Welcome to the third and final installment in my series on the ongoing American Civil/Social Justice War between corporate/white power and freedom, fairness, and justice for all persons within America which originally began over 100 years before the Declaration of Independence. It has continued through the first Civil War, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments which weren’t fully implemented until the second Civil Rights War, and even on to the modern day.
Today the most deeply entrenched battleground is the fight over whether there even is a fight going on at all. On one side you have those who argue that Social Justice for all America’s people—minorities, women, LGBTQ, workers and consumers—remains a distant achievement. You have NY Governor Mario Andrew Cuomo who recently shocked many by saying “America has never been that great” because it has failed to admit and correct gender equality. Largely in solidarity with Cuomo you have the #MeToo movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, #MarchForOurLives and the Sandy Hook parents. The Sandy Hook parents, of course, are pitched against Alex Jones and his 2 million subscribers who would call them all “Social Justice Warriors” in an effort to demean and minimize the legitimacy of their efforts. They fight against the alt-right, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists. But these are not the worst of the opposition.
The worst are the deniers who provide aid, comfort, and cover for bigots and predators.
Those who could look at the ridiculous decades-long litany of bigoted statements and actions, multiple lawsuits for racial discrimination in the ‘70s and in the ‘90s which he lost, his crazed Jihad against the wrongly convicted Central Park Five, the nearly two dozen allegations of sexual assault including his “impromptu inspections” of semi-dressed teenagers competing in his beauty pageant, his history of racially biasing the results of those contests and still say they don’t believe that Donald John Trump is a bigoted sexist asshole because they simply haven’t yet heard him utter the N-word on tape, even though they have seen his Twitter feed. On the other side are people like Tucker Carlson who says that white supremacy is nothing more than a "liberal delusion.”
Tucker Carlson has a few things to say about Netroots Nation, which oddly was some of best coverage of the event that I've seen, except that he typically failed to distinguish socialism from Democratic Socialism which are two different things.
More Tucker this week as noted by Salon:
Last weekend's Unite the Right rally in Washington — scheduled to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the white supremacist gathering in Charlottesville, Virginia, that culminated in the murder of one woman and injuries to many others — was supposed to be a massive show of white nationalist power. Instead, the event was a whiff, with only a couple of dozen attendees, who bailed out early after realizing what a failure the whole thing turned out to be.
Monday night, Tucker Carlson, on his prime-time Fox News show, was triumphant, declaring that this was proof that white supremacy is a liberal myth.
"White supremacy is not ubiquitous in America, it's not a crisis. It's not even a meaningful category. It is incredibly rare," he declared, claiming that the country that legalized slavery and had Jim Crow laws in many states until 1964 is "a generous, tolerant country" and has "always has been that."
"People who tell you otherwise are either delusional or trying to control you with fear, likely both," he concluded.
So to Tucker the fact that the thousands of alt-right neo-Nazis who had appeared in the streets of Charlottesville just last year assaulted dozens of counter-protesters, beat Deandre Harris to a bloody pulp then put him on trial for participating in his own beating and killed Heather Heyer, simply because they all didn’t show up in Washington, DC, this year is a sign that they’ve all just gone away and evaporated? Following last year’s rally, many of these people were personally identified and found themselves losing their jobs. Members of Antifa and other groups have not just been battling them in the streets, they’ve been battling and infiltrating their online existence using VPN networks and TOR browsers to keep themselves safe while entering their chatrooms on Discord, and their message boards to specifically identify them, track them and shut down by cutting off their online funding sources from major vendors such as Paypal, Visa, Mastercard, and American Express. Many of them are now down to surviving on Bitcoin.
But that isn’t all of them. Custom tracking programs by Antifa activists have found over 400,000 alt-right neo-Nazi active Facebook accounts. They could even see them planning and buying plane tickets for last year’s Charlottesville rally in real time. As noted by Wired.
The first big test of Whack-a-Mole came just before the white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville on Saturday, August 12. In the weeks before, because of her database, Squire could see that nearly 700 white supremacists on Facebook had committed to attend the rally, and by perusing their posts, she knew they were buying plane tickets and making plans to caravan to Charlottesville. Her research also showed that some of them had extensive arrest records for violence. She sent a report to the SPLC, which passed it on to Charlottesville and Virginia law enforcement. She also called attention to the event on anarchist websites and spread the word via “affinity groups,” secret peer-to-peer antifa communication networks. [...]
