“Imagine how f*cking exhausting it is living it.”
And imagine how much worse it would be if you couldn’t take a week-long vacation every few months.
I have to admit I’m very impressed with all the comments on here. Honorable mentions to Plucky, lestatdelc, Matten, c6logic and most others replying on this thread see the pathetic FAUX BILLO BS for the pathetic trash it is. I am very proud as a fellow human of the commentators on this thread. Bigotry is bigotry and it’s all wrong. That said, lestat put it so right, I have an issue with the semantic word “bigotry” as well. PEOPLE aren’t really bigots or racists, they’re selfish, egotistical, conceited and narcissistic by nature. Good people like people posting on this thread manage to rise above such petty self-interest. FAUX has yet to. Will they ever? Stewart nailed the selfish self-interest deniers for real.
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The thing is, the current younger generation of white kids–the kids in their teens and twenties, seem to be fully bought in to the notion that “racism” means “noticing race.” And yay for them, I hope they manage to build a world where it is no more noticed than, say, whether you wear glasses or have freckles.
But their belief that they have already managed to will this state of things into existence seems to blind them to the reality that, just for example, black people do get hassled by the cops for no reason, do face higher suspicion and hostility when they go shopping, do find it harder to get job interviews if their resumes contain a clue as to their race and get jobs even if they get the interview. and they don’t seem to see that black people have much higher poverty rate–and all of the problems that go with it–because of a century and more of institutionalized theft that transferred their wealth to white people and tightly constrained their ability to break out of poverty. They think, like Roberts, that all of that stuff was swept onto the dustbin of history of the idealized, nonthreatening-to-white people version of MLK whose birthday we celebrate on a semi-random Monday in January.
One of the saddest things I know of is that when you look at the problems of poor white people in rural Appalachia (and, for that matter, the Ozarks) and the problems of urban poor black people, they are essentially identical, with causes so closely analogous as to likewise be essentially identical. Both suffer from the consequences of a century of systemic overt prejudice, restrictions on educational opportunities, political powerlessness at the state level, and massive economic exploitation that transferred wealth and investment capital to people outside the communities. White rural poor people, of course, were immune to the institutionalized terrorism and were not subject to rape, torture or murder on a whim as long as they didn’t attempt to unionize, but you see the same acculturated coping strategies, both the ones that are obviously destructive, like self-medication with cigarettes, alcohol and illegal drugs, and the ones that trade short term survival for long term viability like the common understanding of what kind of behavior in a child is indicative of a good parent.
And yet, you will never find two groups of people more deeply prejudiced against, and hostile to, each other. And you don’t have to (fully) buy in to Marxist theory to recognize that that’s no coincidence.
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The piece by Jon Stewart was well thought through, carefully researched. It was very effective yet very very funny. Let us not forget that the last Senate Majority leader that the Republicans had was Trent Lott, a racially divisive Mississippi politician, who frequented and spoke at racist gatherings and collaborated with white supremacists.
This was not a Republican from Reagan’s generation and the 60’s folks – it was the last Republican Majority Leader
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I’m not sure I agree with that.
Can you provide me an example of a “really intelligent conservative” in the public sphere?
Because I have not seen any example of that in years, if ever.
There are idiot liberals, certainly. But spare me the false equivalency.
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Well said.
The real problem in this country is not racism (though it’s certainly ever present in many areas) - it’s class.
Unless we do something about that, the youngsters are going to be severely disappointed as they age. And let’s not ignore that there are plenty of millennials who are just as racist as their parents. It is learned behavior, after all.
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Yes, NCSteve, you are right on so many points, but the racism is so embedded in the culture, it is not going anywhere soon, if at all. Your narrative reminds me so much of Lillian Hellman’s “Killers of the Dream”, with Mr. Rich White Man, and Mr. Poor White Man. She called it way long ago!
And yes, there is a certain amount of class bias ingrained in this, but class bias appears in just about every culture throughout the world, so it’s not necessarily unique.
As the question continues to be asked…Do you want to trade places?
But I do thank you for your insight.
I always thought intention preceded ideology, rather than ideology forming what we believe. Now I don’t know. Perhaps it’s a feedback loop, that chokes out other perspectives. Faux and reactionary radio legitimize our darker intentions.
Where DO these fools come from? HOW do they become susceptible to manipulating liars that feed their inner demons?
I don’t know how the dominant culture that Faux represents can be broken, or if it can. Seems to me the least we can do is tell the truth and prepare for rebuilding after the cycles have run their course.
So I checked “white privilege” out and ran across some interesting things. It seems obvious that what we call privilege is the birthright that others are denied. Perceiving it that way elevates the standard for everyone and perhaps eases the fear that something is taken away when others are given what is due to all.
This should be obvious, but most of us need the obvious explained.
Thank God for the internets.
Yep, this is why we bother with the comments, for the insight, real insight, brought by many different minds. And insight is what thinking people, even dim bulbs like me, need to understand what the heck is going on.
Thank God for the internets that we can eavesdrop on the conversations of such people.
Oh, yeah, we do forget how creepy the old “moderate” fellows really were.