America for a very long time. And it works because too many people are suckers for racist laws that have a veneer or plausible deniability.
UncleEbeneezer
@Dave: Oh absolutely. Thank you for mentioning that aspect. And it’s a really hard habit to unlearn.
Belafon
@wjca: Some of the history you are missing is that when the highway got to certain cities, the choice was made to run it through the parts of town, not only because they could force them out, but so that they could put a road between the black and white sides of town. I know you want to equate it with “they also ran it through poor parts of town” but guess what, not all black sections were poor. Some places were middle class, and they forced the blacks to move. In some places, like Dallas, the highway was run through black cemeteries.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Soprano2: I think you misunderstand them. They think they are better than red America and don’t really take it seriously. What they are rhapsodic about is being able to say what ever they want and not be negatively judged for it. In particular, they want to be contrarian and have their peers think they are smart and witty, rather than unseemly. This does align with some in the right wing though. Those people are angry about being negatively judged for being racist, homophobic, and misogynistic. Right wingers think they are better than the Weiss’s of this world too. They are allies of convenience only. None of these people actually like or respect each other.
Baud
Dave
@UncleEbeneezer: It’s so built into so many structures and institutions that we swim in it and that makes it hard to see. Hence the original use of “woke”.
Sometimes make the point that even if we could magically remove all ability to see race and all biases all the lines of race that it would still have inertia to it that would disproportionately impact minority groups for likely generations.
Unfortunately people tend to be very defensive about recognizing this. And this is doesn’t even account for the bad actors that intentionally try to blind people to this.
Soprano2
@Elizabelle: I hope not too. Stewart had Ken Buck on the show Monday night, and pressed him hard about how the prosecution of Hunter was totally political because most people wouldn’t be prosecuted for that offense the way Hunter was, or would get a plea deal. Buck claimed that when he was a prosecutor he brought charges like that all the time; if that’s true, I bet it was in conjunction with a bunch of other charges rather than as a stand-alone crime. Talk about a “paper crime” – he’s being prosecuted for checking a box on a form!
cain
@clay: It’s funny that all the MAGA probably think it’s a super patriotic song.
arrieve
@rikyrah: @wjca:
This article has a good overview of what happened in Atlanta. It’s not just that black neighborhoods were destroyed by the highways; it also served as a tool to divide the city along racial lines.
nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/traffic-atlanta-segregation.html
cain
@Baud: That’s our mayor pete – just love these moves. But gotta keep Biden in charge and hold at least one branch of congress. It’s gonna happen – I can feel it.
Those assholes are chained to Trump. He’s going to rule them until he can no longer talk straight.
ETA – also this is what happens when black people become the bedrock of the Democratic party.
Soprano2
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: I wish someone would tell Bill Maher that, over and over again. I think he truly believes the world should be like it was when he was in his 20’s, with a few changes (gay people are OK and pot should be legal) but otherwise he wants it all frozen from when he was young and hip. You can’t overestimate the rage of older white men who have figured out they aren’t hip, cool or attractive to young women anymore.
Brachiator
It’s not just about voters. The “war on woke” is the catalyst for the return of vicious bigotry. In Florida and other states, the phony opposition to critical race theory is often couched as concern for the delicate sensibilities of white children. The feelings of black children are sneeringly dismissed. This has been accompanied by outright lies about the history of slavery in America and pushback on the removal of Confederate monuments.
The latest tactic is the assertion that all non-white people and women who are not Republicans are beneficiaries of affirmative action. This is rapidly becoming the demand for restorative justice for mediocre white men and the white women who submit to them.
Women have been demoted to second class citizenship with alarming speed and absolute delight in red states.
Republicans just need enough voters to get over gerrymandered humps. The GOP can lose quite a few battles and still win the war by appealing to resentment and bitterness.
Democrats still hold an advantage with a strong get out the vote effort.
Baud
wjca
I am trying, with utter lack of success, to distinguish between the purpose of the system and the purpose of the implementation choices in certain areas.
The way I read the quote** was as saying that the purpose of the system as racist segregation. Which I beg leave to doubt. That isn’t why it was created, even if racists seized the opportunity for their own ends.
** EDT I’m perfectly willing to be told that I misunderstood the original quote. The original, as opposed to other documents referenced later.
RedDirtGirl
@Soprano2: Preach!
Soprano2
@Baud: I think there’s also a culture among men that you can’t show feelings except anger at pretty much anything and happiness when your favorite sports team wins. They might mock how close some women friends are, but I bet they’re also secretly jealous of it. Maybe it’s different now for younger men; I hope it is.
ETA – and of course leering at attractive women. Yes I know, not all men, but this has been my general observation over the course of my life.
Baud
@wjca:
I believe the quote that has you hung up is “tools of racial segregation.” That has nothing to do with the purpose of the system.
The purpose of a legal system isn’t racial segregation, but the law was used as a tool to enforce segregation.
cain
@Soprano2:
Some women also expect this behavior as what masculinity is about. It’s great when men also reject these tropes and want to be their authentic self.
I cry all the damn time watching movies, or what not. That wasn’t wasn’t always true.
Baud
@Soprano2:
Men are taught they need to be different from women, and as women have increasing opportunities to be fully developed people, that leaves very little room for men to distinguish themselves. That’s why they feel squeezed.
Soprano2
@Baud: Oh ITA, I bet in private he trashes a lot of them because they aren’t sophisticated city dwellers.
Betty Cracker
@UncleEbeneezer: Your point about intent is a good one. That’s one reason white supremacists like Rufo are obsessed with demonizing critical race theory, which focuses on outcomes.
