#whitelash

[odinsblog]

Prologue

As a new high school principal, Dr. Whitfield felt moved by the national renouncement of racism he saw all around him in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. It prompted him to write a thoughtful email to parents and teachers in his district. He got lots of praise for it. Less than a year later that same email would threaten his job. (listen)

Incident

During her sophomore year in high school, Nevaeh was targeted in a secret text message chain by a handful of her peers. She’d come to learn the text chat was a mock slave trade where her photo and photos of other Black classmates were uploaded, talked about as property and bid on. Emanuele Berry talks to Nevaeh about what these messages mean to her now, and how she’s navigated her town’s reaction over this, and her close friendships with kids who mostly aren’t Black. (listen)

The Farce Awakens

After the murder of George Floyd, sales of books by Black authors skyrocketed. Now, there are efforts to ban many of the same books. Producer Chana Joffe-Walt talks to author Jerry Craft, who is caught up in this backlash with his graphic novel New Kid. (listen)

[kemetic-dreams]

White immigrants weren’t always considered white — and acceptable

Italians, Greeks, Poles, Hungarians, Slavs and other European groups had to overcome prejudice over many years

By Brando Simeo Starkey@BrandoStarkey

Who, exactly, is white?

The answer sounds obvious — we know a white person when we see one, we think. But when Italians poured into America in the late 1800s and early 1900s, they were not considered white upon arrival. A century later, though, when Teresa Giudice of The Real Housewives of New Jersey maniacally hoisted a table on national television, she did not do so as a member of a supposedly inferior people. No, she was a crazy white lady throwing furniture.

The story of how European immigrants during that era became white enlightens us on our current political realities. Italians, Greeks, Poles, Hungarians, Slavs and other European groups, at the time called “new immigrants,” sought to overcome their subordination by showing, through their behavior, to be deserving of being considered white.

In 1911, Henry Pratt Fairchild, an influential American sociologist, said about new immigrants, “If he proves himself a man, and … acquires wealth and cleans himself up — very well, we might receive him in a generation or two. But at present he is far beneath us, and the burden of proof rests with him.” They ultimately met that burden and crucial to their success was that they were not black and they actively helped in maintaining a racist society.

Newly arrived immigrants disembark from the passenger steamer Thomas C. Millard upon their arrival at Ellis Island in New York in the early 20th century.

BAIN NEWS SERVICE/INTERIM ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES

The influx of new immigrants led to apocalyptic predictions about the impending doom awaiting America — foreigners would impose their inferior biology, peculiar religious practices, and substandard ways of living onto this country, lowering an elevated civilization. Many held that they were not white, rather members of a lower biological order. The kinder view held they were simply culturally inferior — dirty, less intelligent, criminal-prone — but could assimilate.

Not being considered white led to new immigrant misery. Economist Robert F. Forester wrote in 1924, “in a country where the distinction between white man and black is intended as a distinction of value … it is no compliment to the Italian to deny him his whiteness, but that actually happens with considerable frequency.”

Greeks, for example, fretted about being mistaken for Puerto Ricans, mulattoes or Mexicans. J.D. Ross, an Alabama politician, dubbed himself the “white man’s candidate” and campaigned on Greek disenfranchisement. In Utah, Greek and Italian copper miners were classified as “nonwhite.” White workers in Steelton, Pennsylvania, refused to take “hunky jobs” — jobs traditionally held by Hungarians — even during the poor economy of 1908, preferring unemployment.

New immigrants had a choice — fight for inclusion into the white race or align with people of color, who they knew fared even worse than them. One Serbian worker said during the era, “You soon know something about this country. … Negroes never get a fair chance.”

They chose whiteness and sought to demonstrate their cultural and biological fitness. They soon learned, though, when whites said “prove yourself,” helping protect and expand white supremacy was considered convincing evidence.

They watched whites abuse blacks, mimicked whatever they saw and whiteness — the carrot they had long reached for — slowly came closer to their grasp.

Essayist James Baldwin frequently mused on how whiteness was made. How did whites become white? “By informing their children,” Baldwin wrote, “that black women, black men and black children had no human integrity that those who call themselves white were bound to respect. And in this debasement and definition of black people, they debased and defined themselves.”

As one Slovakian woman in Connecticut said, “I always tell my children not to play with the nigger people’s children, but they always play with them just the same … This place now is all spoiled, and all the people live like pigs because the niggers they come and live here with the decent white people and they want to raise up their children with our children.”

Ship loaded with immigrants, coming to New York. A Greek family embarking on Ellis Island to come to America.

GETTY IMAGES

New immigrants hungered for home ownership, even penny-pinching just to own property. Thus, when New Deal-era politics put home ownership at the center of the American dream by making more families homeowners, whites needed new immigrants’ assistance in making Negro-free neighborhoods.

