YoungDemCA
YoungDemCA's JournalThe simple truth is that PoC in the US are threatened more by white America than by "radical Islam."
And by "white America", I mean Nazis and "alt-right" fascists and Klansmen, gun-totin' militiamen, reactionary middle-class white suburbanites, wannabe cops like George Zimmerman - and far too often, actual cops -, and everyone else from ICE agents, the Trump-era DHS and DoJ, many within the FBI, and all of the embedded, systemic, institutional forms of racism and racial violence directed by White America against everyone else.
THAT is the honest-to-god motherfuckin' truth. So, let's talk about that truth. Let's talk about something real. I'm sure all of my fellow white Americans are just dying to have this conversation...
OBVIOUSLY there's no possible way that Hillary Clinton could ever have been elected President.
After all, she's a goddamn horrible candidate and sketchy, untrustworthy, and hopelessly corrupt human being, unlike such pillars of scandal-free decency, trustworthiness, and morality as Donald Trump, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, either George Bush, or Hillary's own husband for that matter.
Obviously all of this is true. Yep, that's for sure...
There's obviously no way to reach white supremacists, and that's a good thing. However...
...there are a lot of people out there - a significantly bigger crowd than the diehard, virulently racist Trumpist types, for sure - who don't really like Trump or support everything he's doing by any means, but still hold the deeply mistaken and dangerous notion that he's somehow the "Lesser of Two Evils" or at the very least, no worse than the Democrats or most of his critics in general. And the vast majority of these people, not coincidentally, are white.
Unfortunately, most white people - even many of those who aren't explicitly racist - don't give a shit about racism because they aren't directly affected by it. It's not an immediate, pressing issue for them. Hard to get many white people to support social and racial justice when they have more immediate concerns in their OWN lives.
With that in mind, I honestly don't see any other way of reaching more white voters - and more to the point, building large, effective, enduring, and critically necessary multiracial coalitions - other than emphasizing to them how supporting a President and party that condones racism and white supremacy won't raise their wages, won't get them jobs, won't help solve the opiate crisis in many of their communities, won't help their children and grandchildren have good lives, won't get them any access to health care or education...you get the point.
Does that make any sense? 
What does it mean to be "white?" Is there a uniquely "white" culture? (cross-post from GD)
To illustrate the point: I am white. How do I know this? Well, I have light, fair skin, and my immigrant ancestors came from certain parts of Western and Northern Europe - England, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, France, Luxembourg, and likely others. Furthermore, I come from a solidly middle/upper-middle class background, with parents and grandparents who mostly grew up middle class themselves. That's not an explicitly "white" thing, but if you're an American whose parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents (as is the case for me) who - over time and from generation to generation - acquired or otherwise benefited from their parents having acquired certain historically significant levels of education, property, economic opportunity, and overall social mobility - you're almost certainly a white American. For even the wealthiest and most educated Americans of color don't have the multiple generations and overall levels of social and cultural capital of white Americans.
But going back to the ancestry issue: My European ancestors not only came from many places and particular cultures within Europe, but included both Catholics and Protestants. Those things were certainly very important in terms of social and political dynamics and cleavages in both Europe and in the US in the past, but nowadays, for the average middle-class, suburban or small-town white American? That doesn't matter. Being "white" within the American context not only erodes those particular historical identities, but - more pertinent for this topic - is a synonym for not having your skin, your blood, your history, your very identity being "polluted" by the presence of color.
Because how else could I, a liberal Democratic voter living in the San Francisco Bay Area whose ancestors were from the aforementioned countries, have anything that makes me more similar in any respect to small-town or suburban Republican-voting fundamentalist Protestant of "Scots-Irish" or "American" ancestry in (pick your state) than I am to my (also American) neighbors who are of Indian, Iranian, Israeli, Chinese, Mexican, and a wide variety of other ancestries? (and FWIW, people of those particular ancestries easily make up the majority of my neighbors and my community - Euro-Americans like me are a MINORITY here, as we are in the world as a whole...)
Would love to read any responses in THIS group specifically. 
Yes, nothing says hard work like inheriting millions from your daddy to slap your name on buildings
Oh, and let's not forget him stiffing his contractors, investors, and business partners, or hosting a shitty reality TV show where he didn't even write his dumbass catchphrases. What a success story! 
It will take decades/centuries to clean up the heinous shit from this sadistic POS and his allies.
