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I thankfully haven't had to deal with many outspoken terfs/bigots in the irl wild, but I've known a lot of people who
are ambivalent about and mostly indifferent to gender/trans issues, in the vein of "well if genders are socially constructed" (true) "idk why people care so much about changing their gender or inventing new categories instead of rejecting the concept entirely" (close but no cigar, but in a vacuum still vaguely in the realm of plausible deniability/pleading ignorance instead of outright prejudice)
actively rail against anyone who dare self-diagnose a neurodivergence/disability/illness.
buddy boy your opacity is lowering before our very eyes
#nd#explainer for any confused:#on one hand claim to think that identity (sex and gender) shouldn't be beholden to a higher authority#(while ignoring that the 'authority' in this case is institutional and it's not something self-inflicted that we can choose to stop)#on the other hand show that they think identity (nd and disability) must be validated by a higher authority (the medical system)
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Hi so ive been wondering something and you seem to be very willing to inform people on issue of people of colour, if this is by any means offensive you dont have to answer this nd i apologise. I would like to know if there some sort of racism amoung african-american people themselves? It might be rare but do lightskinned african-americans look down on dark skinned sometimes? Again i might sound incredibly ignorant but where i live there are very few people of colour so i have no idea.
Hi Anon. I’m going to let a really great article I read by Jaleel Campbell answer your question. I hope it helps.
Dark Skin Vs: Light Skin: The Battle of Colorism In The Black Community
In many different cultures and countries around the world, skin color plays a huge role in the concept of beauty. Lighter skin is often preferable to darker skin. The effects of the African American self-hate toward each other because of one’s skin color is rather eye opening and sad, to say the least. This is a very hot and taboo subject among the African American community. As a culture that came from years of oppression and hatred inflicted by slave owners, forced to think that because of their color, they were inferior, blacks have somehow reverted back to having this sort of mindset which is, in fact, hurting them as a whole. With no thanks to the media and its influence on what is seen as beautiful, Black America is tearing itself apart when it focuses on such a shallow aspect of a person that they can’t control. What a person makes of themselves and all of their aspirations should be what they’re judged on - not their skin color. African Americans should stop using skin color to discriminate against each other because it hinders the progression of the entire black community.
Frequent sightings of dark skinned people portrayed negatively in the media is heavily exploited, while light skinned and non-black individuals are portrayed more positively.These kind of prejudgements negatively impact the African American community and prevents the culture from moving forward. Hundreds of years after slavery, the actions of several people in the black community still show that the culture, as a whole, needs to stop and think about the negative connotations they are associating themselves with. Sometimes people make statements such as, "You're pretty for someone who's dark-skinned " or "pretty for a black girl". Phrases such as the ones above are in no shape or form, a compliment. When someone says the above statement they are implying that because of a darker persons complexion, they’re automatically supposed to be ugly. Subtle jabs like this can take their toll on the self esteem of a person.
Growing up as a child in a place where being ridiculed and made fun of because your skin is of a darker complexion is one thing that most Americans couldn’t even imagine. In an interview with Essence Magazine, actress Viola Davis discusses how, as a child, she too felt the pain of being called an assortment of derogatory terms and shares how after a while, she began to believe that she in fact, was ugly (essence.com). Imagine seeing a little girl who had all of her self confidence ripped from her before she entered the 6th grade. That was the norm for Davis back during her childhood. According to the author of “Exploring the Impact of Skin Tone on Family Dynamics and Race-Related Outcomes,” Evidence suggests that racial socialization helps foster the adjustment of children in the face of race-related adversity and serves to protect youth from negative mental health consequences (Hughes, 2006). What many people fail to realize is that children are still developing and in prepubescent kids especially, criticism such as being called ugly and being told you will amount to nothing, can have a substantial effect on the sanity of someone so young. That child is left with that idea stuck in the back of their head throughout life and this idea can be the base of all of the future problems the person has with their self image as an adult.
The Clark Doll Experiment, administered by Kenneth and Mamie Clark, was an experiment that dealt with race and how children perceive it at a young age. The results that came from it were indeed astonishing yet, heartbreaking to say the least.
In the experiment Clark showed black children between the ages of six and nine two dolls, one white and one black, and then asked these questions in this order:
“Show me the doll that you like best or that you’d like to play with,”
“Show me the doll that is the ‘nice’ doll,”
“Show me the doll that looks ‘bad’,”
“Give me the doll that looks like a white child,”
“Give me the doll that looks like a coloured child,”
“Give me the doll that looks like a Negro child,”
“Give me the doll that looks like you.”
The questionnaire concluded with 44 percent of the black children choosing the white doll as being the doll that looked like them. This study gained a lot of attention because of the fact that young black children were disassociating themselves with their true race. A question that the case leaves lingering in the air is “what made the children choose the white doll instead of the one that was more close to them?”
In American culture, whiteness and more of a European "look" is considered the norm, and as a result, blackness is associated with lesser status. When looking at some celebrities, for instance Nicki Minaj, there has been a drastic change to her appearance since she first came on to the scene. As her popularity arose, she began to seem more increasingly "light". It is clear to the reader that she has altered her appearance. Now why is this you ask? Predictions can be made that in order for her to move up the ladder in the music world, she had to gain crossover appeal by changing her appearance to fit the pop demographic that her managers wanted her to meet. Although she may not agree with some of the ideas her team are putting together to make up her image, it has since propelled her to superstardom.
