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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe Racist Fear: "You're Taking Over Our Country"
It's hard to believe that just three months ago we were celebrating the 50th anniversary of the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. But today I'm thinking of something President Obama said at the time.
We do a disservice to the cause of justice by intimating that bias and discrimination are immutable, that racial division is inherent to America. If you think nothings changed in the past 50 years, ask somebody who lived through the Selma or Chicago or Los Angeles of the 1950s. Ask the female CEO who once might have been assigned to the secretarial pool if nothings changed. Ask your gay friend if its easier to be out and proud in America now than it was thirty years ago. To deny this progress, this hard-won progress - our progress - would be to rob us of our own agency, our own capacity, our responsibility to do what we can to make America better.
That one goes down a little harder today than it did three months ago. As I said yesterday, the shooting at Emmanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston this week evokes memories of the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church 52 years ago in Birmingham. Combined with the recent high-profile police shootings of unarmed Black men, it's no wonder that people are starting to question whether things have really changed much.
As I do so often at moments like this, I go back to something Derrick Jensen wrote in the book The Culture of Make Believe.
From the perspective of those who are entitled, the problems begin when those they despise do not go along withand have the power and wherewithal to not go along withthe perceived entitlement
Several times I have commented that hatred felt long and deeply enough no longer feels like hatred, but more like tradition, economics, religion, what have you. It is when those traditions are challenged, when the entitlement is threatened, when the masks of religion, economics, and so on are pulled away that hate transforms from its more seemingly sophisticated, normal, chronic statewhere those exploited are looked down upon, or despisedto a more acute and obvious manifestation. Hate becomes more perceptible when it is no longer normalized.
Read More http://immasmartypants.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-racist-fear-youre-taking-over-our.html
Much more at the link.
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The Racist Fear: "You're Taking Over Our Country" (Original Post)
sheshe2
Jun 2015
OP
ladjf
(17,320 posts)1. They might check out the billionaires and the "Tea Baggers". They are taking over the Country. nt
seveneyes
(4,631 posts)2. The undertaker raises no hand, but I’ll fear him all the same
UTUSN
(70,720 posts)3. R#12 & K!1 n/t