In the early 20th century, new immigrants in many cities were more segregated than were blacks. By the 1950s, the opposite was true. With these new immigrants living in the same neighborhoods, intermarrying, attending the same schools, mingling, and, most importantly, committing racism against black folk, through successive generations, they became white.

As this tale demonstrates, whites have agreed to privilege themselves over nonwhites. Moral revulsion has compelled many whites to opt out of this agreement. Yet, some white Americans pin their hopes on whiteness, as did the new immigrants, and, therefore, the siren song of a politician promising to enhance the social and economic value of white skin seduces them.

The story of how new immigrants became white teaches us whites can look at people they once deemed their inferiors and consider them part of their team.

President Barack Obama remarked that racial advancement doesn’t proceed in a straight forward-moving line. Instead, moments of progress give way to regressions. He’s right. And whether white supremacy surges or wanes modulates this phenomenon.

I believe we will witness a moment of racial triumph in the future, and elation will overwhelm those longing for a racially fair-minded America. The next “whitelash,” however, can only be prevented if whites conclude that joining with nonwhite peoples of similar socioeconomic standing will bring them closer to happiness than seeking to protect white privilege.

The work to overcome white supremacy will exhaust the nation. Given the stakes, however, the work is worth pursuing.

[saturnniidae]

Why does Alien feel like if it was made only a few years later the second to last surviving characters would not be a black man and a woman

[maiteo]

hopefully our le8ends made you feel a little better lovely💗

le8ends😭 I love it & tysm amor🫶🏽

i was just heated bc they shut this city down & fawked up my classes/campus so this right wing goofy ass governor could get sworn in tmrw….I was having a good day before that abjsksk😭

[thatwritererinoriordan]

[mariacallous]

If we win in November, I hope that going forward, the Democrats never see a white/white presidential ticket again. Our diversity is a major source of our strength and momentum. And if that's the case, if we have a solid eight years of Harris/Walz, I think the trickle-down effect might finally force the GOP to confront their party's core white supremacy problem; if the Dems keep putting forward tickets with people of color on them, and Republicans never do, it'll only highlight that the GOP is the party of white supremacy.

I hate Republicans but to have them finally stop being the whites only party would be a net-positive for the entire country and it's absolutely necessary for us as a country for them to cross that hurdle. We can disagree on taxes and foreign policy or whatever, but we cannot have one of the two major parties continue to be the KKK with the hoods off. And I think the fastest way to get us there is for the Democrats to never have a white/white presidential ticket again.

Don't get me wrong, I know a Harris presidency is going to lead to another big whitelash like we saw during Obama. And in particular, I think we're going to have a reckoning with white leftists (your Bernie Bro types) who are going to get very uppity once they finally realize they're the minority in the Democratic Party. But I think Democrats only ever running POC/white, white/POC, or POC/POC tickets going forward is the future.

I tend to agree, tbh

[hiriajuu-suffering]

Kamala aunty and the Hindu vote

Getting this out of the way, I'm voting for Kamala Harris. Biden really should've dropped out two months ago, and there's no other corporate democrat I would really endorse besides her, and not because of the identity politics. Well, sort of. If the Republican primary taught us anything, is a person of South Asian descent will continue to be the ideological punching bag of the white community.

South Asian men get deleted so hard I can't even find a GIF of Vivek Ramaswamy

How Kamala was treated the past four years by the democratic administration of Biden's was nothing short of egregious. Every impossible problem to solve she was blamed for with no tools address the root cause, and she stayed in there looking dumb like a loyal corporate employee. Now the entire system is banking on the political capital they were sweeping from underneath her to stop a literal convicted felon from retaking power and pardoning himself.

Not to mention the states where votes actually mattered 8 years ago were too sexist to put in a woman in power before, so now we're hoping a woman of color would go over better?

Candace Owens already showed how envious she is of Kamala's biracial swag with some really dumb comments.

Her black half isn't what's the issue is, because she embodies a lot more blackness than Asianness in her disposition to the American psyche. And the precedent for half black Presidents that perfectly fall within the cookie-cutter corporate democrat on policy has already been set.

It's her Asian side that might stoke the xenophobia that caused the whitelash red wave of 2016; y'know, because she's going to be subject to nearly the same misogyny Hilary was.

As an Asian-American, Kamala Harris and Andrew Yang weren't just the two candidates I identified most with, they were the best candidates in that primary, period. But they got dismissed and belittled so immensely because of the need to appeal to milk-toast whiteness. Republicans pander hard to grab minority votes, Democrats just avoid putting any minorities in significant positions influence. Don't believe me? Seen any LBGTQ+ positions in real moving and shaking positions?

The DEI stuff the right is going to criticize the entire scope and sequence of how Kamala became the candidate isn't good or fair, but it's not entirely wrong. Because of just how hollow the Democratic Party treats anyone with the poor affliction of being a minority.

There's a key part of the South Asian diaspora Biden lost exactly that Kamala herself is a part of, which makes things interesting to say the least..