Even today,some people who are lighter-skinned consider themselves superior to (and more attractive than) darker-skinned Americans. Filmmaker, Spike Lee, commented on this problem in the movie School Daze, where he exposed the problems between light and dark skinned individuals attending a historically black college. One famous scene from the movie involves two groups of women, one group light skinned, and the other dark skinned, as they argue in a hair salon about which group has good hair. Both groups of women use many derogatory words to describe each which shows how ignorance is still apparent even within one’s own race. Because of such ignorance, the movie received a lot of criticism after its premiere. Before Lee shed light on the subject, it was a topic that was swept under the table but because of his influence, the problem was brought to national attention.
A 2006, University of Georgia study showed that employers prefer light skinned black men to dark skinned men, regardless of their qualifications. They found that a "light-skinned male could have only a Bachelor’s degree and typical work experience and still be preferred over a dark-skinned male with an MBA and past managerial positions"(Harrison 2006). On the other hand, however, in the corporate world, it is assumed that ”relative to their lighter-skinned counterparts, darker skinned Blacks have lower levels of education, income, and job status” (Turner 1995). Since this stereotype is in place, “Corporate America” can be seen as nothing more than an imagination in the eyes of a dark person, as if they know that the job wouldn’t be inviting to people such as them. So how did black culture become so infused with self hatred? Dark skinned slaves working in the field hated the light skin slaves working in the master's house because of the fact that he chose to “spoil�� their lighter counterparts. According to “Brotherman: The Odyssey of Black Men in America - an Anthology,” One of the most popular methods of teaching this divisive behavior was created by Willie Lynch, a British slave owner in the West Indies, who came to United States to advise American slave owners how to keep their slaves restrained. The darker slaves were forced to work in the fields and received no privileges. This is what began the division within the black community. As history shows, although light skinned blacks were of a higher rank than their black counterparts, they still received scraps at the end of the day (Boyd). This idea is still intact to this day when lighter skinned individuals seem to feel more inferior to darker toned people, but when you ask a Caucasian, or anyone outside of the African American race, what the light skinned individuals would be listed under its always the same response. Black. After slavery, educational institutions, clubs and other activities were reserved only for light skinned black people. In some instances, only those who were lighter than a brown paper bag (paper bag test) would be considered light enough to attend a college or an exclusive club (Boyd).
Sometimes magazines will lighten the skin of black women, just as L'oreal lightened Beyonce's Skin in a controversial makeup ad that made her appear as if she were, indeed, white. The idea of a more eurocentric look comes in to play again as we dig more into America’s perception of western beauty. Characteristics of Eurocentric beauty include: white skin, a narrow nose, blonde or brown long straight hair, and thin lips. For some reason, if you don’t fulfill these beauty standards, you are considered to be less attractive. Many questions can be raised because of this; who’s the decider of what qualifies as beautiful? As cliched as it may sound, beauty is truly in the eyes of the beholder, despite what some people may think.
For some, the views and the opinions of others are too much to bare and consider procedures and different cosmetic products as a way to achieve the ever popular “eurocentric” look that they aspire to have. Although this may sound fine and dandy, the procedures and products bring more risks than they do good. Skin bleaching creams have become hot commodity in the black market beauty world. In a world where the only thing that is seen as beautiful is light skin, can others be to blame for the society that they are a product of? These toxic creams strip the skin of its melanin. Although the person achieves the look they intended to reach, their skin is now weak because of the components said products are composed of. On the other hand, everyone is entitled to self happiness, but the real question is are they ready to face all of the possible repercussions of skin bleaching? That is left for the person to decide.
This is a topic that won’t ever die because people refuse to stop being ignorant, which is evident by Twitter hashtags like #teamlightskin or #teamdarkskin, where people feud and try to prove who’s better based on skin color. Even when various YouTube searches on the topic are pulled up, thousands of results of people - some who try to diffuse the topic, while others add their foolish input. The fact that this topic still remains relevant is ridiculous.
According to “The Skin Color Paradox and the American Racial Order,” Dark-skin discrimination occurs within as well as across races (Turner). This idea is known to be true in an assortment of different cultures, most notably in the caste system set in India. The caste system is in place to form a structured society for the people of India based on one’s skin color. The lighter a person is, the more power that person holds, while the darker they are makes them more prone to living a harder life. Although life shouldn’t be that way for any human being, the darker toned Indians, often called the “untouchables,” are subject to hard labor throughout their lives.
To conclude, in many different cultures and countries around the world, skin color plays a huge role in the concept of beauty. Although light skin may be more preferable, those with darker skin still find their way in society. No matter what adversity they may have faced getting there, they eventually find solace in knowing that they’re on a road to success.The African American community must join together to show that they are more than just a skin, they are people. Although this may be a rather taboo subject, it needs to be brought to the forefront so it can finally be put to rest. The culture must move past those years of oppression and look to the future and what it has to offer. If the culture continues it current ways, then the oppression will always be there; the cycle must stop and the time has been long overdue. Even though the media has made steps in the right direction to show darker African Americans in a better light, the process must be stepped up a couple of notches to get real results. To reiterate, the color of the skin that you were born with should be just that. What a person makes of themselves and all of their aspirations should be what they’re judged on, not their skin color. It doesn’t matter where an African American falls on the spectrum of color because at the end of the day, they’re still black.