Chris
@Soprano2:
The thing is, they would hate to live in Red America, but they still idealize Red America because they see it as a reservoir of properly behaved peons. Red staters don’t annoy them by demanding unions or affirmative action or anti sexual harassment laws. Red staters know their place. They’re simple, wholesome people who, God love them, certainly aren’t rocket scientists, but they don’t have to be because that’s not their role in life: they love their families, they read their Bibles, and they’re content with what they have.
Like all “noble savage” variations, this involves a lot of idealization of a lifestyle you’d never want for yourself. If they ever actually moved to small town America, sure, they’d immediately find about a hundred reason why they hate these people as much as they do the working classes in their own cities, but since they don’t…
It also involves a fair amount of self-delusion about how the people in Red America really feel about them. Every now and then reality peeks through, but they cope by deciding that the real problem is all those tiresome liberals tainting them by association, and then work even harder to distance themselves from them.
dirge
Me too. Have you ever wondered how such places came to exist? You’ll surely have noted how dependent suburbs are on the road system.
For a couple summers, I interned in the planning office for our suburban county. Very illuminating, often in ways I only understood years later. More about money and corruption than race, but also about race.
Dave
@wjca: Things are rarely about one thing. The putative purpose of the system probably for the most part lined up with the actual purpose in general but it’s not all it did.
At local levels there is good evidence that at least some of the secondary purposes was to intentionally segregate cities.
Even where this wasn’t the case that doesn’t mean that the segregation and economic and civil destruction wasn’t an unintended consequence of the policy one that very likely received less consideration because it was more obviously impacting generally, though not always, minority communities.
Doesn’t require the road itself to be racist, or the people building it, designing it, or the people driving on but it does have that impact and therefore we should take opportunities to at the minimum correct this and shape future policy in a way that accounts for this.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@Baud: forgive me for a drive -by comment, I’m at work. I think the case of the Cross-Bronx expressway in NYC is an illustrative example. It was extremely destructive of the south Bronx, of course the “low income” (Black) neighborhood.
Was that the primary intent? Probably not, but it was a predictable [and, I think, predicted] result.
Soprano2
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: You might be right. I think they want to be victims because not being a victim doesn’t write columns or sell books.The way many people in “red America” talk about people in cities is shocking. It’s every bit as offensive as anything they think a liberal ever said about them, yet they think it’s OK to say that stuff because they’re the “real” victims, boo hoo hoo everyone makes fun of them they think. Never mind how many TV shows and movies and songs make fun of people who live in cities and hold up the sincere, rugged country dweller as the “true American”. For example, pretty much any movie on the “Hallmark Channel” has a version of this dynamic.
UncleEbeneezer
@Baud: Also, policies can have more than one purpose. Having one that provides plausible deniability is part of the playbook of White Supremacy. See: Voter ID laws, for just one, obvious example.
artem1s
@Baud:
Interstates also enabled White flight and suburban sprawl. You could go door to door and not have to interact with ‘those’ people anymore.
smith
@Soprano2: Trey Gowdy was also a prosecutor, and remarkably, he says the prosecuton of Hunter Biden is political, and not one he would have ever pursued. Lindsey Graham said something similar on Monday.
Speaking of which, Graham is the third one I’ve seen in the last few days to acknowledge that it was Republicans who killed the border bill. What’s going on here?
Baud
@UncleEbeneezer:
Right. But here I agree with the the general point that they didn’t dream up the interstate highway system for even a secondary purpose of hurting black neighborhoods. The racism came in its implementation.
Voter ID is motivated by its discriminatory effects and is sold as an election security measure.
Dave
@Soprano2: It seems to be mix of both better and worse as is true of so many things these days; there is a lot of reactionary media backlash that wants to reinforce that dynamic and as a result is harsher than what came before.
I will say though there is more awareness of this even in some of the outer less toxic edges of the “manosphere” (hate that term but it’s a useful catch all) recognize this.
Though many of those will blame it on women enforcing this and there is just enough truth to this (there are women that have absorbed toxic attitudes regarding men showing emotion or being vulnerable) that they can convince men of this and train them to see it.
Betty Cracker
One for the “heh” file from Politico:
As their orange idol is fond of braying at hate rallies, “but you knew I was a snake when you took me in!”
UncleEbeneezer
@Betty Cracker: As the Social Justice saying goes: “Intent is not magic.” Presence of good (or absence of bad) intent doesn’t magically erase racist/misogynist etc., results.
Does intent matter? Of course! Whether someone inadvertently offended you or purposefully did so, is extremely important to most of us. And anyone who claims it doesn’t is full of shit. But most systemic ism/phobia is codified into law under the cover of noble stated purposes. Just look at how all the Transphobic laws are framed as “protecting Girls/Women/Feminism.”
Shalimar
Conservatives can pretend they like it if they want, but no one really wants to get Rufoed.
UncleEbeneezer
@Baud: Agreed.
West of the Rockies
@clay:
Florida’s college system has been ranked #1 for three years running? By who? The KKK? The Flat Earth Society?
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Soprano2:
Exactly. And yes, rural folks hate city dwellers passionately for a lot of reasons, including the fact that it is more attractive to their kids than their small town.
rikyrah
@UncleEbeneezer:
Imma say it again..
I don’t give a phuck if they’re lonely.
Not one of these goddamned articles will remotely suggest that these young men do the actual work to improve themselves, so that they can become partners that young women want.
No, we’re supposed to feel sorry for them.
Phuck outta here.
rikyrah
@schrodingers_cat:
And, he doesn’t mealy mouth about it, either.
He straight up says that Reaganomics was WRONG.
I love that from him.
