Photo credit: unknown from a streaming video clip.
A counter-protest in Los Angeles brought out two idiots who thought themselves brave enough to dive into the sea of protesters to stand tall for MAGA. The look of fear of the man in the Trump 2020 hat and the officer who understands that this situation might go somewhere horrific shows me they are in a place I wouldn’t want to be. The other man seemed oblivious and almost carefree at times as he was being shoved around, as though a “Caped Super-Trumpman” was going to fly in to save the brethren. There were a number of black and white protesters who were doing their best to shield these two rubes, and then the camera cut, and I can’t find the outcome of how this played out. The bigger point that should be made is that this is the face of MAGA, scared white people thinking they need to fear the foreign horde. But the horde they fear is simply other Americans and people who don’t look like them. The face of racism is the face of cowardice to confront one’s own fears and biases they’ve CHOSEN and adopted!
With Trump and Barr calling protesters “Antifa and Far-Left Criminals,” they will only fuel the situation as it demonstrates to reasonable people the total disregard and lack of understanding of how tired black Americans are of being targets of social, legal, and economic injustice. Our national leadership, as it is, continues to perpetuate the idiocy of labeling and sorting in the effort to polarize a country where the only real interest is the accumulation of wealth. I don’t mean to imply that I eschew financial security, but I’m aware that most of everyone around me is living in catastrophic financial insecurity with a crippled education without the means to do anything to fix it. Empathy from the right would be a good starting point, except that human emotions are not found in the definition of a sociopath who strictly believes in the survival of the fittest.
Photo credit: Slate.
Dr. Jena Barchas-Lichtenstein wrote the following on Twitter about the headline above:
“This headline a) attributes agency for the violence and b) attributes it correctly, to police. Agency: violence is, by definition, intentional. We rarely describe certain things that are destructive on a wide scale (e.g., wildfires, earthquakes, epidemics) as “violent” — we generally understand that those kinds of things don’t have agency & can’t be held responsible. Police responsibility: power differentials tend to mean that police, *not* protesters, really set the tone of protests. Especially important to highlight the role police are playing in escalating violence right now since the protests are in response to police violence. That is – police violence is the ultimate cause in any case. Obligatory bad headline example: the AP’s top headline right now: “‘We’re sick of it’: Anger over police killings shatters U.S.” In this take, the ANGER is to blame — not the violence that led to the anger. Imagine, instead: “‘We’re sick of it’: Police killings shatter U.S.”
Photo credit: Chris Brann
I was anxious as America started self-isolating due to COVID-19, but the sense of urgency that arrives with the protests over the brutality of what it means to be black in America makes the virus seem a whole lot less threatening and urgent. At least with a virus, there is hope that spending billions of dollars will create the incentive to earn even more if a vaccine can be found. Trying to contain the hatred of white Americans has no financial upside, so why should the country spend billions to take the target off black Americans? It appears that sooner or later, people are going to have to remove the knee from the necks of the oppressed, just as Americans had to do with the British oppressors a couple of hundred years ago.
And then news of spreading curfews, staged pallets of bricks that could facilitate looting, mysteriously parked old police cars in hot zones that can be torched, and possible agent provocateurs working to inflame the entire situation have me thinking we are all becoming the victims of some incredibly strange gas-lighting designed for an outcome that for the moment is beyond my level of comprehension. Are we being consumed by madness?