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In Indian Country, a Crisis of Missing Women. And a New One When They’re Found. https://nyti.ms/2EPhav7
Indigenous activists say that generations of killings and disappearances have been disregarded by law enforcement and lost in bureaucratic gaps concerning which local or federal agencies should investigate.
There is not even a reliable count of how many Native women go missing or are killed each year. Researchers have found that women are often misclassified as Hispanic or Asian or other racial categories on missing-persons forms and that thousands have been left off a federal missing-persons database.
In Indian Country, a Crisis of Missing Women. And a New One When They’re Found.
The federal government is trying to catch up with a crisis of missing Native American women. But no one is addressing the problems that arise when they’re found.
By Jack Healy, Photographs by Adriana Zehbrauskas | Published Dec. 25, 2019, 3:00 a.m. ET | New York Times | Posted December 25, 2019
GALLUP, N.M. — Prudence Jones had spent two years handing out “Missing” fliers and searching homeless camps and underpasses for her 28-year-old daughter when she got the call she had been praying for: Dani had been found. She was in a New Mexico jail, but she was alive.
It seemed like a happy ending to the story of one of thousands of Native American women and girls who are reported missing every year in what Indigenous activists call a long-ignored crisis. Strangers following Dani’s case on social media cheered the news this past July: “Wonderful!” “Thank you God!” “Finally, some good news.”
But as Ms. Jones visited Dani in jail, saw the fresh scars on her body and tried to comprehend the physical and spiritual toll of two years on the streets, her family, which is Navajo, started to grapple with a painful and lonely epilogue to its missing-persons saga.
“There’s nothing for what comes after,” said Ms. Jones, 48, who has five daughters. “How do you heal? How do you put your family back together? The one thing I’ve found is there’s no support.”
Indigenous activists say that generations of killings and disappearances have been disregarded by law enforcement and lost in bureaucratic gaps concerning which local or federal agencies should investigate.
There is not even a reliable count of how many Native women go missing or are killed each year. Researchers have found that women are often misclassified as Hispanic or Asian or other racial categories on missing-persons forms and that thousands have been left off a federal missing-persons database.
From state capitals to tribal councils to the White House, a grass-roots movement led by activists and victims’ families is casting a national spotlight on the disproportionately high rates of violence faced by Indigenous women and girls.
Several states, including New Mexico, have set up task forces. President Trump signed an executive order last month creating a task force to improve cooperation among Balkanized law enforcement agencies and address problems with basic data collection.
Some tribal officials praised the move, but other activists criticized it as a hollow, belated gesture that failed to include tribes or survivors in its membership, and would do nothing to give tribes more authority to prosecute sex traffickers or others who prey on women and girls. They said its focus on rural reservations has also overlooked the large numbers of Native people in cities who become targets of violence.
Tara Sweeney, assistant secretary for Indian Affairs in the Interior Department, said the task force had already met with survivors and Indigenous leaders in Arizona, Alaska, South Dakota and Washington State and was committed to including their voices in its recommendations.
“We need to do something,” she said.
But for all the official promises to help, families like Dani’s say they get little assistance in navigating a patchwork of tribal, state and federal law-enforcement agencies to find their missing relatives or heal their families if they are found.
“Nothing happens afterwards — that’s the scary thing,” said Annita Lucchesi, whose group, the Sovereign Bodies Institute, has tallied numbers of missing and murdered from a jumble of police reports, news clippings, family contacts and social media posts. “Maybe a victim advocate from their tribe might offer some assistance. But that’s a case-by-case basis.”
Activists describe the crisis as a legacy of generations of government policies of forced removal, land seizures and violence inflicted on Indigenous people. Hundreds of the missing never return, and families said they have struggled to find counseling and treatment for those who do. Some are trying to cope with the trauma of being trafficked. Some are confronting addiction or grappling with violence they suffered on the streets. Some had fled abuse at home and do not have a safe place to welcome them back.
There are also authorities and counselors who have failed to screen located Navajo women and girls as victims of sex trafficking, said Amber Kanazbah Crotty, a Navajo Nation Council delegate who has been studying the issue.
On the Yakama reservation in Washington State, Larise Sohappy’s family spent three weeks looking for her after she went missing in August 2018. Ms. Sohappy, 36, said she had been “lost in my addiction” after being in an abusive relationship.
Her family rejoiced after relatives and tribal police found her, but Ms. Sohappy said she felt humiliated to suddenly be known as a Missing Person reading local newspaper articles about her family’s search. One day, she walked into a convenience store in Toppenish and saw her own “Missing” poster on the wall. But when she tried to enroll in a tribal substance-abuse clinic, she said, she was told there was a two-week wait.
“I kind of stopped trying,” Ms. Sohappy said.
She said her drinking got worse and she grew more despondent until one night in November, when she texted a suicide hotline as a last plea for help. This time, it worked. She is now in an outpatient treatment program in Portland, Ore., and taking classes in medical billing.
“While I was gone I felt like nobody loved me and nobody cared about me,” she said. “We’re overlooked as a people.”