ICAM…I hope that the Unions realize that this is their once in a generation President. They’ve never had a President who was more pro-Union.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Soprano2: I’ll add that unless they are talking about politics or some crazy news story they read, urban dwellers don’t talk or think much about rural dwellers. When they do, its mostly dismissive. Rural America thinks and talks a lot about urban America. Hate isn’t the opposite of love. Apathy is. I believe that is one of the things at the heart of their bitter anger.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Dave:
Having worked for this mode of DOT for 27 years, I have just a slight amount of background on the subject.
What you just said was most of the reasons. The other, main one, was they routed the systems thru the places where acquiring the right-of-way cost the least…which also happened to be neighborhoods that had been redlined in the 30s and were still redlined in the 50s/early-60s when the routes were being laid out and ROW acquired.
I actually studied this off and on from 82-85 when I was in the geography dept at CU-Boulder. The interstate and it’s effects were a commonality in political and historical geography studies.
The interesting thing now is that these well intentioned bills seeking to in someway address the effects of where interstates were placed in cities is actually being opposed by the longtime residents. It happened here in Denver. Why? They see it as a “gentrification catalyst”: make the neighborhoods that were cut in half by interstates and have been populated by POC more attractive to developers, thus paving the way for eventual displacement.
rikyrah
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
I don’t care about them. I don’t think about them, except to note how they cling to the Whiteness to the detriment of their own existence. If Whiteness is that important to them, then what they give up for it, shouldn’t be my concern.
Brachiator
@gene108:
Not just that. Low income communities could not fight the constitution efforts.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@rikyrah: I spent my childhood in rural areas (we moved a few times). I have family that live in rural areas. I am one of those kids who fled to the city as soon as she could. There is a whole lot of ugliness in small towns. Even so, its been shocking to see some people I know to be kind, accepting, and compassionate get taken in and transformed by Fox News and Trump. Its heartbreaking.
Ksmiami
@Scout211: Trump and his grifter associates are all such whores. No offense against actual whores who work hard and deserve a decent life. Our country is so grubby now.
Kay
I think they hate talking about redlining and real estate and the whole subject of “black wealth building” because it flies in the face of their belief that everything has been evened up and it”s all good.
If appraisers and banks are still undervaluing homes because black people own them then it’s not a level playing field, which means white people had and have an unearned financial advantage, and they can’t admit that.
That’s why I think we should bring it up at every opportunity. You can count it – it’s tangible.
Sister Golden Bear
@Kay:
They’re a walking, talking example of the old adage that when you’ve been raised with privilege, equality feels like discrimination.
Plus a living embodiment that we must “cease to call
slaverywhite patriarchy wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly — done in acts as well as in words.”Melancholy Jaques
@Brachiator:
Robert Moses may be the most notable for this.
Ksmiami
@West of the Rockies: the UCs would like a word…
Betty Cracker
@rikyrah: I also love it when Biden punctures the Reagan hagiography straight up. Maybe that’s an advantage of age. Biden knew the amiable dunce, so he doesn’t buy into the bullshit myths about the man?
RaflW
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: Bowles and Weiss find this [mild wokeness] stifling and annoying, yet they keep going to the dinners and events where their assumptions get gentle pushback.
They can find different social circles to hang out in. Even in NYC. But they don’t. Huh.
Dave
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Thank you that fleshed out something that I figured was the case. Including opposition to changes because of fear of gentrification.
Something I’m sympathetic to even if in general I come down on the side of removing/rerouting the interstates and similar projects whenever possible.
There are always unintended consequences.
divF
@Baud: Also Oakland, CA. Interstate 980 follows exactly the redlining border for West Oakland drawn by / for lenders in the 1930s.
Sister Golden Bear
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
Plus I strongly suspect that — given it’s Bowles and Weiss — they’re getting critiqued by the liberal things that are bit more substantial, e.g. it wasn’t just saying “Yes, ma’am” without asking someone’s pronouns, it was intentional misgendering someone. It wasn’t just critiquing Hillary, it was doing so in a misogynistic way.
Even here in the ultra-lefty SF Bay Area people generally don’t do that. Albeit admittedly there’s a tiny minority of annoying people who do. But I really doubt Bowles and Weiss hang out in those social circles. Rather they’re repeating “it happened to a friend of friend” stories.
sab
@rikyrah: That sure is true in my little city.
rikyrah
@Kay:
And, it keeps on happening. Time and time again.
Black owners- low evaluation.
Remove all traces of Black ownership and get White friend to pretend to be owner.
Suddenly the valuation skyrockets.
RaflW
@Kay: Oh, g-d. The wails of young conservative men “Whaaaaa, no liberal women will date meeeee, it’s woke’s fault!” just sickens me.
Yes, a generation or two ago, there were more politically mixed marriages. So what? Maybe being conservative in an insensitive, jerky, MAGA way is a turnoff. Go find a Boebert type and woo her.
Chris
@Betty Cracker:
I think it also doesn’t hurt that Reagan is increasingly so far in the past that you can shit on him without offending critical masses of people.
I remember the early 2000s when I was just becoming politically aware and Reagan references were everywhere. (It was less than subtle that George W. Bush really really wanted to be Reagan 2.0, and that the war on terror was supposed to crown him a hero just like the fall of the Berlin Wall). Nowadays? He’s like JFK or Truman: maybe you like him, maybe you don’t, but in either case, he belongs in a history textbook.
Geminid
@Betty Cracker: For Maryland’s right wing nut-jobs, this is Hogan’s 3rd strike. He came out for codifying Roe a few weeks ago, and in 2022 Hogan wouldn’t support the knuckledragger who beat his handpicked successor in the Maryland primary for Governor.