One morning in December, I visited Squire in her small university office. She had agreed to show me the database. First she logged onto a foreign server, where she has placed Whack-a-Mole to keep it out of the US government’s reach. Her screen soon filled with stacks of folders nested within folders: the 1,200-plus hate groups in her directory. As she entered command-line prompts, spreadsheets cascaded across the screen, each cell representing a social media profile she monitors. Not all of them are real people. Facebook says up to 13 percent of its accounts may be illegitimate, but the percentage of fakes in Squire’s database is probably higher, as white nationalists often hide behind multiple sock puppets. The SPLC estimates that half of the 400,000-plus accounts Squire monitors represent actual users.
Until Whack-a-Mole, monitoring white nationalism online mainly involved amateur sleuths clicking around, chasing rumors. Databases, such as they were, tended to be cobbled together and incomplete. Which is one reason no one has ever been able to measure the full reach of right-wing extremism in this country. […] Whack-a-Mole harvests most of its data by plugging into Facebook’s API, the public-facing code that allows developers to build within Facebook, and running scripts that pull the events and groups to which various account owners belong. Squire chooses which accounts to monitor based on images and keywords that line up with various extremist groups.
These people are not a myth, they are not a delusion. They are quite real.
The downside — for them — of the Charlottesville assault from last year is that many of the Alt-Right/Supremacist groups came out of the shadows and are now visible and identifiable as this piece from Thinkprogress does, specifically listing various new groups such as the
Identity Evropa, (who chant “You Will not Replace Us”),
the Proud Boys founded by Vice Media co-founder Gavin McGinnis,
Vanguard America who chant “Blood and Soil” and have since morphed into
Patriot Front, Neo-Nazis, Skinheads, the
League of the South, Jared Taylor of the New Century Foundation and
American Renaissance Magazine, Richard Spencer and his
National Policy Institute and the
Occidental Quarterly which according to the SPLC is the who’s who of the extreme right.
In the end, that rally didn’t turn out well for them. It blew their cover.
For example, Unite the Right organizer Jason Kessler who had been attempting with his Charlottesville rally to bring these groups together has been forced to move home with his parents due to the blocks put up against his fundraising.
Kessler, who is in his mid-30s, explained that he had moved back in with his parents because of the spiraling costs associated with a recent lawsuit, brought by Integrity First for America, which has accused him of conspiracy to commit violence at last year’s “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Unfortunately for Kessler, a judge ruled earlier this summer that the lawsuit will move to trial — meaning the costs will continue to mount for the foreseeable future.
[...]
Kessler’s ability to raise funds has also taken a significant hit recently, as PayPal put an end to his efforts to raise money via his lawyer. (The same goes for “Crying Nazi” Chris Cantwell, who did not show up at last weekend’s rally.) As HuffPost’s Jessica Schulberg recently wrote, “Online payment processors and fundraising platforms have repeatedly shown they have the ability to identify and remove white nationalist users — if there’s enough public pressure to do so.”
Outside of Kessler and the Alt-Right, we continue to see a rise in Micro-Aggressions against women and minorities.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — A tone-deaf inquiry into an Asian-American’s ethnic origin. Cringe-inducing praise for how articulate a black student is. An unwanted conversation about a Latino’s ability to speak English without an accent.
This is not exactly the language of traditional racism, but in an avalanche of blogs, student discourse, campus theater and academic papers, they all reflect the murky terrain of the social justice word du jour — microaggressions — used to describe the subtle ways that racial, ethnic, gender and other stereotypes can play out painfully in an increasingly diverse culture.
On a Facebook page called “Brown University Micro/Aggressions” a “dark-skinned black person” describes feeling alienated from conversations about racism on campus. A digital photo project run by a Fordham University student about “racial microaggressions” features minority students holding up signs with comments like “You’re really pretty ... for a dark-skin girl.” The “St. Olaf Microaggressions” blog includes a letter asking David R. Anderson, the college’s president, to address “all of the incidents and microaggressions that go unreported on a daily basis.”
And even if overt racists like Kessler and his affiliated groups are getting shut down financially that really isn’t stopping those who still remain in the closet as has been seen in one North Carolina school district where racial slurs and threats have become commonplace.