A lack of support or follow-up from social workers or victims’ advocates makes it more likely that women and girls will go missing repeatedly. Some are written off as habitual runaways, activists said. In Washington State, Ms. Lucchesi has collected data showing that 83 percent of missing girls had been reported missing more than once.
“We see these kids going missing over and over again until eventually they don’t come back,” she said.
The crisis has turned families into search parties and parents into private detectives. They draw grids across rural reservations and fan out through chaparral and sagebrush. They crack into their children’s social media accounts to search for a telltale direct message.
Around the Navajo Nation, volunteer activists set up their own version of an Amber Alert to supplement the spotty official alert systems. They pin “Missing” posters to the bulletin boards of grocery stores.
They provide a live accounting of missing-persons cases. From January to October, 86 Navajo men and women have gone missing nationwide, said Meskee Yanabah Yatsayte, a missing-persons advocate for the Navajo Nation since 2013. She said 55 of them had been found safe, 21 were found dead and 10 were still missing.
Ms. Yatsayte said the focus on missing women and girls had also ignored a parallel crisis among men and boys, and she has urged tribal leaders and other government officials to widen their focus.
Dani went missing from Gallup in September 2017 after years of drug use and personal and legal problems. Court records show she had lost custody of her two young children and been arrested several times earlier that year on charges that included burglary and fleeing the police in a stolen truck after a police officer reported seeing her and another man — both apparently on drugs — trying to break into a self-storage unit.
Dani’s family, which asked that she not be identified by her full name because of concerns about her privacy and mental condition, called the police and began papering streetlights with “Missing” posters.
Her twin sisters, Ashley and Renee, 20, posted on her Facebook account in the hopes that Dani would log in and notice. The family followed sightings and rumors of her to Las Vegas and Southern California.
The charges against Dani were dropped, and she was released from jail after she was found not competent. It was the only psychological examination she has received, Ms. Jones said.
Dani has told her family little about what happened during the two years she was missing, living mostly on the streets and in homeless camps. “It was hard,” she said one afternoon.
If she spoke in straight lines before, her thoughts now meander. She arranges and rearranges shampoo and soaps on the windowsill of the motel room she shares with her mother and her sister Ashley. She collects scraps of dirty fabric and sometimes forgets she is no longer 26.
“28, honey,” Ms. Jones reminded her one night. “It’s been two years.”
When missing children are located, police officers and child-protection investigators are often tasked with following up. But Dani is a legal adult, though one with no Medicaid coverage or bank account.
Ms. Jones said she and Dani’s sisters have tried to welcome her back with love and comfort. But Dani has resisted when Ms. Jones suggested going to the packed walk-in clinic at the Indian Health Service hospital, and Ms. Jones worries that if she pushes too hard for counseling or drug treatment or the doctor, Dani will slip away.
One chilly afternoon, she did. She had not returned to the motel on Route 66 where the family now lives, and it was getting dark fast.
So Ms. Jones set out to find her daughter again, swinging her gray Chevy by landmarks that might have drawn her. They passed a street preacher sermonizing to a group of homeless people. An ex-boyfriend’s house.
“I didn’t see her,” said Ashley, sitting in the back seat.
“Shoot,” Ms. Jones murmured. “We might get her. We might not.”
Then, they pulled into an alley and there she was, talking to two friends in a car. Ashley approached and told her, gently, “I like your hair.”
Ashley and her twin, Renee, said they grew up being mothered by Dani and their two other older sisters, carried around on her back at family parties. “I’m the big sister now,” Ashley said. They struggled with not knowing whether Dani was alive or dead, and now, loving her despite not knowing who, exactly, their sister is.
“She’s there, but she’s not the same Dani,” Renee said. “You can kiss her and talk to her, but the Dani who’s here isn’t there as much.”
One night, the four women sat on the double beds in the motel room, looking at old photos of themselves riding horses, at parties and Disneyland, and talking about their hopes of leaving Gallup for a fresh start with relatives in the Eastern United States. Then Dani started pacing the room, twirling a cigarette as she edged toward the door.
Her mother looked up: “Stay close, O.K.?”
______
John Eligon contributed reporting from Kansas City, Mo.
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The Ticking Time Bomb in Biden’s ‘Record Player’ Answer
New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/the-ticking-time-bomb-in-bidens-record-player-answer/
The Ticking Time Bomb in Biden’s ‘Record Player’ Answer
Once upon a time, in the long ago pre-social media days, it took a day or so for the full impact of a debate answer to emerge. When President Gerald R. Ford declared in 1976, “there is no Soviet domination of Poland,” it took a day’s worth of analysis for the firestorm of ridicule to ignite.
You’d think in an age of instant communication that would no longer be true. But the next day or so will tell us whether an answer Joe Biden gave in Houston mioght come back to haunt him.
Story Continued Below
Biden had been performing effectively throughout the first half of the debate, pushing back vigorously on the high costs of the “Medicare for All” plans proposed by his nearest opponents—Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who bookended him on stage. He took a body shot from Julián Castro, who (inaccurately) accused him of forgetting what he’d said a moment earlier, but didn’t crumple. He had a bad moment trying to explain his strategies for Iraq and Afghanistan, but overall it was shaping up as his best debate night so far.