A rational Republican would look past these transgessions and vote for Hogan anyway, because he could give the Republicans a Senate majority. But some of these folks vote on animus, and intra-party fights are the most bitter of all.
jonas
@Dave: The crazy thing, there were *still* people having a fit and trying to stop them tearing down the viaduct, going so far as to advocate an even *bigger* viaduct over the old one named for Harriet Tubman. Seriously. You can’t make this shit up.
RaflW
@Baud: To the extent that our legal system was enacted to ensure property rights, and that property included owning Black people, the roots of segregation were right there. The 3/5ths compromise was also essential to ratification.
divF
@divF: Also, Grove Street (which formed the redline boundary in Berkeley / Oakland) was re-named Martin Luther King Boulevard in the 1980s to acknowledge the legacy of housing segregation in the East Bay.
Chris
@Sister Golden Bear:
YES, oh my God, this.
Note the way they framed it. People whining about this almost never actually come out and say that it happened to them (because it didn’t). It’s always “well, if you do this, then some Woke is going to say…” “well, you can’t say this, because if you did, then some Woke would say…” “oh boy, you could never make this movie today, because if you did, some Woke would…”
Not that this kind of thing never happens, but almost every time you hear them bitch about it, they’re either 1) being as vague and editorial as possible in order to frame the story so that they look more sympathetically, or just 2) preemptively making shit up so they can fantasize about how oppressed they totally would be, if only a hypothetical scenario played out in exactly the way that it would have to to justify their feeling oppressed.
E.
@wjca: Oh it was explicitly, in the law, racist. Read the book The Color of Law to get one hell of an eye opener.
@wjca:
jackmac
@rikyrah:
Chicago DOES have a southwest expressway. The Stevenson Expressway (originally called the Southwest Expressway) was opened in 1964. Much of the system covered portions of the historic but defunct Illinois-Michigan canal, so fewer neighborhoods were affected.
Dave
@jonas: They will be whining about this and suing to stop it years after it’s completed and any negative impact at all even if it’s heavily outweighed by the positive will be brought up nonstop.
The arguments they have basically boil down to
-it might add five minutes to their commute (never mind the nightmare that is the current 690/81 interchange)
-it’s different we can’t have that because it’s different
-the entire county will become the South Side; AKA they are afraid of black people
Baud
@RaflW:
But the legal system does a lot of things, only some of which are oppressing black people. Likewise, the fact that most highway miles aren’t about racism doesn’t change the fact that the design of some highways was influenced by racial factors and certainly had racial effects.
The basic point is that looking at things at the 50,000 foot level isn’t necessary helpful or relevant to the discussion at hand.
Anoniminous
@RaflW:
FIFY
Chris
@RaflW:
Even this comes with footnotes.
For most of history, both parties were loose coalitions of regional party machines, and contained at least some number of progressives, moderates, and conservatives alike, even if one faction was dominant at the moment. That makes it hard to judge exactly how different things were back then. One suspects that a lot of those “politically mixed marriages” involved a Barry Goldwater voter marrying a George Wallace voter, or a JFK voter marrying a Nelson Rockefeller voter: crossing partisan lines, but not so much ideological ones.
E.
@wjca: I think what you are misunderstanding is the law. New Deal projects were explicitly written with racist application and intent.
Belafon
@Mr. Bemused Senior: I don’t know exactly where it is, because I’m not familiar with NYC, but there is a part of the major roads through there with a tunnel that was specifically designed to be smaller than public busses in order to keep blacks on one side.
Sister Golden Bear
As someone who’s lived on both sides of the gender binary, it’s possible to free sorry for the men/boys feeling lonely; frustrated that, as rikyrah says, you know the vast majority of them won’t do a damn things to do anything constructive about it; and recognize the intense challenges to men who want to break free of the patriarchy.
As bell hooks said:
Too boys still have emotions beaten out of them, sometimes literally, learning the only “acceptable” emotions are aggression and anger. Norah Vincent’s flawed but insightful “Self Made Man” gives a firsthand account of how she experienced this during her 18 months posing as man.
Unfortunately, the rise of the manosphere has obviously made things far, far worse. Sadly, I’m not sure how we break out of it until men/boys are willing to do the introspection to realize what’s going one — and introspection is something they’re definitely encourage not to do, and are willing to own their shit, and start actively work to change things.
Belafon
@E.: A good example of designed racism that a lot of people don’t seem to know about is the GI Bill. It was a national program for returning soldiers and sailors to pay for college. But it was administered by the states. Why? Because the states were in the position to deny it to minorities.
Trollhattan
Has there been a better explanation for these shenanigans than Charlie Pierce’s “Republican prion disease”? There has not. Behold:
Brachiator
@Melancholy Jaques:
Good example.
In the Los Angeles area, a number of significant construction projects had huge impact on non-white neighborhoods. Hispanic communities were disrupted in Chavez Ravine in order to build Dodger Stadium.
In the 1930s, Los Angeles Chinatown was demolished in order to build Union Station. The current Chinatown found a way to rebound to a large degree.
In the 1970s, partial construction of a continuation of the 710 Freeway in Pasadena displaced over 1500 residents, a majority of whom were low income and non-white. The stub of the freeway which resulted killed the economy of the community which was effectively separated from the rest of the city. The adjacent upper income communities did not want traffic flowing around their neighborhoods and fought completion of the freeway for decades. They finally won and unless angels come down from the sky, this section of the freeway will never be completed.
tam1MI
There is a stretch of I-94 between Michigan City and Gary that my friends and I call “The Wasteland” because of all the now-abandoned little communities that got destroyed when the highway came through, that are right up next to the road.