Kamala does have the best policy on Israel of any candidate, but that's not saying much since her policy is essentially Obama-lite.

But that means she might lose her own identity vote on just that considering how abhorrently Islamophobic naturalized Indian-Americans have gotten in their support of Narendra Modi

I don't care how effective the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue has been at curbing Chinese aggression, the Nationalist imagery isn't a good sign for any society, really.

Especially when Muslim civil rights in India have all but evaporated. Nikki Haley wasn't particularly bad on Muslim civil rights compared to other Republicans, even as a half-Indian, she didn't buddy up to Modi (probably because he's done more to encourage gender-based violence in India than stop it), and I expect Kamala to actually get the misogynistic slander from conservative Indians because the hyperpatriarchy only comes when it comes to the opposition.

Being half Brahmin though certainly can't hurt her chances with her Hindu base, right? Well, Hindu men certainly have deeper roots in the red pill movement then we'd like to believe, and the first ones they point the finger towards are Hindu women that didn't choose them. Nikki Haley was polling better but Vivek Ramaswamy ate up her press pretty handily. Everyone sees Asian feminine beauty as valuable, but our misogynistic standards prevent us from seeing that type of ethnic image as leadership-worthy.

At least it's not Gavin Newsom. But that might not be enough for South Asian American males dissatisfied with their lot in life. Trump's message is appealing to us because it feeds into our vanity and takes responsibility off us as to why our sisters are meeting the model minority myth and we aren't. While we're not solely to blame, at least the right has some crazy narrative that explains why life didn't turn out to what was expected of us, even if that narrative twists it in a way that will end up just making us feel more isolated, because the right has the most racist women in the country, bar-none.

Well, women on both sides of the political spectrum are equally pretty racist in their courtship preferences, it's just liberal women will explain things in vague externalities and icks rather than being a sign for public restrooms in pre-1963 America.

In either case, this is a biracial black woman who was never in touch with the struggles of an Asian man, never really having been related to one even though she's an Asian woman. To a lot of Asian men, Trump is just more of what we expect of the lunacy of American politics, versus Kamala might be one of those people who actively makes us feel subhuman by being of the same race but still treating us as less than, like many desi women have been doing since biracial marriages within 1st generation South Asian Americans began getting normalized.

The normative view has to become where femininity isn't inherently more attractive than masculinity, especially so that women aren't just fit to be more educated and start making more, but actually lead society in meaningful ways.

I think if you're an AAPI in any capacity and you're not voting for Kamala Harris, you're missing the point somehow. But we're not the movers and makers of these elections, because we always reside in states that are firmly blue or red (well, at least until 2016 when Georgia did a thing). Kamala Harris's black vote definitely extends further than Biden's, but by less than makes actual sense. Can't do much worse than Biden on the Hispanic vote, but Kamala Harris if anyone is how you do that.

So if there's fundamentally just about how identity works in America, we will have a POTUS 47 in 2025. But we've learned the two decades in America has been anything fair to identity. Heck, as a Muslim teacher of a liberal arts content area in a red state I feel at the time. My supervisors won't make exceptions for me they readily make for anyone else, not that they were requirements to begin with, just because my identity bears the ugliest parts of the model minority myth. I don't look Asian enough to be Asian, and the media makes my ethnic identity look to threatening to be trusted with novel ideas, at least.

That's at least something this candidate and I have in common. Biraciality and Multiethnicity isn't well understood in our discussions of intersectionality in social and political discourse. The only people that try to make sense of it are the ones that actively try to erode the ethnic barriers enclaves self-segregate on. Kamala has had to think about that because it's a fundamental part of her identity.

I'm not voting on identity or identity politics, as the right would claim I will. I'm voting because at least this candidate has the capacity to understand me, because they're not a white, entitled, spoiled brat that tried to overthrow the government when he didn't get his way. Y'know, fundamental stuff like that.

Because I'm still American through-and-through, regardless of what my ethnic background is. What's more American than having a minority prosecutor in a liberal enclave? That's literally one of the top 5 career options every desi child is given when they think about their careers.

So yeah, Kamala2024. Bite me.

[starblightbindery]

Editor's Note from The Black Sands of Socorro by Patricia A. Jackson

While researching Patricia A. Jackson’s entire body of Star Wars work for a short story anthology, I came across the West End Games sourcebook Star Wars: The Black Sands of Socorro (1997.) It’s a crucial work of Star Wars ephemera: The first creator of color writing for Star Wars in an official capacity, writing not just about individual characters of color, but centering entire cultures populated by non-white characters. A young Black woman in the 1990s wrote science fiction for Star Wars, worldbuilding with concepts like antislavery, indigeneity, linguistic divergence, and settler colonialism...while Disney-Lucasfilm in the 2020s ineffectually positions Star Wars as a post-racial fantasy.