Then the subject turned to the matter of race and inequality, and moderator Linsey Davis posed this question to Biden:
“In a conversation about how to deal with segregation in schools back in 1975, you told a reporter, ‘I don’t feel responsible for the sins of my father and grandfather, I feel responsible for what the situation is today, for the sins of my own generation and I’ll be damned if I feel responsible to pay for what happened 300 years ago.’ You said that some 40 years ago. But as you stand here tonight, what responsibility do you think that Americans need to take to repair the legacy of slavery in our country?”
There was a smile (some called it a “smirk”) on Biden’s face as he listened to the question. And he answered her this way:
“Well, they have to deal with the—look, there’s institutional segregation in this country. From the time I got involved, I started dealing with that. Redlining banks, making sure we are in a position where—look, you talk about education. I propose is we take the very poor schools, triple the amount of money we spend from $15 to $45 billion a year. Give every single teacher a raise to the $60,000 level. Number two, make sure that we bring in to help the teachers deal with the problems that come from home. The problems that come from home, we have one school psychologist for every 1,500 kids in America today. It’s crazy. The teachers are—I’m married to a teacher, my deceased wife is a teacher. They have every problem coming to them. Make sure that every single child does, in fact, have 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds go to school. Not day care, school. Social workers help parents deal with how to raise their children. It’s not like they don’t want to help, they don’t know what to do. Play the radio, make sure the television—excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, the—make sure that kids hear words, a kid coming from a very poor school, a very poor background will hear 4 million words fewer spoken by the time we get there.”
The post-debate commentariat pounced on the “record player” comment, noting that it suggested a lack of familiarity with more modern-day devices, like the eight-track tape or Walkman. It was viewed mostly as a proxy for his age, a self-inflicted wound from a candidate stuck somewhere in the 1970s technologically.But by Friday morning, attention had begun to shift to the broader and far more culturally fraught implications of what Biden was saying: Did he mean that black parents depended on an army of white people with degrees to help them raise their kids?
Anand Giridharadas, an author and editor-at-large at TIME magazine, helped trigger a Twitterstorm about the nature of Biden’s comments. “Right now, somewhere, in some newsroom, some brilliant journalist ought to be pitching a big analytical story parsing Joe Biden’s statement and explaining why it was so troubling—and ignored by so many people. It is a textbook example of the racism that is still respectable.”
There’s some anecdotal evidence that other journalists are already on the case.New Yorkmagazine writer Rebecca Traister wrote:
“Yes. Syntactically this reminded me of the viral Miss Teen USA answer from years ago. But the substance of what he was trying to say was much worse.” Journalist David Rothkopf wrote: “This is an important and accurate thread. I don’t believe Joe Biden is a bad person. I just think this once again reveals that he is not of this era or suited to lead for nearly the decade ahead.”New York Timescolumnist Jamelle Bouie joined the thread as well, while also noting the meandering nature of Biden’s words.
At the risk of stating the obvious: Biden’s lead in the polling rests in substantial measure on his enormous strength in the African-American community. It is why he is far ahead in South Carolina (where black people cast the majority of Democratic primary votes), while doing much less well in Iowa and New Hampshire. It is why sustaining that strength is crucial to his nomination chances; over the past decades, no Democrat has won the prize without winning the lion’s share of the African-American vote. Eroding that support is crucial to the hope of his rivals, which is why Kamala Harris went after him back in June on his self-proclaimed ability to work with Southern segregationists.
And it suggests that if the Twitterstorm gains salience over the next several days—if his comments are interpreted as cluelessly condescending at best—it poses a serious danger to his prospects.
Biden has some resources to deploy here. His embrace of Barack Obama, and the former president’s obvious affection for him, may insulate him from the criticism. And he has an army of African-American allies, who see him as a fighter for racial justice going back decades. Whether they jump to his defense, or begin to create distance, will be an early sign of whether this is a passing firestorm or something much, much worse.
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By Kody Fairfield
In a shocking, yet not so shocking, form of reverse sexism and oppression, a Huffington Post blogger is begging the question: Is it time to deny white men the right to vote?
Shelley Garland, an MA philosophy student and self proclaimed feminist (see: Social Justice Warrior) who you can typically find working on ways to, as she calls it, “smash the patriarchy,” took to her computer to take part in the regressive left’s inherently fallacious marketing program.
Her product to sell? Removing the right to vote, “the franchise,” from “white men.”
The Blog Post
Garland, whose article is subtly titled “Could It Be Time To Deny White Men The Franchise?,” starts off with a premise that the time for mass theft of another man’s labor, wealth redistribution, has come and since “white men own a disproportionate amount of wealth” around the world which they took through oppression, it’s about time they lose their power to vote. In fact, she directly blames the power held in the vote of “white men” for the stagnation of what she calls the “progressive cause.” This stagnation, she claims, has led to happenings such as the election of Donald Trump, Brexit, and the Democratic Alliance’s control of large South African cities.
The philosophy student attempts to make the most obvious and sophomoric argument, if you accept her premise, that if you oppress the oppressor, you get less oppression. “If white men no longer had the vote, the progressive cause would be strengthened,” she wrote.
