Tag Archives: race

The White Working Class of the Rust Belt

Politics, Uncategorized, , , , , , ,

I should clarify an earlier post:

Why should I help try to bring back to the progressive movement the same “White Working Class” demographic who voted to fuck over their own “lazy” unions?

  • Wisconsin and Michigan voted for Trump, right after many of the same bothered to vote for Bernie in the primary.
  • Wisconsin voted for Scott Walker, Michigan voted for Rick “toxic water” Snyder, right after they both voted for Obama twice.
  • Wisconsin and Michigan voted for GOP rabidly anti-union majorities in both houses of their legislatures.
  • Wisconsin and Michigan both voted to gut collective bargaining rights, union security agreements, the right to strike, and many other union-secured benefits.

Wisconsin and Michigan are both majority White Working Class. Black people are leaving Detroit because of the many ills which have befallen that metropolis, so Michigan is becoming even more White Working Class than it has been since before the Great Migration of the early 20th century.

Both states’ GOP leaderships have made it a goal to get more on a parity with Texas and other Southern “miracles” which have ditched state income tax and are further ahead at being “at-will” in their employment security.

And yet you want to bring this demographic back in from the conservative cold.

Do they even want to be saved?

This is irrational voting behavior. This is an ungrateful, suicidal demographic which is inflicting pain upon itself. The White Working Class of today would make the likes of Wellstone and La Follette spin in their graves.

This is also a fool’s errand to try to win back with class consciousness.

I just hope that you’re only asking White people to do this work. Don’t ask Black and Brown people to do this. We are already toxic to the White Working Class in the Midwest. Milwaukee’s own Black sheriff is a bloviating, trigger-happy Uncle Tom with an armed force at his disposal, so he’ll be the last to leave.

Maybe the White Working Class will come back to the Progressive Movement and the labor unions after all the Black people leave Milwaukee and Detroit. Maybe they’ll come back when Wisconsin and Michigan are both 99.9% Euro-American and the “swart gevaar” is ancient history.

Don’t ask me to do this. I am Black, and I will not be listened to.

#WhiteWorkingClass #WhiteFolkWork #ClassConsciousness #racism #ClassWarfare #1u #p2 #FeelTheBern

We can either:

  1. (under current liberal thought aka “race consciousness”) wait until ethnic demographics change across the depopulated bastions of Middle America which provide the bulk of the Electoral College’s power, or
  2. (under Sanders-Warren’s progressive thought aka “class consciousness”) we can try to woo back the White Working Class who voted for both Trump and the gutting of their own unions in the name of prosperity.

Either way, for logistics or optics, it seems like Democrats will have to throw someone under the bus for the midterms.

The Congressional Black Caucus and the 1994 Crime Bill

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You know what I’m missing about the #1994CrimeBill?

An actual rebuttal to all the 23 Congressional Black Caucus members who voted for it and all the African-American non/ex-politicians who defend it to this day.

I have read so many defenses and criticisms of the bill from White folks during 2015-2016, but they all center the Clinton family in their explications. Even Michelle Alexander’s rage piece against the crime bill in “The Nation” magazine during the primary centered the Clintons.

What about the African-Americans themselves? Where was our political agency at that time? What benefits did many of us, the Kweisi Mfume-Sanford Bishop school of 23, see in supporting the bill, versus the John Lewis-Jesse Jackson school of 11 who voted No? Why do many African-Americans today still support the bill and its harsher terms of law in the context of its time, and is there a proper rebuttal to *their* supportive arguments?

In the end, this became an election year attack line, and not a moment for reconciling the past with the present. I think those who demand the lessening of mass incarceration missed a grand opportunity for change because the conversation about the 1994 Crime Bill went nowhere this year.

I reject the premise for that video of the rainbow person hugging the confederate person.

If I were that rainbow person (and I am), I’d have to tell the confederate person that the “Lost Cause” is a damn lie of rich white Southerners to the poor white Southerners.

I would ask them why they would brandish the legacy of that lie.

I would ask them why their ancestors allowed themselves to be played like a damn fiddle.

Then we’d probably fight in the street.

It’s More than Identity for Us

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You know what I felt to be racist about 2008? It wasn’t that so many chose to vote for Obama or McCain based on their skin color.

It’s that so many in the GOP went out of their way to denounce Obama’s presence in the race overall, and dismissed his eligibility based on his ethnicity and insinuations about his ethnicity in ways that McCain did not face.

You know what I feel to be misogynist about 2012? It isn’t that so many choose to vote for Clinton or Trump based on their gender.

It’s that so many in the GOP have gone out of their way to denounce Clinton’s presence in the race overall, and dismiss her eligibility based on her gender and insinuations about her gender in ways that Trump has not faced.

So I don’t mind that African-Americans turned out much more for Obama, and I don’t mind that women will turn out much more for Clinton. Not one bit.

I do mind that anyone would be institutionally denounced in their candidacy based on their ethnic or gender background, especially by those whose ancestors have been privileged with citizenship and social credibility for the entirety of this country’s history.

Ultimately, over 50% of the population voted for Obama based on his background and his credibility. The same will happen for Clinton.

If GOP voters are concerned that so many would vote for a Democratic candidate based often on their background while their similarly-originated candidates don’t do anywhere near so well, they are not doing anywhere near enough to bring in candidates with both a relatable background and a believable credibility for office. Try harder.

One more time, with feeling:

“white voice” vs. “talking black”

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Well let’s analyze what is meant by “white voice” vs. “talking black”.