I non-hyperbolically refer to Patricia A. Jackson as the “Octavia Butler of Star Wars,” not because fans of color need to be officially sanctioned by Lucasfilm to create Star Wars content, but because of how difficult it is to carve out anti-racist space in a transmedia storytelling empire. Challenging even in transformational fandom spaces (e.g. fan works), to broach race in affirmational fandom spaces—or while writing content for the property holder—is to be unflinchingly subversive.

And Jackson did it first. In an interview with Rob Wolf in 2022, Jackson described her experience writing race into Star Wars in the 1990s as an “experiment.” The planet, peoples, and cultures of Socorro were a way for Jackson to obliquely, yet concretely, center Blackness and racial justice into Star Wars, pushing the racial allegory constrained by the original trilogy to its limits.

Since it’s inception, Star Wars has spent much of it’s storytelling on the fringes of the galaxy (whether it’s Tatooine or Jakku, Nevarro or Ajan Kloss.) The Black Sands of Socorro is an extension of that trope, but where the Star Wars films used indigeneity as set dressing (eg. “Sand People”, Ewoks, Gungans, etc.) Jackson creates a vivid world where indigenous culture and settler colonists collide; where characters are coded with dark skin and central to the action. The planet Socorro is distinct as a Star Wars setting. As one of the only places in the galaxy where slavery is eradicated with a vengeance, Socorro refuses to let go of a plot line Star Wars media often leaves behind. Socorro is a haven from Imperial fascism, a space where readers are invited to imagine a story that does not center around occupation.

When I learned that Patricia A. Jackson no longer has a physical copy of The Black Sands of Socorro, I realized that I had the materials and the means to create a fanbound hard copy for her home library (well, and also for my own home library.) While this handmade book is not an exact reproduction of the RPG supplement, I hope my renvisioning of the supplement as an in-universe travel guide lives up to the original work.

As the idea of creating a travel guidebook based on the original material percolated, I reflected on the State of Race in Star Wars in the year since I compiled Designs of Fate, an anthology of my favorite Patricia A. Jackson short stories. In May 2022, actress Moses Ingram debuted as Inquisitor Reva Sevander, the deuteragonist in the Dinsey+ streaming Obi-Wan Kenobi series. As predicted by Lucasfilm—and any fan sick of alt-right Star Wars related “whitelash”—Ingram was promptly subjected to a firehose of racialized harassment and misogynoir.

Yep, fascist self-proclaimed fanboys complained about a Black woman Inquisitor in 2022, having no idea (or deliberately whitewashing) that one of creators of the entire freakin’ concept of Inquisitors was a Black woman writing for the Star Wars Adventure Journal three decades ago.

Then, a public facing Star Wars account (@StarWars on Twitter) broke precedent and slapped back at the trolls. Lead actor Ewan McGregor filmed a video retort, posted on @StarWars, stating “racism has no place in this world” and telling off the racist bullies: “you’re no Star Wars fan in my mind.” A few months later, Disney+ debuted it’s second flagship Star Wars streaming series of the year, starring a Latino actor as the protagonist. In the opening episode of Andor, a police chief describes Diego Luna’s eponymous lead as a “dark-featured human,” perhaps the closest the franchise has ever gotten to acknowledging out-of-universe constructions of race, to date. The series explored aspects of imperialism with more depth than Star Wars had previously done on screen, such as the Empire’s treatment of the native people of Aldhani. And, in November, the The Acolyte, a Disney+ series co-developed by Rayne Roberts, announced Amandla Stenberg and Korean actor Lee Jung-jae as its top-billed leads. Stenberg will be the first Gen Z, mixed race, Black, Inuit, queer, and non-binary actor to lead a major Star Wars series.

On the Patricia A. Jackson Star Wars front, in 2022, Jackson’s character Fable Astin was an easter egg in the Obi-Wan Kenobi series. Jackson will again write for Star Wars in an official capacity in From a Certain Point of View: Return of the Jedi, due for publication in Fall 2023. A series about Lando Calrissian, the galaxy’s most famous Socorran, is still in production, so I have my fingers crossed that we may soon see Socorro on camera.

I wonder if this past year will have been a fulcrum year for BIPOC fandom. Maybe Disney has finally realized it’s bad for business that the alt-right uses social media algorithms and Star Wars fan spaces as a soft recruiting ground to radicalize young white men? Maybe Star Wars as a franchise will continue to loudly disavow fan whitelash and firmly position performers of color in true leading roles? I really hope so. On the other hand, as much as I am in favor of increased representation in Star Wars storytelling, I am also troubled by Disney-Lucasfilm’s framing of the Galaxy Far, Far Away (GFFA) as “colorblind.” Recently, Star Wars fans have been asked to accept that in the (a long time ago) sci-fi futurepast GFFA, humans have always been post-racial, and it’s just a coincidence that racialized people were not caught on camera the way white characters have been for years. The galaxy is post-racial and it’s just acoincidence that the movers and shakers of the galaxy have largely been depicted as white men for the past 40 years of media.