Bill Arnold
@RaflW:
Out of curiosity, are there many similar complains from “conservative”(aka Republican) women about liberal men?
normal liberal
@TBone: Speaking as an actual urban planner specializing in transportation, not only does the history support the assumption of racist intent, so does the simple geography. Look at how the location of interstate highways in urban areas from the 1950s through the 1970s cut off access from minority neighborhoods to city centers and their resources, but also how highway placement (not just the interstates) drove through minority neighborhoods, deliberately dumping the consequences (heavy freight traffic, degraded air quality, denial of access to transit and so much more) into those neighborhoods, and kept away from the affluent and even middle class residential areas. Look at any large city in the northeast and Midwest – it is inescapable.
This analysis isn’t even remotely controversial, and the Federal Highway Administration has in recent years begun what are deconstruction projects to mitigate the impacts. Too little and way too late, but it’s a start.
Dave
@Bill Arnold: They tend to take the “we don’t want to date feminine soyboys” route from what I’ve seen. Though the ones that go further into the fetid swamp will occasionally surface complaining about how their fellow travelers treat them; it doesn’t tend to go well for them when they do this.
TBone
@normal liberal: I know that. I was trying to educate another commenter, wcja, per his request. Thank you!
I’m so woke I had a vintage Uncle Sam poster hung in my law office cubicle, the one where he’s pointing directly at the viewer, “I WANT YOU TO WAKE UP” way back in 2005. Before any of the other kids on my block.
I own the hardcover 1619 Project.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_1619_Project:_A_New_Origin_Story
JoyceH
Is this thread still alive? This is apropos of nothing discussed so far, but today it just struck me – assume that everything turns out for the best, that Biden is reelected, we take back the House and keep the Senate, and the court system stops dragging their feet and allow the remaining Trump indictments to go to trial in 2025. Give all that, the best of all possible worlds… the Trump Era will still have lasted for a DECADE! Ten freakin’ years out of all our lives! Years we will never get back. For some reason, that realization just infuriates me…
Baud
@JoyceH:
Would you rather have had that woman?
(Narrator: the answer is yes.)
prostratedragon
Just in time, an LGM commenter notes that I-244 passes through the middle of Tulsa’s Greenwood district. This in response to a Loomis post on proposals in the Senate to create a National Park historical district for Greenwood.
smith
@JoyceH: Better than it lasting forever. But I agree with you — this has been a gruelling journey, and I think most people who have lived through it, if they are even minimally politically aware, will have some level of PTSD from it for a long time.
normal liberal
@TBone: I know you know, your’s was the post that caught my attention to the discussion, and I lazily just responded to you. I’m grateful that others in the thread provided concrete (sorry-bad transportation planner pun) examples, and mentioned the Infrastructure Investment & Jobs Act reconnecting communities program.
Everyone tends to forget that the interstate highway system began as a defense program – can’t be trucking that scary stuff through white neighborhoods.
eclare
@smith:
I know I do.
Baud
@smith:
@eclare:
I for one feel perfectly fine.
gwangung
@wjca: This is such a privileged position. Which has been pointed out to you on numerous occasions.
Why is it not possible to look at it from the view point of marginalized communities?
prostratedragon
@JoyceH: And well it should!
@smith: Those of us still around in 20 or 30 years are going to have a hard time explaining ourselves to younger people. I mean, the basis of the trauma might lack the clarity of WWII or the Depression when you try to express it in words. Doesn’t make it any less wounding.
JoyceH
@smith: just PLEASE let there be an enormous backlash to all that Trump stood for!
rikyrah
@RaflW:
That’s how I feel. Go find a like-minded GOP right-wing woman and court her.
In today’s world, your politics are your values. And, no, I’m not going to be with a man who is ok with taking away my body autonomy. That’s a non-starter for me.
TBone
@normal liberal: 💙 I love that you know that bit about why we needed the highways expansion initiative to be done so quickly.
stinger
@JoyceH:
Ugh. What a waste.
rikyrah
@jackmac:
@rikyrah:
Chicago DOES have a southwest expressway. The Stevenson Expressway (originally called the Southwest Expressway) was opened in 1964. Much of the system covered portions of the historic but defunct Illinois-Michigan canal, so fewer neighborhoods were affected.
I disagree. The Stevenson goes WEST.
I live Southwest.
I can only get home if I:
Go SOUTH, then West. (The Dan Ryan)
Or WEST, then South. (The Stevenson)
There is no Southwest Highway that I can take from downtown.,
eclare
@Baud:
You forgot the first line, it’s the end of the world
Miki
@rikyrah: See, e.g., St Paul’s Rondo Neighborhood.
Brachiator
@JoyceH:
Even if Trump is solidly defeated, Trumpism may be with us for a while.
Anoniminous
@Bill Arnold:
Friend who is a flaming liberal and gayer than a tree full of monkeys has Conservative Republican women hanging all over him.
For what’s that worth.
Baud
@eclare:
Haha. I didn’t want to bring anyone down.
Chris
@rikyrah:
The fact that they can’t do this kind of says a lot about how much of a niche problem it is.
Let’s be honest, the average truck owner-operator in MAGA-land is not desperately looking for a liberal woman to sleep with. This is not a general problem for Republican men, it’s a problem specific to Republican upper-middle-class young men, who live in big blue cities, who work in fields where politics matters more than for the average bear, with a lot of career-oriented women who aren’t willing to put all of their life plans on the shelf to play housewife.
Even then, they probably could find themselves a nice Republican housewife at one of the local evangelical churches, except a lot of those on offer there would be what they view as “lower-status” women: they want the “high-status” women that they share an office with, even as they expect them to leave the office as soon as they’re together.