A lot of it has to do with formative regions and the prevailing cultures of a certain period. African-Americans got our accent of English from the White British settlers in the Lowcountry region. We’ve kept that accent and spread it to multiple urban areas outside the South starting with our migrations to the Midwest and the Great Migration. This is why a lot of our linguistic roots in American English are shared with the descendants of British settlers in the Carolinas and Georgia. This spread out further following the invention of the cotton gin, resulting in the forced migration of slaves to as far as Texas by the same descendants of the aforementioned British settlers.

But this spread of population, this region, has always been poor and both socio-economically and racially stratified, and we carried both the accent and the perception of Southern poverty with us to multiple cities. Hence, this Southern American English is more associated with us in more cities than it is with the White Southerners who mostly carry the same and similar linguistic tendencies to this day.

If you’re from the South, you can tell the difference between African-American and White Southern English; in fact, Southern English is the most widespread accent of English in the United States. But if you’re from outside the South, that difference is minimal compared to the difference between African-American and White Western/Minnesotan/New England English.

The Midwestern English that is most associated with Nebraska is the most state- and economically-privileged form of English in the United States. This Nebraska accent, known as “General American”, is what we think of when we speak of “White Voice”. It is also the accent in which television journalists are regularly trained.

I should know, since I can’t speak African-American English to save my life. This accent helps for phone calls.

#NoAccent #MilitaryBrat #NebraskaAccent

Guns, Germs and Steel

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Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel” is a challenging read which does a cursory look at the role that environment and location both have upon human technological development.

But based on the severe critique of the book by other anthropologists, I’m learning to take it with a grain of salt.

The same perceived “environmental determinism” which drives much the book’s narrative can also be tied to the genetic determinism which has been used to justify scientific racism and its many related tragedies.

Instead, it would be better to consider both environmental and social factors.

A people may have been lucky enough to be in a certain place where a certain food crop was plentiful, but they also had to be lucky enough for someone else from somewhere else to show them how to preserve their bodies and food over the winter.

If you’re at the right place at the right time, have the right geography, and encounter the right people under the best terms, your people can go pretty far in the long run.

Those best terms do not include colonialism. Colonialism is one of the worst terms, actually.

#GunsGermsAndSteel #Anthropology

The Racism of Chicago in the White Conservative’s Mind

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Something I’ve noticed: certain demographics from outside of Chicago love to describe Chicago’s African-American population and neighborhoods as a Third World country, like it is Hell on Earth.

Apparently, it’s not so “dark”, dysfunctional and evil of a place that most of the European-Americans in Chicago proper flee in droves from the city.

In fact, despite decades of petty gang-gun violence largely concentrated in the African-American population, it’s still the third largest city in the United States.

Maybe most of the African-American population is tucked away in a certain physical memory hole called the South Side, where murders happen and outsiders cynically tsk-tsk the surviving residents (or burnish their 2nd Amendment grievances with the bloody cloth of Black gun violence, or rage against the “niggers” and “race pimps” sullying the good name of yet another nice city) before moving on with their day?

Maybe deindustrialization happened, making life harder and encouraging many who had their highest skills in manual labor to turn to drugs, which entailed a turn to the violence which follows?

Maybe the culture of honor in the White South was adopted by us early in our belated freedom, and was brought by us to places like Chicago during the Great Migration when we should have left it in Jim Crow Land?

Nah, none of that could possibly be true! Chicago is just our sideshow, our American Mordor! Let’s always talk about Chicago’s Black people as if they are all crazy, evil and feral, and then pin that on President Obama like we’ve done since 2007.

Lineage-based Fraternal Societies

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Reading about Essie Mae Washington-Williams, the mixed-race oldest daughter of Strom Thurmond who he never publicly recognized in his 100-year life. I noticed that she tried unsuccessfully to join the United Daughters of the Confederacy through her father’s descent from Confederate soldiers, but emphasized the need for African-Americans to join more lineage-based fraternal societies in order to forge closer ties to the earlier United States. Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has also joined the Sons of the American Revolution by way of a free man of color who fought for Continental forces in the Revolutionary War.

This led me to the list of lineage-based fraternal societies in the United States, most of which are either based on participation in war, settlement of a state or region at a particular time, ethnicity, service in some military branch.

Most of these tend to be of the accidental, circumstantial type that would involve some catechism of honor to esteem the “honorable ancestors”, the sort of unchangeable accident of history involving some distant soldier guy (or nurse woman) who, if you were not reminded of it or cognizant of research, you would totally forget or ignore. Similar to this practice is the war or period reenactment culture (like RenFaire and Civil War reenactment).

The only African-American-oriented genealogical [NOT lineage] society which I can find right now is the AAHGS-Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society, Inc. and their state chapters, which exist to “share resources and methodology for pursuing historical and genealogical research” and “to trace the historical ties that bind us one to another, mold the present, and shape the future.”

So it’s not exactly “Sons/Daughters of [whatever]”.

It seems to predominantly be a Euro-American thing. It’s hard for us to squeeze into most of these organizations.

 

“We are twice as likely to have a firearm in our homes as black Americans and Hispanics, yet significantly less of us die by gunshot. White people represent 65 percent of the population but just 25 percent of gun homicides. Black people represent 13 percent of the population yet a disturbing 55 percent of gun homicides.

Our gun obsession is simply fueled by the fact that the odds are in our favor. Black and brown kids in Chicago, Baltimore and Miami die by bullets at a much greater rate than our children in Montana, Idaho and Wisconsin.

The color of our skin makes up most of the Republican Party, a party twice as likely to own guns at home than the Democratic Party.

People who look like me are ultimately responsible that a third of all Americans with children under 18 at home have a gun in their household, including 34 percent of families with children younger than 12.

We make up 80 percent of Congress. The majority of white lawmakers refuse to make it legally harder to buy firearms, even AR-15 assault rifles that no respectable hunter would ever use to bag a 12-point buck.”

Source: America’s nostalgic gun culture defies logic and common sense – The Undefeated