The “white knighting” continues, with Garland directly blaming “reckless white males” and their power as a “primary” reason for the occurrence of “the Great Recession” in 2008. She argues that “a redistribution of global assets to their rightful owners,” would occur if we simply cut down the patriarchy’s power. She says that “white men” and “the imposition of Western legal systems around the world” are used to “reinforce modern capitalism,” and that the “violence of white male wealth and income inequality” needs to become part of the past.
Garland moves to defending her case for reverse oppression, making sure to touch on all of the usual talking points against the “patriarchy.”
“This redistribution of the world’s wealth is long overdue, and it is not just South Africa where white males own a disproportionate amount of wealth. While in South Africa 90 percent of the country’s land is in the hands of whites (it is safe to assume these are mainly men), along with 97 percent of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, this is also the norm in the rest of the world. Namibia has similar statistics with regard to land distribution and one can assume this holds for other assets too. As Oxfam notes eight men control as much as wealth as the poorest 50 percent of the world’s population. In the United States ten percent of the population (nearly all white) own 90 percent of all assets.”
What is funny about her defense however, is the fact that should there be a statistic she can’t find, she utilizes presumption to fill in the gaps. “It is likely that these assets are largely in the hands of males,” “Although statistics by race are difficult to find from other parts of the world, it is very likely that the majority of the world’s assets are in the hands of white males, despite them making up less than 10 percent of the world’s population,” she speculates.
In an attempt to reconnect her premise, Garland attempts to explain the ideologies behind the patriarchy, liberalism (including both conservatism and libertarianism), and how her idea of reverse oppression is a viable answer to its defeat. She argues, “These ideologies with their focus on individuals and individual responsibility, rather than group affiliation, allow white men to ignore the debt that they owe society, and from acknowledging that most of their assets, wealth, and privilege are the result of theft and violence.”
Now, Garland appeared, at least for a brief moment, to understanding that her ideas may appear a bit extreme, or larger than that, hypocritical (oppression traded for oppression). So instead of calling for the blanket and permanent removal of voting rights, she calls for a 20-30 year moratorium. She says that “it would not be necessary to deny white men indefinitely,” only long enough to see “a decline in the influence of reactionary and neo-liberal ideology in the world.” She continued, “a moratorium on the franchise for white males for a period of between 20 and 30 years is a small price to pay for the pain inflicted by white males on others, particularly those with black, female-identifying bodies. In addition, white men should not be stripped of their other rights, and this withholding of the franchise should only be a temporary measure, as the world rights the wrongs of the past.”
She concludes that, “It is time to wrestle control of the world back from white males, and the first step will be a temporary restriction of the franchise to them. Although this may seem unfair and unjust, allowing white males to continue to call the shots politically and economically, following their actions over the past 500 years, is the greater injustice.”
Response
Garland loves the coercion of government.
In response to Garland’s dramatic and misguided “white knighting” against the patriarchy, there are a few things that need to be addressed. The main issue is the hypocrisy of her tactic. The premise of her idea is that those outside of “white males” or the “patriarchy” have been oppressed, and are owed a sort of reparations. Ignoring the more nuanced arguments relating to the fact that the majority of grievances are ex post facto, the “feminist” is either okay with the existence of oppression, so long as it doesn’t occur to her or her community, or she is a hypocrite. Neither option is all that flattering and both prove she does not fundamentally understand the ground she preaches from.
Now, it is true that throughout history, there has been oppression, and that it has even matched her patriarchal view at times, but to pretend that reversing the direction of oppression is the answer, even in limited duration, is simply ludicrous. Simply play out her premise, and you are left to envision a world where oppression is constantly thrown from one victim to another. Garland argues for band-aiding the issue, not for the investigation of the cause.
Garland then attempts to connect capitalism, and liberalism to the patriarchy, summarizing, as was quoted above, that “these ideologies with their focus on individuals and individual responsibility, rather than group affiliation.”
The amount of fallacy in this is beyond the ability to hold back an eye roll.
First, the rise of capitalism, and innovation, NOT cronyism, directly correlate with a sharp decline in global poverty. In 2015, the Washington Examiner reported on a study conducted by Max Roser, a fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at Oxford University’s Martin School, which gave empirical data precisely to this notion.
From Rosen’s Study:
In 1820, according to data compiled by Roser*, the share of the global population living in poverty was 94 percent while 84 percent lived in “extreme” poverty. By 1992, the poverty rate had dropped to 51 percent, while the “extreme” poverty rate had dropped to 24 percent. Using a different measure of international poverty, the rate has dropped from 53 percent in 1981 to 17 percent in 2011 – representing the most rapid reduction in poverty in world history.”In the past only a small elite lived a life without poverty,” Roser explains. “Since the onset of industriali[z]ation – and as a consequence of this, economic growth — the share of people living in poverty started decreasing and kept on falling ever since.”‘
The Cato Institute, a liberty think tank, has also done studies regarding the correlation of poverty and capitalism, calling the defeat of “global poverty, capitalism’s triumph.”
Even the band U2’s lead singer Bono understands this notion.