Orange County school officials recorded 70 incidents at the district’s middle schools and high schools during the 2016-2017 school year that involved racially or politically charged disturbances between students, reported WRAL-TV.
[...]
The district released the five-page report with numerous redactions — including 16 incidents that are completely redacted — intended to protect student privacy
An assistant principal found graffiti in May threatening to “kill all n*ggers,” as well as swastikas, scrawled on the walls inside a boys’ bathroom at Cedar Ridge High School.
A teacher at the same school heard a student yell “white power” a few months earlier as students boarded a school bus, but she was unable to see which student — and she went inside and found a swastika scratched into a desk in her classroom.
A student at C.W. Stanford Middle School announced in the cafeteria that Trump “was going to deport all blacks back to Africa since he was president.”
No, of course, every Trump supporter or voter isn’t an alt-Right racist. But the thing is, some of them are, and the problem is that when those few rear their heads — the rest who may not consider themselves at all “racist” usually go into hiding, or start making excuses and rationalizations and try to deny and minimize what is occurring just like Tucker Carlson.
The vast majority themselves may or may not be technically racist, but they tend to agree with the anti-Immigrant philosophy and policies which are inherently racist so in the end they’re actually something worse — they are racism enablers. They are racism protectors. They are racism defenders. Most Americans have never been racist, but many of them haven’t been willing to fight against racism — and that’s exactly how it flourishes.
if you were to call most of these people “racist” to their face they would be highly offended and shocked. They would be highly annoyed and vehemently deny it, just as Paula Deen, Phil Roberson, Cliven Bundy and Donald Sterling have all denied that they are “racist.” They respond by calling you the “racist” just for making the accusation just like the woman who threw hot coffee at a Latino man while proclaim she was the “real” victim. Or the partially clothed white family who went on a rampage in a black families front yard. Or the NJ School board candidate who posted Facebook messages about gunning down Black Lives Matter “Monkeys.” Or the Oregon man pushing a stroller who demanded that Hispanic laborers “Go back to Mexico.” Or the Utah parents who had to demand why their daughters were subject to racist abuse? Or the South Carolina bar manager who was fired for not getting rid of all his black employees because the owner wanted a “whiter crowd.” All them would say they aren’t racist while behaving exactly like someone from the Proud Boys or Vanguard America.
Most of these so-called “Non Racists” on the right rather than be outraged by Trump’s “Zero Tolerance” and his inhumane family separation policies claim there “nothing racist” about it, and never-the-less support those policies repeating the weak and ridiculous excuses for them parroted by the Trump Administration.
Two-thirds of Americans oppose a policy that has led to more than 2,000 children being separated from their parents at the U.S. border, and Republicans were the only group polled who support it.
In a survey by Quinnipiac University, 66% of respondents said they oppose a Trump Administration policy that has led to family separations, while only 27% supported it.
But Republicans in the poll backed the policy by 55%, the only party, gender, education, age or racial group to support it.
These are policies that the head of the Pediatric Society has said will cause permanent damage to these children, but craven Trumpsters like Cruella De Kirstjen Nielsen simply blow those facts off. Given their choice, this is exactly the type of policies that the Identity Evropa or the Proud Boys endorse. This is exactly what they want.
They are supremacist policies.
But Tucker is absolutely right about one thing, the alt-Right and racists are not a majority of Americans. The truth is that it was never the case that most Americans were ever white supremacists, not even most of the south during the first Civil War hated slaves. Not during the height of Jim Crow and the terrorist reign of KKK lynchings. Most Americans, not even white Americans have ever been that deeply invested in this issue on either side. There’s always been only a relative few, even during the KKK’s heights during the 1920s following the release of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation it has never been most of us. Most Americans simply didn’t care.
They had their own lives to live, they have their own concerns, they simply didn’t have time or interest to worry about what was going on with those negroes over there, or those women marching for the right to vote. Most Americans lived in denial and they didn’t stand up against bigotry in their own lives or in the general country at all. Civil rights was originally fought largely in the courts before it was fought in the streets. Most Americans really didn't care, honestly, about what did or didn’t happen to Trayvon Martin. Even the
polls showed this was the case.