For example, in the decade since Disney rebooted the expanded universe, fans have learned that Star Wars’s biggest galactic war criminal to never be depicted on screen is Admiral Rae Sloane, a bisexual Black woman who was the leader of Imperial remnant forces, one of the architects of the First Order, and personal mentor to General Hux. Under Disney-Lucasfilm’s post-racial retcon of the Star Wars universe, the allegorical fascists are intersectional equal opportunity employers (at least in expanded universe content like animation, video games, and novels.) Along those lines, several of the franchise’s newly introduced, prominent women of color have been part of the Empire: Imperial loyalist Cienna Ree (Lost Stars), Inferno Squad leader Iden Versio (Star Wars: Battlefront II) former stormtrooper Jannah (Episode IX), First Order pilot Tamara Ryvora (Star Wars: Resistance), Inquisitor Trilla Sundari (Jedi: Fallen Order), Captain Terisa Kerrill (Star Wars: Squadron) and, most recently, Inquisitor Reva Sevander. Once the sole purview of stodgy, very white and very British men (demonstrably so even in the sequel trilogy movies,) now anyone can be a stooge of the Empire.

That’s not to say that marginalized people can’t collude with fascism, or that there haven’t been heroic characters of color introduced in recent years. Rather, I posit that in order to sell audiences on the post-racial/colorblind GFFA, fascist-of-color characters like Rae Sloane or Giancarlo Esposito’s Moff Gideon (The Mandalorian) are created by necessity. The franchise wants to at once be racially inclusive and yet never directly address race. In Star Wars, real world oppression is primarily explored through allegory—such as Solo (2018)’s bit on droid rights, the clone army, or the myriad of non-human alien bodies that nonetheless are coded with racial stereotypes. A lot has been said about how allegory in sci-fi allows audiences to grapple with inequality from a comfortable distance, and not enough has been said about which audience is being prioritized for comfort.

What does it mean when race is supposedly a non-issue for humans in the GFFA, but creators and actors with marginalized identities cannot participate in Star Wars in any capacity without experiencing identity-targeted harassment? In the past ten years, this has been true even for white women like Kathleen Kennedy and Daisy Ridley, but the vitriol has been most strongly directed towards Black women like Lucasfilm Story Group lead Kiri Hart, author Justina Ireland and The High Republic Show host Krystina Arielle. Can the Galaxy Far, Far Away truly be “colorblind” or “post-racial” (never-racial?) if the narrative continually centers white characters and replicates all the common racial inequities seen in commercialized Hollywood storytelling? Upon the release of The Force Awakens in 2015, critic Andre Seewood aptly described Finn’s positioning in the story as “hyper-⁠tokenism,” even presciently predicting that Finn would continue to be hyper-⁠tokenized in Episodes VIII and IX. As the narrative veered away from Finn, it also left unrealized a stormtrooper rebellion plot line where Finn could have been, in effect, a Black abolitionist. Actor John Boyega’s critique of his experience in the sequel trilogy aligns with Seewald’s assessment: “Do not bring out a Black character, market them to be much more important to the franchise than they are and then have them pushed to the side.”

Published in 1997, The Black Sands of Socorro came before Finn, before Mace Windu, back when all the melanin of Star Wars could be found in Billy Dee Williams’s singular swagger and James Earl Jones’s distinctive voice. Back then, the most prominent Black actress in the original trilogy was dancer Femi Taylor, who played Oola, the hypersexualized green twi’lek fed to the rancor in Return of the Jedi. Bantam Spectra, the publisher that held the license for Star Wars from 1991 to 1999, had no leading characters of color in its’ Expanded Universe. The first full length Star Wars novel by a writer of color, Steven Barnes’s The Cestus Deception15, would not be published until 2004. Even though the book featured two protagonists of color, they would not be depicted on the cover. At Comic-Con in 2010, I spoke with Tom Taylor, a white Australian comic book writer who tried to make the lead family in Star Wars: Invasion (2009) a Black one, but was shut down during the creative process. The comic instead depicts a family of blondes, because the publishers did not think fans would embrace leads of color. All this to say, the inclusion of melanated characters in Star Wars has been so, so hard fought. It’s incredible The Black Sands of Socorro exists at all. It’s more than worthy of celebration, and I’m floored that more attention has not been brought to it.

Patricia A. Jackson is a smuggler.

This sourcebook was explicitly written to assist fans in telling their own Star Wars stories, and in it Patricia A. Jackson smuggled in emphatic allusions to the Black Panther movement and the trans-Atlantic slave trade, smuggled in commentary on indigeneity and settler colonialism, and smuggled in multiple ways for fans to envision characters of color. Her writing has consistently added richness to the GFFA, and in The Black Sands of Socorro she envisions multiple histories for multiple cultures coded as non-white. She ensured the existence of not mere tokens, but flourishing societies of people of color in Star Wars.