“Commerce (and) entrepreneurial capitalism takes more people out of poverty than aid. … In dealing with poverty here and around the world, welfare and foreign aid are a Band-Aid. Free enterprise is a cure. … Entrepreneurship is the most sure way of development.” – 2013 speech at Georgetown University
In the end, Garland’s argumentum ad passiones is just that: emotional playwriting. Like many of today’s generation, it is her attempt to look as if she is doing something to “raise awareness for” or “create momentum for” a cause of which she doesn’t understand. She plays in the world of false dichotomy, ignoring nuanced details about the history (causes) of events, and attempts to pat herself on the back for being “compassionate” and “sympathetic.”
Unfortunately, the world has scars, people are inherently flawed, and will continue to make mistakes, but you do not fix oppression by shifting its application. You fix it by empowering the individuals being oppressed. By allowing each person to become the best they are capable of being: freeing innovation, and exploration, while allowing people to associate or disassociate with ideas or things as they will.
Force or coercion, as suggested, never create “good,” only fear and anger. In fact, it is exactly why the idea of the “patriarchy” exists in the first place.
(Author’s Note: While my name comes off as your typical patriarchal white privileged cis male, most are shocked to know I have more hispanic or latin blood, being second generation United States from Mexico, than I do European.)
EDITOR’s NOTE: The views expressed are those of the author, they are not representative of The Libertarian Republic or its sponsors.
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"Trump is mercurial in his cruelty, waiting until people are in dire need to punish them, often based on sheer bigotry and racism. Most recently he has refused to let desperate people from the Bahamas enter the United States after their homes were destroyed by Hurricane Dorian."
"He tells his subordinates to break the law as they execute his plans and promises to pardon them if they do so. He fires people on a whim in order to ensure their loyalty. He ignores any restraints on his power as mandated by the Constitution."
Social psychologists explain new research showing Trump supporters are addicted to chaos — and warn the comedown won’t be pretty(I'm sick and tired of the chaos in the Trump administration. I would give anything to return to the days of "No Drama Obama".)
BY CHAUNCEY DEVEGA | Published September 17, 2019 1:50 PM ET | Salon Magazine | Posted September 17, 2019
Donald Trump is the King of Chaos. He has lied at least 12,000 times since becoming president of the United States.
These lies are often obvious and lazy — such as incorrectly claiming that Hurricane Dorian would hit Alabama and then forcing scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to parrot his lies. Trump’s lies are made no less dangerous when they happen to be lazy and obvious.
Trump is unapologetic and unabashed in his contempt for American democracy and the rule of law. Many mental health professionals have concluded he is unwell. He lacks impulse control and evidences sociopathic behavior.
Trump acts like a self-styled mob boss — a corrupt bully who forces his subordinates to “kick up” to him.
America’s own spies do not trust our unpredictable president to act responsibly with the country’s secrets.
Trump is mercurial in his cruelty, waiting until people are in dire need to punish them, often based on sheer bigotry and racism. Most recently he has refused to let desperate people from the Bahamas enter the United States after their homes were destroyed by Hurricane Dorian.
He tells his subordinates to break the law as they execute his plans and promises to pardon them if they do so. He fires people on a whim in order to ensure their loyalty. He ignores any restraints on his power as mandated by the Constitution.
Progress is under assault in America as Trump and his allies are overturning the human and civil rights of nonwhites, women, LGBT people, the disabled and everyone else he and his movement deem to be “less than” and the Other.
Chaos is at the nucleus Age of Trump. This chaos and the disruption and destruction it causes manifest in many ways.
Trumpism is a form of backlash politics fueled by white rage at a perceived loss of privilege and power in a more diverse and cosmopolitan world. Trumpism is a temper tantrum along the global color line fueled by anxieties about power and social dominance.
Writing in the journal Contemporary Sociology, Jeffrey Alexander offers this context:
Backlash does not occur because conservative cadres and followers are anti-modern, irrational, or even unusually bigoted. Backlash is triggered, rather, because ideal and material structures of the status quo have been abruptly displaced, and those who occupied those structures wish to return to the time before displacement, when they were sitting and standing in what was obviously, and not just in retrospect, a better place.
In their 2016 article “Trump, Brexit, and the Rise of Populism,” social scientists Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris also locate Trumpism as part of a global right-wing movement that is channeling what they describe as “retro backlash.” This is a feeling “especially among the older generation, white men, and less educated sectors, who sense decline and actively reject the rising tide of progressive values, resent the displacement of familiar traditional norms, and provide a pool of supporters potentially vulnerable to populist appeals.”
Trumpism is doing the work of “accelerationism” — an ideology which holds that the destruction of the existing social order must be hastened, regardless of the human cost, so that a new and “better” world can be created. Trumpism is a means through which a right-wing, reactionary version of accelerationism is being enacted in the United States.
Writing in the Guardian, Andy Beckett summarizes the goals of accelerationist thinkers: “They often favour the deregulation of business, and drastically scaled-back government. They believe that people should stop deluding themselves that economic and technological progress can be controlled. They often believe that social and political upheaval has a value in itself.”
Predictably, white supremacists and other right-wing terrorists have embraced accelerationism because they understand it to be a viable strategy for destroying multiracial society.
Going beyond a conceptual framework, new research shows how backlash politics and accelerationism are lived through and experienced by Trump’s supporters — and make clear that Trump’s hold on them will be difficult if not impossible to break.