According to a Pew Research Center poll, 86 percent of African-Americans expressed dissatisfaction with the verdict, compared with just 30 percent of whites. A Washington Post/ABC News poll reported a similar finding: Just 9 percent of blacks approved of acquitting George Zimmerman of criminal charges in Martin's death, compared with 51 percent of whites who approved.
The Post/ABC News data also reported that 87 percent of blacks say the shooting was unjustified. Just 33 percent of whites agreed.
Hispanic reaction registered in between, with 16 percent saying the shooting was justified, 34 percent saying it was unjustified and 50 percent reporting they couldn't say whether the shooting was or wasn't justified. [...]
A small percentage of African-Americans (13 percent) said the issue of race "is getting too much attention"; the percentage of whites saying that, however, was 60 percent.
It could be argued that Zimmerman managed to be acquited by lying about one key aspect of the case, which is the probability that he grabbed Trayvon once he finally caught up to him and that’s what initiated the fight just as Trayvon’s girlfriend, Rachel Jeantel, who was on the phone with him, surmised and also matches the physical evidence. However, the prosecution never asked her about that or brought the subject up or did the defense fully explain how Zimmerman pulled his gun from the holster at the small of his back while a teenager was supposedly sitting on his chest. Answer: He could only have pulls his gun after he’d released his grip on Trayvon’s hoodie and was standing up to escape, pulling out the landyard on Trayvon’s right side which he was still gripping with his left hand.
Clearly, African Americans were highly energized by this case—but while 30 percent of whites disagreed with the verdict a slim majority of 51 percent agreed, there was still another 29 percent who apparently didn’t care either way. For Hispanics, the group in the middle was 50 percent.
Sixty percent of whites said “race” was getting too much attention. They didn’t want to hear about it anymore, they weren’t interested. They choose not to consider the possibility of a raciai motivation, dismissed it and therefore most of them agreed with the verdict because of “racism fatigue.” The majority of them essentially agreed with Dylann Storm Roog, but didn’t react the way that Roof did, going out and reading a bunch of racist anti-African American propaganda from the Council of Conservative Citizens which falsely gave him the impression that blacks were killing whites by the hundreds every year.
“When George Zimmerman was acquitted, white nationalists in the U.S. considered that to be a win for them,” says Stephen Piggott, who tracks white supremacist groups for the Southern Poverty Law Center. “The Council of Conservative Citizens’ website blew up. More people were going to the site, and Dylann Roof was one of those people.”
Since the Zimmerman trial, the CCC has been squarely focused on what it calls an epidemic of black-on-white crime. And when Roof Googled that phrase, he found the group’s website.
“I have never been the same since that day,” Roof wrote in a purported manifesto found online in the days after he opened fire at the Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, S.C. and killed nine people. “There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders. I was in disbelief. At this moment I realized that something was very wrong.”
That moment apparently sent Roof on the road that ended in the massacre at the historic black church.
Most white people didn’t grab a gun and go shooting up a black church, but 51 percent of them agreed with Roof about the Zimmerman case. Sixty percent of them thought they’d heard enough about race problems already. And a majority of them ultimately didn’t mind that Donald Trump had been talking ridiculous deluded trash about President Barack Obama’s birth certificate for years and decided to vote for him anyway.
And then hate crimes started to increase starting from the Day Trump was elected.
Reported hate crimes with racial or ethnic bias jumped the day after President Trump won the 2016 election, from 10 to 27, according to an analysis of FBI hate crime statistics by The Washington Post. There were more reported hate crimes on Nov. 9 than any other day in 2016, and the daily number of such incidents exceeded the level on Election Day for the next 10 days.
FBI data collected since the early 1990s show that reports of hate crimes typically spike during election years, according to a study by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University at San Bernardino. There was a 21 percent increase in reported hate crimes the day after Barack Obama won his first election in 2008, though hate crime reports remained relatively flat for the rest of the year
Now two years later, that is still the case.
Hate crimes reported to police in America’s ten largest cities rose 12.5 percent
in 2017. The increase was the fourth consecutive annual rise in a row and the highest total in over a decade according to an analysis by the Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. In contrast to the increase in hate crime in the ten largest cities last year, crime, in general, dropped slightly across the nation in the first half of 2017, with preliminary FBI figures showing a 0.8 percent decrease in violent crime and a 2.9 percent decrease in property crime.