Do we as a country, or as a species for that matter, even have that long (read: climate change and other environmental destruction, war - potentially nuclear war - and global social unrest)? That's not a rhetorical question, by the way.
Don't worry guys, we'll see a lot more condemnation of Trump from Republicans...
...once he does something truly scandalous, like proposing to raise the capital gains tax, for example.
To understand Donald Trump, it can't be emphasized enough that he's a trust-fund bully.
You know, the kind of little sociopathic boy-prince who technically "grew up" but whose excessively narcissistic mind stopped maturing at like, 13 or 14. He's a spoiled rotten little brat who never worked a day in his life, whose used to getting what he wants when he want it, and who takes his impotent rage out on those who can't defend themselves whenever he doesn't get EXACTLY what he wants.
There's no better embodiment of unearned privilege, pathological entitlement, and just unashamed douchiness than Donald Trump. And to top it all off, he's an insecure coward who feels the need to puff himself up just like any fake macho asshole that you may come across in your neighborhood dive bar. That's Trump. That is who he is, and he's 100% unchangeable.
In 1860, many Southern Democrats refused to support their party's racist, non-abolitionist nominee.
Why? Because Stephen Douglas - the official Democratic Party presidential nominee and overall giant of the party in his time, the champion of "popular sovereignty" and "states rights", the political nemesis of Abraham Lincoln in 1858, and who himself was a virulent white supremacist, married to the daughter of a Southern slaveowner, and who had relentlessly smeared Lincoln as a "Black Republican" and a "n---er lover" in the 1858 campaign for the US Senate in Illinois (which Douglas had won) - was not seen as being pro-slavery enough.
See the thing is, the South knew that Lincoln was anti-slavery, and that the Republican Party was itself founded as a basically anti-slavery party. Moreover, the South also knew that by 1860, a Republican could win the Presidency without the votes of the South; they were terrified by this development. They knew what this meant for their "peculiar institution."
And yet, rather than unite behind Douglas, many white, Southern, slave-owning Democrats chose to bolt their party in the name of a pure, unadulterated, and violent defense of slavery - and more importantly, in support of the EXPANSION of slavery into places that didn't have it (read: the Western territories). And when the South's pro-slavery election gamble failed, they seceded from the Union, choosing the utterly evil and perverse institution of human chattel slavery over their country. Some "patriotism," right? Some "heritage."
THAT's why these Nazis and other white supremacists want to keep all these pro-Confederate States of America statues around. They are well aware of what memorializing this history in public, in the 21st century American South really means. And make no mistake: they absolutely want to go back to that era.
What does it mean to be "white?" Is there a *specifically* "white" culture that's worth celebrating?
To illustrate the point: I am white. How do I know this? Well, I have light, fair skin, and my immigrant ancestors came from certain parts of Western and Northern Europe - England, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, France, Luxembourg, and likely others. Furthermore, I come from a solidly middle/upper-middle class background, with parents and grandparents who mostly grew up middle class themselves. That's not an explicitly "white" thing, but if you're an American whose parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents (as is the case for me) who - over time and from generation to generation - acquired or otherwise benefited from their parents having acquired certain historically significant levels of education, property, economic opportunity, and overall social mobility - you're almost certainly a white American.
But going back to the ancestry issue: My European ancestors not only came from many places and particular cultures within Europe, but included both Catholics and Protestants. Those things were certainly very important in terms of social and political dynamics and cleavages in both Europe and in the US in the past, but nowadays, for the average middle-class, suburban or small-town white American? That doesn't matter. Being "white" within the American context not only erodes those particular historical identities, but - more pertinent for this topic - is a synonym for not having your skin, your blood, your history, your very identity being "polluted" by the presence of color.
Because how else could I, a liberal Democratic voter living in the San Francisco Bay Area whose ancestors were from the aforementioned countries, have anything that makes me more similar in any respect to small-town or suburban Republican-voting fundamentalist Protestant of "Scots-Irish" or "American" ancestry in (pick your state) than I am to my (also American) neighbors who are of Indian, Iranian, Israeli, Chinese, Mexican, and a wide variety of other ancestries? (and FWIW, people of those particular ancestries easily make up the majority of my neighbors and my community - Euro-Americans like me are a MINORITY here, as we are in the world as a whole...)
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Gender: MaleHometown: CA
Home country: USA
Member since: Wed Jan 18, 2012, 11:29 PM
Number of posts: 5,714