(And quite honestly, even then they’re probably major creeps who’re socially dysfunctional even by the standards of MAGA-land).
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@TBone:
There are some good pieces on Ike’s first cross-country trip after WWI and automobiles were numerous enough and reliable enough, to be considered transportation for something other than the immediate area.
atlasobscura.com/articles/in-1919-dwight-d-eisenhower-suffered-through-historys-worst-cross-country-…
Flash forward 25 years. Ike’s in conquered Germany looking at the Autobahn. He’d just help defeat an existential threat and was looking at potentially another one in the form of Stalin’s Soviet Union. He saw what the Autobahn meant strategically, particularly for a country as large as the USofA.
When he becomes presnit, well, the rest is history with lots of warts involved in the process.
normal liberal
@TBone: I’m located along I-55 in Illinois. Lots of military traffic during Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s a neat little touch that the commemorative Eisenhower Interstate System signs reference his real motivation as a former 5-star general. So subtle.
JWR
Thank you for the wonderful essay, Ms. Cracker!
Meanwhile, here in SoCal’s Inland Empire, (and where else?), the culture war might be headed for a minor ass whoopin’! From CBS:
The current vote totals are:
rikyrah
@Belafon:
Over ONE MILLION BLACK GI’S WERE DENIED THEIR WWII GI BENEFITS.
The economic foundation of America’s Middle Class came from that Bill.
The amount of Black wealth completely STOLEN is so evident..
you don’t even have to go back to slavery to monetize
TBone
What a coincidence. Just read my Philly Inquirer morning email news roundup:
gvg
@Kay: Property condemned for public purposes has to be purchased for a fair market price. Black property, due to society’s past and present racism, tends to be cheaper than white area property. Nobody really likes paying higher taxes and elected officials do not enjoy trying to raise taxes. Most places have budget issues all the time. It doesn’t take any intent or plan to end up sending roads through black areas. that problem starts with society and it’s attitude.
In sum, it’s hard to overcome once a society has racism.
There can also be underlying reasons an area is black, such as an area is more prone to floods, people know this and the danger and the insurance companies know it too, so they will if they can pay more to live elsewhere. then the poorest buy or rent in the low area which (surprise) can be mostly blacks (or other minorities) because racism gives them fewer jobs that pay less and gives them higher cost fines and tickets and the few stores charge more. Higher hidden costs help keep them poor. This is why Katrina drowned the poor black areas of New Orleans. And if the government condemned all the unsafe areas…that would also be seen as racism. Its been done in the past.
TBone
@normal liberal: my Lt. Colonel Great Uncle (Army Corps of Engineers) helped build the road from Kabul to Kandahar after WWII (survived Pearl Harbor, wounded in France, then went to Korea and survived there too). I have stories and souvenirs from Afghanistan procured in the 60s. Turquoise, silver, ancient pottery shards, tea pots and chalices…and a wallet stamped with gold lettering “Army Corps of Engineers.”
They weren’t concerned about anything they impacted there, either 😉
TBone
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: thank you, always love history reading!
gvg
@Betty Cracker: Only if we get better government before too long. I can’t say how long that is. We are being corrupted by the petty governor and legislator making laws or rules about specific minor points. Most of them don’t seem to know about the massive number of functions we have and have not yet even thought of a way to complain and punish us so we just keep following laws and regulations that we always did which they haven’t noticed and we try to keep it that way.
Voting here is really important.
Anoniminous
@TBone:
Re: Chalices
Suggestion: do not choose poorly
Jackie
@smith: I was sooo close to subscribing to Rolling Stone. I’m definitely going to do a sit back and wait and see…
TBone
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: hey, we still travel the Lincoln Highway here in PA too!
lincolnhighwayassoc.org/info/pa/
gvg
@Baud: Many drug enforcement laws were implemented at the request of black voters to Clinton (for example) because the black community at that time felt victimized by criminal drug sellers. those laws ended up being used mainly against black men. We didn’t use to have as high a ratio of black to white incarceration and the crime rate decades ago was much higher. Those laws were used in ways not intended.
Miss Bianca
@smith: I don’t know, but I hope the trend continues!
lowtechcyclist
@RedDirtGirl:
That’s really a great thing for Hampshire to do!
Fun fact: Hampshire College isn’t in New Hampshire – it’s in Amherst, MA. I guess that’s Old Hampshire or something.
Miss Bianca
@Chris: see recent SCOTUS cases involving, say, Colorado bakers (hypothetical) who (hypothetically) would suffer extreme mental anguish by being asked to bake a (hypothetical) wedding cake for a (hypothetical) same-sex couple.
Sister Golden Bear
@gvg: Definitely a contributing cause, but it doesn’t explain things like Robert Moses deliberately building overpasses that were too short to allow city buses to reach popular beaches — and a time when that was the dominant way Black folks reached those beaches.
Obviously it’s not either/or, but sometimes the racism is namely overt.
Kayla Rudbek
@wjca: The precise location of the interstate in cities was frequently used to destroy Black neighborhoods (Rondo in St. Paul for example was demolished to make way for I-35E or I-94 if I recall correctly). However I would argue back that having an interstate highway system gave anyone with a car access to get out of town, although the argument back might be that having a train system would do the same thing.
wjca
In my case, it was basically a little farm town, just barely beginning to become a suburb. The only significant part of the community which commuted to anywhere urban were a cadre of physicists. The lived there because it was half way between UC Berkeley and the Rad Lab (now Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) — some days one of them might go one way, some days the other.