What was it that happened four years ago that could have been a catalyst for this change? Well, Trayvon Martin died in 2012 and the trial of Zimmerman was 2013. The year 2014 was the shooting of Michael Brown and the subsequent riots in Ferguson, Missouri. White people—generally speaking—didn’t like those riots at all.
A poll taken since a white police officer in Missouri shot dead an unarmed black teenager shows blacks and whites sharply divided on how fairly the police deal with each group, along with a rising feeling, especially among whites, that race relations in the country are troubled. But when asked about their own communities, members of each race say their relations with the other are good.
The latest New York Times/CBS News nationwide poll shows most whites reserving judgment on whether the fatal shooting of the teenager, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Mo., was justified. Most blacks say it was not.
The poll also shows significant differences in how blacks and whites view the unrest that has gripped Ferguson since Mr. Brown’s killing. Most whites say they think the actions of the protesters have gone too far, while blacks are more evenly divided. Thirty-eight percent of blacks think the protesters’ actions have been about right, compared with 15 percent of whites. A vast majority of the protesters in Ferguson have been black.
Different people with different life experience see the same set of events and they feel differently about them. The simple reason, of course, is because they do have different life experiences. Although there was no trial in this case and the FBI findings of the shooting were at best inconclusive preventing them from bringing forth Civil Rights charges, the fact is their analysis of the Ferguson police department practices were brutal.
In a searing report released in March 2015, the US Department of Justice uncovered a pattern of racial bias in the Ferguson Police Department. And it argued that the disparities could only be explained, at least in part, by unlawful bias and stereotypes against African Americans.
The disparities were rooted in the city's reliance on the police department and courts for local budget revenue: Federal officials found that city officials worked together at every level of enforcement — from city management to the local prosecutor to the police department — to make as much money from fines and court fees as possible, ranging from schemes to raise total fines for municipal code violations to asking cops to write as many citations as possible.
The report noted that, although black people made up about 67 percent of Ferguson's population, 88 percent of documented uses of force by Ferguson police from 2010 to August 2014 were against African Americans. In the 14 police canine bite cases for which racial data was available, the people bitten were black.
The African American experience with police is not the same. It's not even close to the same, and that has been shown time and time again starting with Mother Jones who crunched the numbers based on data from the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Justice Statistic report on Arrest-Related Deaths to came up with this.
Since a police officer shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, one month ago, reporters and researchers have scrambled to find detailed data on how often cops wound or kill civilians. What they've uncovered has been frustratingly incomplete: Perhaps not surprisingly, law enforcement agencies don't keep very good stats on incidents that turn deadly. In short, it's a mystery exactly how many Americans are shot by the police every year. [...]
The Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that between 2003 and 2009 there were more than 2,900 arrest-related deaths involving law enforcement. Averaged over seven years, that's about 420 deaths a year. While BJS does not provide the annual number of arrest-related deaths by race or ethnicity, a rough calculation based on its data shows that black people were about four times as likely to die in custody or while being arrested than whites.
More updated figures due to Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s call for better data has revealed that this previous figures were tragically low, and that in reality Police have killed twice as many Americans since 9/11 as have the Taliban, Al Qaeda and ISIS combined both domestically and abroad.
Between June 1, 2015, and March 31, 2016, media reviews identified 1,348 potential arrest-related deaths. During this period, the number of deaths consistently ranged from 87 to 156 arrest-related deaths per month, with an average of 135 deaths per month. To confirm and collect more information about the 379 deaths identified through open sources from June to August 2015, BJS conducted a survey of law enforcement agencies and ME/C offices.
The survey findings identified 425 arrest-related deaths during this 3-month period—12% more than the number of deaths identified through the open source review. Extrapolated to a full calendar year, an estimated 1,900 arrest-related deaths occurred in 2015. Nearly two-third (64%) of the deaths that occurred from June to August 2015 were homicides, about a fifth (18%) were suicides, and another tenth (11%) were accidents.
1,900 arrest related deaths is over four times the previous estimate that Mother Jones was relying on. Even with the most generous look at these figures, it’s bad.