The coda for The Last Jedi again shows how perilously close to tokenization characters of color, particularly Black characters, are in modern day Star Wars. In this film, the franchise returns to itsprevious exploration of slavery with the depiction of enslaved children on Canto Bight. The last speaking lines of the film are from Oniho Zaya (played by Josiah Oniha, a young Black British actor) who recounts Luke Skywalker’s heroic exploits to the other children. The film then closes out by showing that one of the downtrodden children is Force-sensitive—a future hero in the Star Wars mythos. In a film where every single Force-user depicted is white, the next generation kid with the potential is, again, a young white boy. Once again, the Black character can only serve the narrative in a supporting role. A franchise depicting a colorblind fantasy continually reifies racial and gender hierarchies in America. With The Acolyte, scheduled for release in 2024, it’s possible the franchise may finally be shifting past hyper-tokenism. In the meantime, fans of color and our erstwhile allies will continue doodling in the margins.

In the end, the sequel trilogy left the Canto Bight plot line (and the overarching slavery plot line started in Episode I) unresolved. I’d like to think the Black Bha’lir strafed Canto Bight and grabbed those kids. It seems like something they would do. Out among the stars, Oniho Zaya is adventuring with Drake Paulsen, and his story does not bracket another characters’; he is central. The Black Sands of Socorro is a launching pad for stories like that. It represents how fans of color have always carved out pieces of Star Wars for ourselves.

[nodynasty4us]

What we call backlash at certain moments is really a long-running “whitelash” that’s intricately woven into American history and currently targets not just Black people, but any group that threatens a shifting consensus of who is American and who is not.

The ‘American Whitelash’ Is Far From Over - POLITICO

[odinsblog]

where OJ Simpson died , what your thoughts on his abuse of his two wives and nicole brown and rod goldman's families , i know every women of color experience domestic violence , i saw black women cheer that oj is dead, has gotten away from murder

I wish I had something more poignant to say, but when I heard about OJ Simpson’s death the only things I thought about were,

1) Nicole Brown Simpson. She was a victim of femicide, and unfortunately,

2) I cannot help but remember how fucking mad white people were. Literally for years afterwards. And I’m not trying to excuse OJ or anything, but I was a kid when all that happened. Like not even a teenager. And I remember being interrogated by my white school mates, and I also remember being treated a lot more harshly than normal by my white teachers (lol, and I can count on one finger the number of Black teachers I had from kindergarten to high school)

For clarity, I dO believe that OJ murdered Nicole and her boyfriend and I am not making excuses for OJ

I just keep thinking about how the L.A. riots happened only two years prior, and how A LOT of the racist cops involved in OJ’s arrest were patently racist — they caught Mark Furman on audio tape freely slinging the n-word, and other (white) cops were totes cool with that

White people were sO fucking angry. Like, not angry because a woman was murdered, but because it was a Black man who murdered her, a literal blonde haired Guinevere

It was the same kind of whitelash that got Emmett Till murdered, and the same kind of white anger that landed the Central Park 5 and countless other Black men in prison. If Nicole was a Black woman (or if OJ was white), I doubt white people would have even taken notice

Again, I’m not caping for OJ Simpson. He definitely murdered Nicole, and there isn’t a poor Black man alive who would have gotten off like OJ did

FWIW, I personally do not know any Black women who cheered at his death, but then again, his death is a non-issue and it hasn’t come up too much (not at all, really) amongst my family and friends, and it’s almost beyond my generation

And I just wanted to add some context for the jury verdict that let him off the hook, because in my experience there’s this unwritten cultural thing in America where, whenever any non-Black person asks a Black person about OJ, they are really just expecting a simple admonition of “bad dark skinned Black man,” without digging any deeper and recognizing context like what had just happened to Rodney King and the L.A. riots —they ask Black people about OJ kind of like how whenever a media pundit “randomly” asks every single Muslim they encounter if they condemn Hamas)

(SN: And even if OJ hadn’t murder anyone, I never liked him ever since I read where he once said, “I’m not Black, I’m OJ” … I genuinely detest other Black people who are so desperate for the white gaze that they hate their own Blackness and would sell out Black people for their own self enrichment)

It’s wild af that every time I’ve heard about his death, it’s like listening to a highlight reel of his career, almost without any mention of Nicole or Ron Goldman’s murders

The United States has a big fucking problem with femicide

And misogyny

And racism

And racialized misogyny

I would say that OJ’s death would be a great opportunity to raise awareness about femicide and domestic violence and intimate partner violence, but America is so blind or indifferent to the role that ingrained racism plays, I wouldn’t trust the disproportionately overwhelmingly white media to not fumble it

Yeah, anyway, I have always believed that if the police hadn’t had such a long ass + well documented history of being abject liars and racists, Nicole might have gotten the justice she deserved

I hope that OJ’s death brings some semblance of peace to the families of Nicole and Ron

[your-krazy-uncle-bob]

The Republicans were always going to win big in November, regardless of what biased pundits professed. 