Pre WW II there had been a Japanese American family, but the relocation camps took them away. The closest we had to a minority group was Hispanics. Except that, since many of them had lived in the area longer than the Anglos, nobody (at least that I as a kid noticed) regarded them as distinct from the rest of us.
UncleEbeneezer
@JWR: I don’t know if I’m saddened that 46% wanted to keep this homophobic asshat or heartened that 53% actually voted right? (I’m assuming Temecula is a fairly deep-red city.)
UncleEbeneezer
@JWR: In other CA Pride news:
O. Felix Culpa
@rikyrah: Yes, what rikyrah said. The Stevenson goes west. I used to take the reverse commute from the city to my job in the near-west suburbs on the Stevenson, and it is most definitely an east-west road. There’s no southwest highway.
Dog Dawg Damn
@MisterForkbeard: DEI is in fact illegal. It has been rejected by the Supreme Court, by the voters of California in a referendum, and it is patently in violation of the 14th amendment.
Considering that Harvard, MIT, and others have stopped requiring the DEI statements as part of hiring, I think we are seeing the end of the DEI grift. And that’s what it is.
E.
@Sister Golden Bear: All true but that’s a racist application of a purportedly non racist schema according to John Robert’s and some commenters here, and doesn’t really count. The thing is there is a whole, entire, book that describes and details the actual 100 percent intentional racist language deployed in New Deal programs in positive law. It does a disservice not to insist on acknowledging that when we get the traditional white person shoulder shrug about how all this just sorta happened because of old racist local influence. Because that is exactly John Roberts’sbelief. The book is The Color of Law and I am surprised I am the only one mentioning it.
MazeDancer
Always sad when a good school gets shanked.
Look at the heinous graffitti at Stanford.
Extreme garbage from all directions.
BruceFromOhio
Late to the thread, my Fortune 500 employer has embraced DEI, and hasn’t budged a Gaia-damned inch. Is it perfection and rainbows and unicorns farting glitter? Ha, nope. Though a big Pride shout out and encouragement to march and support LGBTQ+ on the internal news site is the most recent example. Fuck the haterz, steady as it goes. Those that object know to STFU and get back to work. If the little fascists want to declare victory and move on, please proceed. At least its quieter.
wjca
No, it isn’t. I asked a question: The quote in the OP appeared, to me, to say that the Interstate Highway System originated as a tool for racial segregation. (The way Voter ID laws inarguably are.) I hadn’t heard that particular accusation before.
So far, I’ve gotten lots of arguments that the implementation, in urban areas, was racist.** Which I don’t dispute. But exactly one response, from @E., has actually pointed me to something that might support the original quote.
** It occurs to me that most of the examples offered here of racist implementations (e.g. I-980 in Oakland) are 3 digit highways. Which, if I’m not mistaken, are local add-ons rather than the core system (with 1 or 2 digit numbers). I will be interested to see, in E’s referred Color of Law, whether that opportunity figured in the original creation of the law.
Baud
@wjca:
FWIW, I don’t think you’re wrong about history, but you are wrong in your interpretation of the original quote.
bjacques
@Dog Dawg Damn: now there’s a troll I haven’t heard from in awhile. Just get out of the joint for sticking up a gas station? Selling dope disguised as a nun?
Now I wonder if we’ll hear from Brick Oven Bill and Matoko_chan. The Great Old Ones have returned! Iä! Iä! Yog-Sothoth!
wjca
That would certainly do it. Thanks.
UncleEbeneezer
@rikyrah: Yup.
• Rescinding Sherman’s “Forty Acres & A Mule” Executive Order,
• Southern Homestead Act giving land predominantly to White People,
• Social Security exempting Agricultural and Domestic workers from benefits,
• Sundown Towns/Counties,
• Racial Covenants preventing Black People from owning property,
• Eminent Domain (and other racist ordinances) to seize/block Black residences/businesses,
• Predatory Lending,
• Segregated Schools, Parks, Hotels, Restaurants,
• (Completely Legal) College and Job Discrimination
And that’s before all the instances of illegal acts of discrimination that simply couldn’t be proven. Every avenue to build or retain wealth was denied from Black People in some way, for a very long time.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Sister Golden Bear:
Maybe? I don’t really know. They strike me as the kind of people who need to be cool. So I’m guessing they hang out with people who are reasonably successful in the arts, public intellectuals, local activists, and other types that have cultural cache. Even in a place like St. Louis, if you go to an event with those folks, someone is going to be venting about something environmental, gender related, whatever in a way that people who are more conservative leaning get prickly about.
Steve in the ATL
@Sister Golden Bear:
In my experience, annoying people are a vast majority, but I don’t live in California!
Geminid
@TBone: Have you read James Michener’s Caravans? It’s set in Afghanistan in the 1950s. I like everything Michener wrote, but Caravans stands out.
Betty Cracker
@Dog Dawg Damn: As usual, when people make sweeping generalizations, they miss half the story. You are no exception. Grifters absolutely cashed in on DEI specifically and the groundswell of desire to do better on race in this country more generally in the wake of Floyd’s murder. (Name a social upheaval event that didn’t flush greedy pricks out of the woodwork. They sense unloosened wallets like a shark senses blood.) But in other cases, people genuinely had their minds and hearts changed, and some organizations took steps to address long-term equity problems. That’s not nothing.
emjayay
@wjca: The interstates as tools of racial segregation thing could be about ramming freeways through existing neighborhoods instead of running the interstates around cities. I think even at the time there was a lot of resistance to this among urban planners.