Let’s say just for the sake of discussion we only include the 1,216 “homicides” (64 percent of the 1,900 from the BJS estimate) by police per year, excluding the accidents and suicides (which for some reason both ex-sheriffs Arpaio and Clark seemed to pile up by the hundreds) and contrast that not only with battlefield losses, but also all the people we lost on 9/11 both in New York and Washington. Adding another 2,996 deaths, that brings fatalities from al-Qaida, the Taliban, and ISIS combined to 9,683, while those killed by police homicide remain at 20,624, which is still two times greater.
As the Guardian has pointed out the highest rate of these killings affect minorities, specifically Native Americans and African-Americans. This tends to generate a difference of opinion.
We don’t have slavery, or Jim Crow anymore but we still have housing discrimination.
Two years later, Jenkins, who is African American, has won a $180,000 settlement, ending a federal racial discrimination lawsuit filed in January against the Mansfield Housing Authority and its executive director, Rebecca Fields.
Fields and other authority employees never referred to Jenkins' race. They didn't have to in order for the Connecticut Fair Housing Center to file a credible lawsuit with Jenkins as plaintiff.
Instead, the authority used what federal courts have come to describe as "code words" that substitute for overt racial language. Jenkins never heard or saw any of those words -- rather, they were contained in emails to the Fair Housing Center and Jenkins' case worker from a shelter in Middletown.
We still have lending discrimination.
Black Wells Fargo borrowers in Sacramento with credit scores above 660 are 2.8 times more likely to receive a high-cost or high-risk loan than comparable white borrowers, the lawsuit said. Latino borrowers were 1.8 times more likely, the suit said.
The lawsuit comes just weeks after the Federal Reserve rocked Wells Fargo with an unprecedented punishment for "widespread consumer abuses," including the infamous fake account scandal. The tough sanctions prevent Wells Fargo from growing until the Fed believes the bank has cleaned up its act. [...]
Sacramento is not the first city to point the finger at Wells Fargo.
Last year, Philadelphia filed a similar lawsuit, citing former employees who alleged the bank encouraged workers to push the use of higher-cost loans to minorities. Baltimore and Miami have also accused Wells Fargo of discriminatory mortgage lending.
We still have employment discrimination.
One male colleague called her “Big Girl,” a belittling nod to her 6-foot-tall stature. Another was said to make obscene gestures when he heard her voice over the company radio. A third reportedly dismissed her complaints of harassment, saying she was “losing her mind” or “throwing fits.”
For six years, Fayette County resident Sandra S. Robertson said she endured harassment, venom and gender-based discrimination from her male colleagues as a shipping supervisor at Hunter Panels’ Smithfield plant — all the while making less than the man who was her predecessor despite her years of experience in the Air Force as a supply specialist.
“I’m former military, and I can take a joke. But things started to turn really ugly and then I noticed it wasn’t stopping,” Mrs. Robertson, 48, of German Township, said Monday. “It just kept getting worse, and management pretty much condoned it.”
A federal jury did not.
On Friday, five women and three men in a Pittsburgh courtroom found that Hunter Panels and its parent company, Carlisle Construction Materials Inc., discriminated against Mrs. Robertson, subjected her to a hostile work environment and retaliated against her by firing her. For that, jurors awarded Mrs. Robertson more than $13 million in damages and pay.
Just because discrimination became a legal liability with the civil rights act, doesn’t mean that it is likely to completely end any more than robbery or murder were likely to completely stop just because it’s illegal. Nothing ever goes away completely, but it can be minimized and it’s effects can be reversed. That is if we try to reverse them.
We still have a massive wage and wealth gap between whites and blacks.
- According to the New York Times, for every $100 in white family wealth, black families hold just $5.04.
- The Economic Policy Institute found that more than one in four black households have zero or negative net worth, compared to less than one in ten white families without wealth.
- The Institute for Policy Studies recent report The Road to Zero Wealth: How the Racial Divide is Hollowing Out the America’s Middle Class (RZW) showed that between 1983 and 2013, the wealth of the median black household declined 75 percent (from $6,800 to $1,700), and the median Latino household declined 50 percent (from $4,000 to $2,000). At the same time, wealth for the median white household increased 14 percent from $102,000 to $116,800.
And it’s likely the seeds of that gap were planted during both slavery and Jim Crow.
Since the end of the Civil War, America has slowly and painfully worked to break down racial barriers and heal the wounds of slavery. We’ve made progress, outlawing Jim Crow segregation, passing the Civil Rights Act, and electing our first black president.