There was likely never a sudden “blue resurgence” or “red collapse” of late summer. 

Those fantasies were mostly Democratic Party talking points. They were readily regurgitated by the fusion media and biased pollsters. The ruse was transparently designed to dampen conservative turnout and fundraising, while fueling interparty squabbling over supposedly “unelectable MAGA candidates.”

As it turns out, all the late infusions of millions of dollars of Silicon Valley dark “cabal” money will be to no avail.  

All the last-minute Joe Biden giveaways like student-loan forgiveness, marijuana pardons, and COVID relief checks will be too little, too late.  

All the Trump-derangement syndrome psychodramatic distractions from the January 6 committee to the Mar-a-Lago raid will be too transparently desperate. 

And all the shrill 11th-hour warnings of a new variant of racism from the multimillionaire Obamas on the stump will be just that—shrill.

Yes, the Democrats will soon chant democracy is dying because they are terrified it is thriving as never before. And that grass-roots resurgence is mostly because Republicans are no longer so easily stereotyped as the out-of-touch party of aristocratic Mitt Romneys and condescending Bill Kristols.  

Instead, supposedly “racist” conservatives are now empowered by minority voters worried more about shared class concerns than skin color. They are concluding that if there are American racists, they are most likely the rich bicoastal elites, never subject to the consequences of their selfish agendas, and their own self-appointed, self-interested, and ossified diversity industry.

So as the election nears, to save reputations, pollsters will now become just a bit more honest. Thus, they will be off on the final tally by only 2-3 percentage points rather than midsummer’s 5-8. That way, they save their eroding reputations by claiming post facto that at least their final polls “were within the margin of error.” 

In the last few days, pundits will cease talk of an unappreciated “real” Democratic late surge. Instead they will turn on the electorate for its “stupidity.” 

We will read all sorts of “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”-like screeds against those who voted  “against their interests,” with ample fillips of “whitelash,” “voter suppression,” and Stacey Abramsesque denialism—even as Republicans win record numbers of minority voters. 

(Remember, minorities who vote conservative are excommunicated from the Left and no longer considered genuine minorities, as adjudicated by wealthy white professionals).

We always knew that any president in his first midterm historically loses about 28 seats in the House and four Senate seats. Voters realize the prior promises of a presidential candidate are not the same as the actual policies of a president. It is one thing for a loud candidate to point out that an incumbent president is responsible for all that goes bad. But it is quite another two years later to be that “bad” president who bears out that truism. 

Hubris also plays a role for cocky majorities—whether Democrats printing $4 trillion to spread around even as the economy faced a dearth of supply and near-record labor nonparticipation, or Republicans in 2017 ending the state and local tax exemption that enraged independent swing voters in purple states.

When the generic party ballot favors the out party in a president’s first term and his polls hover at or below 40 percent, then a normal 20-30 seat loss can become a 40-60 seat tsunami. 

Moreover, in 2022, the Republicans start dead even in the Senate. They are only eight down in the House. So, their natural pickup will be force multiplied by the fact they will surge way ahead rather than coming from way back to achieve a modest majority.

Joe Biden is not just an obnoxious, off-putting, snarly, and enfeebled president. He is also captive of the most radically destructive, left-wing agenda in the White House since 1933. On energy, inflation, the border, debt, crime, racial relations, and foreign policy, the Left’s project has proven an utter disaster that has hollowed out the middle class and embarrassed the nation in under two years. 

Yet, there will not even be a futile, last-minute progressive attempt at correction.

Leftist ideologues never backtrack from their long-march agendas. Instead, as religious nihilists they would rather be purist in their destructive policies that alienate the voters—rather than win them over as apostates by moderating their views. 

However, do not even expect the Left to brag on their “successes.” For example:  

“We gave you a wonderful, welcoming open border and 3 million new Americans!” 

“We worked to get gas up to $5 a gallon in a way Barack Obama only dreamed!” 

“We finally have fewer felons in jail and prisons than ever before!” 

“We ended the war in Afghanistan and on our terms!” 

“We really spread the wealth with an 8 percent plus annual inflation rate!” 

Instead, they will fall silent on the very policies they enacted on their age-old principle that the opiated masses never know what is good for them.

Given these realities, expect the Republicans to end up with a near historical majority in the House and firm control of the Senate. 

What then should we expect after the midterms?

Again, we will be told that democracy is now in its final stages. Voter “suppression” was rampant, even as turnout hit near record levels. 

When those leftist talking points don’t convince voters, pundits will lament the stupidity of the American people, the malevolent MAGA surge, the racist nature of the country—any excuse other than the new Democratic Party is the domain of the hyper-rich, the bicoastal white professional elites, the subsidized poor, and affluent and privileged minorities. And it is increasingly despised by the white working class, by nearly half of the Hispanic population, by more and more independents, and by a growing minority of African American males. 

