Begin Fawkes News editorial: (YMMV)
Racism is taught. It has been and is propagated because
• It is "good for business" (slavery, later - cheap labor)
• It is "projection" of weakness in the majority onto the minority.
• It is a visceral, emotional engine for politicians, who cover it up with platitudes like "war on crime", "welfare mothers" .. these are institutionalized so that they are self-fulfilling.
That's a load.
I am copying the argument below from Ibram X. Kendi (Epilogue from "Stamped from the Beginning" ) that the only effective way to counter this in finite time is to take away its power, de-claw it by making the levers of racism illegal. (and more)
But protesting racist policies can never be a long-term solution to eradicating racial discrimination—and thus racist ideas—in America. Just as one generation of powerful Americans could decide or be pressured by protest to end racial discrimination, when the conditions and interests change, another generation could once again encourage racial discrimination. That’s why protesting against racist power has been a never-ending affair in America.
Protesting against racist power and succeeding can never be mistaken for seizing power. Any effective solution to eradicating American racism must involve Americans committed to antiracist policies seizing and maintaining power over institutions, neighborhoods, counties, states, nations—the world. It makes no sense to sit back and put the future in the hands of people committed to racist policies, or people who regularly sail with the wind of self-interest, toward racism today, toward antiracism tomorrow. An antiracist America can only be guaranteed if principled antiracists are in power, and then antiracist policies become the law of the land, and then antiracist ideas become the common sense of the people, and then the antiracist common sense of the people holds those antiracist leaders and policies accountable.
And that day is sure to come. No power lasts forever. There will come a time when Americans will realize that the only thing wrong with Black people is that they think something is wrong with Black people. There will come a time when racist ideas will no longer obstruct us from seeing the complete and utter abnormality of racial disparities. There will come a time when we will love humanity, when we will gain the courage to fight for an equitable society for our beloved humanity, knowing, intelligently, that when we fight for humanity, we are fighting for ourselves. There will come a time. Maybe, just maybe, that time is now.
A Third try to get this right?
Arguably, the first was Lincoln. The second was Kennedy/Johnson, and the third (needed) is through Biden/Harris and US.
The United States needs a Third Reconstruction.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/united-states-needs-third-reconstruction/614293/
I HAD TO TURN OFF JAVASCRIPT TO READ THIS
So what is needed for a successful Third Reconstruction? Perhaps it begins with sweeping criminal-justice and voting reforms that could transform the United States from the world’s leading carceral state into a truly multiracial democracy. It might also entail direct investments in Black communities to guarantee stable housing, universal health care, and high-quality education, necessities for achieving a more inclusive economy and greater wealth parity.
(IMO, this means de-institutionalizing racism's "levers" )
John Lewis was an American Founder
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/how-john-lewis-founded-third-american-republic/614371/
I HAD TO TURN OFF JAVASCRIPT TO READ THIS
By custom, headline writers refer to men such as Vivian and Lewis as “civil-rights icons.” This understates who they were. They were the leaders of an incomplete revolution that remade American society. If Americans loosely followed the example of the French, one could argue that the First American Republic, founded by men including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, would have lasted from 1776 to 1861, when the Confederacy turned its guns on Fort Sumter. The Second American Republic, which abolished slavery and wrote the equality of man into the Constitution, was founded by the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and Frederick Douglass. The Third American Republic, the only one to sincerely pursue the promises of the Declaration of Independence and the first true attempt at interracial democracy in American history, was founded by people including Vivian, Lewis, Diane Nash, and Coretta Scott King. They are part of a third generation of American leaders who elevated the universal truths in Christian doctrine and the words of the 1776 Founders, and shamed the nation into deciding that these ideals meant something. The Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act remade America into something it had never been, bringing the nation closer to what it fancied itself to be. ...
Lewis and Vivian lived long enough to see their revolution begin to unravel. A disciplined legal counterrevolution, a rising white nationalism, and a bipartisan expansion of mass incarceration led by some of those who eulogize the men today reversed or hindered the progress they sacrificed to achieve. Their loss ushers in a compounding tragedy: the passing of their lives into public memory as America’s living memory of Jim Crow apartheid fades into time. Just as the proponents of chattel slavery and the partisans of the Confederacy made propaganda of history to serve the doctrine of white supremacy, there will be those who seek to invert the meaning of the civil-rights struggle, what it battled, and what it achieved.
But Lewis never thought of his struggle as one that would end. “We must accept one central truth as participants in a democracy: Freedom is not a state; it is an act,” Lewis wrote. “It is not some enchanted garden perched high on a distant plateau where we can finally sit down and rest.” Lewis and Vivian can now rest. It is up to us to honor them, by continuing what they started, by sustaining the work of democracy as best we can.
So, by our actions, building that majority ("54 or more" ), passing the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, AND LOTS MORE. we can disable that engine.
End Fawkes News editorial.
= new reply since forum marked as read