Obviously, they didn’t go through urban elite areas, but through places where condemning the buildings and buying the land was far cheaper and without resistance from the wealthy. Some of these, particularly freeways going along formerly industrial dockland coast edge of cities areas, have been taken down or undergrounded. More will come down in the future. In some situations the freeway divided communities themselves, or lower from upper income areas.
JaySinWA
That made me look back at I-5 and then I-90 in downtown Seattle history.
Here’s an article about the local history, including the I-90 interchange (with I-5)
legacy-racism-built-northwest-highways-and-roads
The article references the Buttigieg comment that became “racist roads” in RW lore.
thegrio.com/2021/04/06/pete-buttigieg-racism-us-infrastructure/
Hamlet of Melnibone
@Soprano2:
E.
@JaySinWA: Hwy 99, which I-5 replaced, was designated The Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway. after much local lobbying from the NorCal and S . Oregon racist constituencies.
Geminid
@E.: The “Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway.” This is good example of the idiotic “Lost Cause” narrative. Jeff Davis did more to to destroy the Confederacy than any man besides Abe Lincon and Ulysses Grant.
Omnes Omnibus
@Geminid: Sherman?
JaySinWA
@E.: Not quite true. There was the “Jefferson Davis Highway” that ran cross country ending in CA, that had nothing to do with Highway 99 in WA.
There was an attempt to name all of 99 in WA to Jefferson Davis Highway in 1939. It resulted in a couple of highway markers at the Oregon and Canadian borders, but I don’t know of any areas where the name was used.
emjayay
@wjca:
Then containers came along and the ports all moved far away to much more roomier locations with good interstate and rail access.
Jackie
OT; but this is significant! Nicolle Wallace broke this story today:
As pointed out on Wallace’s show, neither Perry nor Jackson would normally pass the security background investigation to hold these Intelligence Committee seats, but these aren’t normal times, are they?
emjayay
@JaySinWA:
Whoa, some kinda big words there in that Buttigieg quote.
Mayor Pete has got to learn how to speak at the 4th grade Trump level (not sure he’s still there even) instead of the ninth grade Obama or tenth grade Carter level.
JaySinWA
@JaySinWA: By nothing to do [with Highway 99], I mean it wasn’t connected physically or temporally. The Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway ran from Virgina to San Diego CA. in 1910-1920 per Wikipedia. I believe the naming was driven by the same group of people, the UDC, United Daughters of the Confederacy. It may be that there was no complete version of that highway either, but it appears that the name was in fact used on some of it.
In related speculation, apparently the Washington territories picked up a bunch of southern refugees after the Civil War (along with Oregon) It left its mark in other places. We had a Robert E Lee school from 1955 to 2018, when it was finally renamed to Lee school. There was huge local resistance to renaming the school. As there was to removing the highway markers.
emjayay
@Jackie:
I’m going to have to extend my experience based women wearing gold cross pendants theory to men who would be displaying one if they could.
All such people are duplicitous conniving lying backstabbing sanctimonious weasels. Every single one. Mike Johnson is just another one of these.
Geminid
@Omnes Omnibus: Sherman did a lot, but Davis set the table with his faulty grand strategy and lousy personnel decisions.
wjca
Not quite all. C.f. the Port of Oakland. (4th busiest on the west coast; 9th in the US) Still only accessible by road (or rail) thru the city. And, in fact, a couple of neighboring cities as well.
wjca
Why does this remind me of Putin?
Sally
@Geminid: Caravans is outstanding! A fabulous insight into Afghanistan.
trnc
I’m way late to this discussion, so maybe these points were already made.
“Tools of racial segregation” doesn’t mean they were built exclusively for that purpose. It means that racists discovered they could be used to destroy black neighborhoods. Any white neighborhoods that got destroyed in the process were collateral damage.
I’d like to point out that sometimes language is imperfect. I completely understood why the phrase tripped you up, but once a few people cite some examples for context, there’s not much point in continuing to view the original statement solely through your own initial interpretation.
trnc
@wjca:
The quote doesn’t say “originated”.
ETA: I see you got it worked out with Baud.
Geminid
@Geminid: Two of Jefferson Davis’s personnel decisions set the table for William Sherman:
Davis left the incompetent Braxton Bragg in charge of the South’s main western army, the Army of Tennessee. Bragg’s generals had no confidence in their commander, but he was Davis’s favorite. Bragg’s inept handling of his command allowed to rout it at Chattanooga in November, 1863.
That left the Confederate army without a viable defensive position between the Union army and Atlanta. When Sherman’s drive towards Atlanta commenced Ma5, 1864, the Army of Tennessee’s new commander, Joe Johnston, conducted a skillful fighting retreat through Northwest Georgia until he had backed up to his base of Atlanta, much as Lee had fallen back upon Richmond (with heavier losses).
But Grant’s Army could easily be supplied by water, while Sherman relied on a single railroad back to Chattanooga, 120 miles away. Atlanta fortifications were too strong to assault and too extensive to encircle. The crafty Johnson could have held Atlanta for many months, just like Lee held the Richmond/Petersburg front for 10. And with Sherman’s back to the Chattahoochee River, Johnston had good possibilities for a counter-offensive.
But Jefferson Davis never got along with Johnston, so when Georgia politicians complained that Johnston had let Sherman cross to the south side of the Chattahoochee River without a fight, Davis was quick to replace Johnston with John Bell Hood. Davis might as well have handed Sherman the keys to the city of Atlanta.
Six weeks later, after repulsing three of Hood’s fierce but uncoordinated attacks, Sherman’s troops walked into Atlanta on September 2nd. This laid the rest of Georgia open to invasion and more importantly, handed Lincoln a badly needed victory when the result of 1864 Presidential campaign was very much in doubt.