Why? Because on issues that count, the Left insults middle-class critics as it destroys them, pushing green, inflationary, open-borders, racially obsessed, and elitist agendas without voter support. 

In pathetic attempts to distract the electorate to support policies contrary to their interests, it grows hysterical in demanding late-term abortion, mainstreaming transgenderism in all its drag manifestations, and racialist indoctrination, insulting all who demur as bigots and racists.

But there are other reasons the Left will become livid and terrified when they lose the Congress. 

They fear not what Republican majorities may actually do, but what they would do if they were Republicans and suddenly gained the Congress after being smeared by the party in power.

That is, the Democrats fear that the Republicans might remember what the Left did while in legislative control and would see that as the new model for an incoming majority. 

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Consequently, will a Republican Senate simply refuse to confirm Biden’s ultra-left appointments and judges, on the theory they will inevitably do the damage of a Merrick Garland or Alejandro Mayorkas or prove sanctimonious nincompoops like a Pete Buttigieg or Xavier Becerra?

Will the Republicans subpoena an array of left-wing activists and Democratic functionaries? Will jail sentences await any who retry the Eric Holder gambit of congressional defiance?

Will they adopt the January 6 committee protocols? 

That is, will Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) announce he is following the precedents of Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and therefore reluctantly must: 

Automatically deny “extremists,” such as members of “the squad,” from any congressional committee appointments; 

Sometimes veto any Democrat minority leader’s recommendations for House committee assignments; 

Run simultaneous congressional investigations of 1) politicized leadership at the wayward FBI and Department of Justice; 2) the labyrinth of conflicts of interest within our federal health bureaucracy, starting with National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci; 3) the tax liabilities, false statements, and sources of income of the Biden family; 4) “insurrections,” starting with the role of social media, Antifa, and Black Lives Matter during the 120 days in 2020 of uninterrupted rioting, looting, and arson. 

Undertake a real probe of the entire January 6 riot and its aftermath, using newly inherited operating procedures to subpoena high-ranking bureaucrats, left-wing pundits, Democratic National Committee operatives and elected officials to discover: 1) why the breakdown in Capitol Hill police security; 2) why the suppression of information about the officer killing of Ashli Babbitt, and the death from natural causes of Officer Brian Sicknick; 3) why all videos, emails, and communications concerning the riot have not been released; 4) what was the role, if any, of FBI informants; 5) why were dozens of the accused held without bail, without charges filed, and subject to nonstop jail harassment?

Would Democrats—if they were Republicans in January 2023—vote to end the filibuster? 

Will Joe Biden, who all summer long blasted the filibuster as a racist relic, flip in 2023 and claim it is the bastion of the republic when the Democrats are in the senate minority?

Will Democrats object if the Republican House becomes impeachment-hungry, following the 2019-2021 precedent? 

Is the rule now established that an unpopular president should face first-term impeachment when he loses the House? 

Or is the new legacy automatic impeachment when a president clearly warps the national interest to further his own political viability—such as ruining relations with Saudi Arabia while draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in a last-ditch effort to avoid a midterm wipeout? 

Or is impeachment warranted when a president does not faithfully execute the laws, such as destroying the entire corpus of federal immigration law to enhance a future political constituency?

Does impeachment now extend to former presidents as private citizens? Should Joe Biden expect an impeachment writ while retired to his Delaware retreat?

Will impeachment include cabinet officials such as Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for his open border, or Attorney General Merrick Garland for unleashing the FBI against political enemies? Will the petty become institutionalized, such as Kevin McCarthy scowling and tearing up one of Biden’s rambling and incoherent State of the Union addresses in front of cameras on national television?

Will the Congress call in Ivy-League mental health professionals to tele-diagnose Joe Biden as they clamor for 25th-Amendment investigations and demand a presidential Montreal Cognitive Assessment?

It should be a fascinating post-midterm fall and winter. 

But one question remains: will the Left now blame Biden as the perfect scapegoat for its midterm implosion—even after using him as the reputable empty vessel to carry through an otherwise disreputable agenda? 

If so, expect plenty of leaks, but arising from the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Democratic National Committee—and spread by the left-wing network news and mainstream media. 

The subtext will be “Good ol’ Joe from Scranton dutifully played the useful idiot, but now is to be properly scapegoated and sent packing, given what lost the election was not our extremist agenda but the doddering fool who was identified with it.” 

As hard as it will be to believe, after all the excuses are exhausted (voter suppression, racism, MAGA extremism, right-wing news, etc.) the Left will blame their erstwhile savior Biden for sullying their message. That way they can conclude they lost only because of the inept messenger and so can escalate their revolutionary but otherwise toxic agendas.

[godanadre0101]

I found this on NewsBreak: "American Whitelash": Fear-mongering and the rise in white nationalist violence

I found this on NewsBreak: "American Whitelash": Fear-mongering and the rise in white nationalist violence