ANTEBELLUM BLOG: take heed

Showing posts with label take heed. Show all posts

7/5/17

GLOBAL WARMING CREATING PERMENENT HIGH-TIDE

West Maui's Honoapiilani Highway falling into the ocean from rising seas.

2/18/17

11/21/16

When the history books are written about his dark time in America and how we arrived at a con man reality show charlatan and his kleptocratic klan in the White House as the fronts for the new Fascist Order in America, these will be some of the points on the chart:

(1) Nixon's southern strategy and the welcoming of Dixiecrats into the corporatist Republican fold.

(2) The Dixiecrats paving the way for the rabidly right-wing white evangelical theocrats since those two groups practically overlap - the latter being the progeny of the former

(3) The oligarchical Koch Brothers and the Koch father playing the very long game ever since the latter helped lead the John Birch Society

(4) The assertion of civil rights against these forces which, though many battles were won against them, also heightened the bigotries that never lay buried too far beneath the surface

(5) Ronald Reagan.

(6) The NRA

(7) The 2000 Supreme Court decision of Bush v Gore which was a judicial coup - an acknowledged one even in the ruling itself since it stated that the legal concept of stare decisis (one of the very foundations of our legal system) did not apply in this case.

(8) Fox News and all its many media tentacles.

(9) 9/11 and the subsequent national security state including a militarized police force

(10) A black man and his blacker wife and children living in the White House as our president and first lady and their daughters.

(11) White men and women seeing other white men and women succeed as they fell farther behind and instead of holding those other white people to account were conned by those other white people to place the blame on "the other" in any form that ginned up the anger and heightened the differences and unburied the bigotries.

(12) The Kardashians, Real Housewives, et al.

(13) So few people vote.

(14) Cable news and its growing resemblance to #12

(15) So few people read.

(17) The need to be conned. Never underestimate that need in people.

(18) Putin

(19) Yet another iteration of a politicized FBI

(20) Ignorance.

(21) The need to be ignorant.

(22) The solace of ignorance.

Kevin Sessums

1 hrSan Francisco

MOURNING FOR WHITENESS- TONI MORRISON

MOURNING FOR WHITENESS
By Toni Morrison

This is a serious project.
All immigrants to the United States know (and knew) that if they want to become real, authentic Americans they must reduce their fealty to their native country and regard it as secondary, subordinate, in order to emphasize their whiteness. Unlike any nation in Europe, the United States holds whiteness as the unifying force. Here, for many people, the definition of “Americanness”
is color.
Under slave laws, the necessity for color rankings was obvious, but in America today, post-civil-rights legislation, white people’s conviction of their natural superiority is being lost. Rapidly lost. There are “people of color” everywhere, threatening to erase this long-understood definition of America. And what then? Another black President? A predominantly black Senate? Three black Supreme Court Justices? The threat is frightening.

In order to limit the possibility of this untenable change, and restore whiteness to its former status as a marker of national identity, a number of white Americans are sacrificing themselves.
They have begun to do things they clearly don’t really want to be doing, and, to do so, they are

(1) abandoning their sense of human dignity and (2) risking the appearance of cowardice.

Much as they may hate their behavior, and know full well how craven it is, they are willing to kill small children attending Sunday school and slaughter churchgoers who invite a white boy to pray. Embarrassing as the obvious display of cowardice must be, they are willing to set fire to churches, and to start firing in them while the members are at prayer. And, shameful as such demonstrations of weakness are, they are willing to shoot black children in the street. To keep alive the perception of white superiority, these white Americans tuck their heads under cone-shaped hats and American flags and deny themselves the dignity of face-to-face confrontation, training their guns on the unarmed,
the innocent, the scared, on subjects who are running away, exposing their unthreatening backs to bullets. Surely, shooting a fleeing man in the back hurts the presumption of white strength?

The sad plight of grown white men, crouching beneath their (better) selves, to slaughter the innocent during traffic stops, to push black women’s faces into the dirt, to handcuff black children. Only the frightened would do that. Right? These sacrifices, made by supposedly tough white men, who are prepared to abandon their humanity out of fear of black men and women, suggest the true horror of lost status. It may be hard to feel pity for the men who are making these bizarre sacrifices in the name of white power and supremacy.
Personal debasement is not easy for white people (especially for white men), but to retain the conviction of their superiority to others—especially to black people—they are willing to risk contempt, and to be reviled by the mature, the sophisticated, and the strong.
If it weren’t so ignorant and pitiful, one could mourn this collapse of dignity in service to an evil cause. The comfort of being “naturally better than,” of not having to struggle or demand civil treatment, is hard to give up.
The confidence that you will not be watched in a department store, that you are the preferred customer in high-end restaurants—these social inflections, belonging to whiteness, are greedily relished. So scary are the consequences of a collapse of white privilege that many Americans have flocked to a political platform that supports and translates violence against the defenseless as strength. These people are not so much angry as terrified, with the kind of terror that makes knees tremble.
On Election Day, how eagerly so many white voters—both the poorly educated and the well educated—embraced the shame and fear sowed by Donald Trump.

The candidate whose company has been sued by the Justice Department for not renting apartments to black people. The candidate who questioned whether Barack Obama was born in the United States, and who seemed to condone the beating of a Black Lives Matter protester at a campaign rally.
The candidate who kept black workers off the floors of his casinos. The candidate who is beloved by David Duke and endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan.

William Faulkner understood this better than almost any other American writer.
In “Absalom, Absalom,” incest is less of a taboo for an upper-class Southern family than acknowledging the one drop of black blood that would clearly soil the family line.

Rather than lose its “whiteness” (once again), the family chooses murder.
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