In their new award-winning research paper “A ‘Need for Chaos’ and the Sharing of Hostile Political Rumors in Advanced Democracies,” political scientists Michael Bang Petersen, Mathias Osmundsen and Kevin Arceneaux show that Donald Trump’s supporters are attracted to chaos and want to inflict it on others. They reached this conclusion by surveying a representative sample of approximately 6,000 people in Denmark (a country with comparatively low political polarization) and the United States.
The researchers asked the subjects if they agreed with the following statements:
I fantasize about a natural disaster wiping out most of humanity such that a small group of people can start all over
I think society should be burned to the ground
Sometimes I just feel like destroying beautiful things
There is no right and wrong in the world
The answers were compiled in an index that Petersen, Osmundsen and Arceneaux label as “Need for Chaos.” They do not bode well for liberal democracy. Nearly one in four respondents, 24 percent, agreed that society should be burned to the ground, while a remarkable 40 percent agreed with the statement, “We cannot fix the problems in our social institutions, we need to tear them down and start over.” Similarly, 40 percent agreed with the statement, “When it comes to our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking ‘just let them all burn.’”
In their paper Petersen, Osmundsen, and Arceneaux describe their findings as “staggering.” They write:
The extreme discontent expressed in the “Need for Chaos” scale is a minority view but it is a minority view with incredible amounts of support. … A substantial minority of individuals are so discontent that they are willing to mobilize against the current political order to see if what emerges from the resulting chaos has something better in stock for them.
People who measure high in “Need for Chaos” are also more likely to circulate conspiracy theories online. This is done not out of sincere belief but rather from a desire to cause chaos and confusion.
Right-wing authoritarians — a group that strongly correlates with Trump supporters and Republicans — are also emotionally immature. This is the conclusion of social psychologist Alain Van Hiel and his colleagues in their new paper “The Relationship Between Emotional Abilities and Right-Wing and Prejudiced Attitudes.“ Van Hiel explained his findings to the website PsyPost.
The results of this study were univocal. People who endorse authority and strong leaders and who do not mind inequality — the two basic dimensions underlying right-wing political ideology — show lower levels of emotional abilities.
When one includes the findings of other research showing that Trump supporters and other conservatives) are likely to exhibit what psychologists call the “dark triad” of human behavior — Machiavellianism, psychopathy and narcissism — we must consider the possibility of significant political violence if and when Trump is removed from office.
Donald Trump’s movement is a type of political body. The brain consists of ideologues, whether they work in the White House (like Stephen Miller), right-wing think tanks and interest groups, the Republican Party, Fox News and other elite groupings. These people see Trumpism as their best chance to destroy America’s multiracial democracy, profit from environment disaster, gut the social safety net, destroy the commons, slash taxes on the wealthy and large corporations, or (in extreme cases) install a Christian nationalist regime.
The muscles, bones, guts and sinew of Trump’s political body are his coalition of white right-wing evangelicals, white suburbanites who do not care about democracy or the country’s overall health as long as their 401(k) accounts continue to grow, and bigoted, rage-filled members of the infamous “white working class.”
Does Donald Trump’s political body and fascist movement have a heart? Yes. But it is an organ incapable of caring, concern, empathy or concern for human dignity. Nevertheless, the Trumpist heart beats hard and fast.
Last Friday, the Wall Street Journal presented an intimate profile of the beating heart of Trump’s political body. These are his superfans, people who have attended dozens of Trump’s political rallies, traveling all over the country to show devotion to their Great Leader.
Donald Trump is their drug. And like other drugs he fills an emotional, spiritual and intellectual void for his supporters:
All of them describe, in different ways, a euphoric flow of emotions between themselves and the president, a sort of adrenaline-fueled, psychic cleansing that follows 90 minutes of chanting and cheering with 15,000 other like-minded Trump junkies.
“Once you start going, it’s kind of like an addiction, honestly,” said April Owens, a 49-year-old financial manager in Kingsport, Tenn., who has been to 11 rallies. “I love the energy. I wouldn’t stand in line for 26 hours to see any rock band. He’s the only person I would do this for, and I’ll be here as many times as I can.”
Like other addicts, these Donald Trump’s supporters convince themselves that their addiction is somehow good and normal:
Just before midnight on the eve of the Cincinnati rally, about two dozen fans lounged in lawn chairs or leaned on metal bike racks, scrolling through their phones and sipping from cans of Coors Light. A soft brown blanket covered Ms. Barten and her 12-year-old granddaughter, who slept sitting up in her camp chair.
The 57-year-old Air Force veteran’s disability check is reduced by $5 every month by an automatic donation to the Trump campaign.
“We’re not rich by any means,” Ms. Barten said. “But I’ll tell you what: When we’re rich in our hearts with our country and our president, we’re richer than anybody.”
Donald Trump delivers human cocaine for his followers. He is is both a cult leader and a political drug dealer. Inevitably, Trump’s voters will come crashing down from their political cocaine high. Unfortunately, they will not suffer alone in well-deserved and hard-earned misery. Instead, we can expect them will lash out against the rest of the American people and the world in a fit of destruction and chaos.
Chauncey DeVega is a politics staff writer for Salon. His essays can also be found at Chaunceydevega.com. He also hosts a weekly podcast, The Chauncey DeVega Show. Chauncey can be followed on Twitter and Facebook.
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