But it’s still clear that, as author Mehrsa Baradaran puts it, “past injustices breed present suffering” — especially when it comes to wealth.
The median wealth among white households in America is $171,000. Among black households, it’s $17,600.
Yes, you read that right.
It doesn’t take 50,000 sheet covered Klansman marching in the streets for this to happen, or for it to continue. It takes relatively good people to turn a blind eye when someone next to them is doing something wrong, and they know it—but they just don’t care.
African Americans aren’t pulled over twice as often as whites, arrested twice as often, searched and experience physical assaults three to four times as often even when they’re less likely to have anything illegal in their possession or have done anything violent, or are killed four times as often even when unarmed simply because the police are full of neo-Nazis. They aren’t. They may be mistakenly acting in support of bogus and distorted “statistics” that for the financial gain of the prison and security industry are twisted to make black and poor people appear more violent and dangerous and consequently believe they’re really just doing their job. Not literally Nazis in their heart, but in actual practice and structure not much better than Nazis.
The bottom line is that they do have a different perspective. That perspective is also different for women, it's different for Muslims, it’s different for Latinos, Asians, Sikhs, and Hindu Americans. White supremacy infects all of this not in the embodiment of hateful or fearful individuals, but in a series of bigoted practices, assumptions, ideas and ideals that allow and justify all of the disparate treatments I’ve described. Practices that not enough people question, that not enough people demand change for the better.
There may be solutions for hardcore racists with resources such as T.J. Leyden’s Forgiveness Project. There are tactics for handling online trolls as was well explained in my comments last Sunday. For the rest, there are other options. We can fight back against false history, false facts and false statistics, but in the end we have to reach the heart and rekindle the dormant selective empathy of our opponents on these issues. Although it’s difficult and sometimes time consuming, there are ways to reach across the racial/ideological aisle.
1. The first step, and the most obvious, is to open up a dialogue.
I often see people saying things like, “You can’t talk sense into racists and bigots.” While it is true that some may have biases too deeply-engrained for them to change, that certainly isn’t the case for all of them. We all suffer from
tribalism to some degree, a trait that has been hardwired in through evolution, but many of us have largely overcome this natural tendency thanks to the influence of open-minded others. Staunch religious fundamentalists firmly believe everyone else is going to hell, but that didn’t stop the atheists, agnostics, and moderately-spiritual people from trying to convince them otherwise—and thanks to those efforts, religious extremists have drastically decreased in numbers.
When you engage Trump loyalists in debate, try to respond with meaty content that has greater numbers of sentences and paragraphs, since research shows that one-liners and superficial statements do little to persuade people. Also, it is a good idea to cite reputable sources and provide links to external sites, so that information is recognized as objective, rather than a biased opinion.
2. Avoid using emotionally-charged words and approach them in a way that does not feel threatening.
Emotions like anxiety, fear, and anger exacerbate political bias, so use soft wording and a calm tone, and try to make them feel at ease.
A well-established psychological phenomenon is that when people feel they are under threat, they cling more strongly to their worldviews—cultural and political ideologies, religions, and biases—because those familiar things make them feel safe.
When challenging their views, don’t try to belittle or insult them by calling them dumb or ignorant. Expose them to new information in the way you would introduce an interesting concept to a friend. Don’t try to convince a conservative to become a liberal or take on a new identity—instead try to convince them to simply become a more informed, disciplined, and open-minded thinker. This implies that the persuader is already open-minded and aware of their own biases, which is important.
3. Find common ground and build on it.
I think it is safe to say that most Americans, regardless of political affilitation, want what is best for America. While the Left and the Right have different visions of what a “great America” looks like, there are surely a lot of things that can be agreed upon, such as safety, economic opportunity, and liberty.
Acknowledge facts and be willing to concede a little. America does have a problem with violent gangs composed of illegal immigrants like MS-13, and radical Islamic terror groups like ISIS still pose a threat, both physically and ideologically. Once that common ground has been established, it becomes much easier to explain that these individuals exist as a very small minority, and that most immigrants come to this country for the same American dream of freedom and opportunity that they hold. Support these facts with data from scientific or politically-neutral sources. Show them that you are reasonable, and also willing to change opinions in the face of new evidence.
By carefully building these bridges, we can come closer to agreement rather than pushing one another further away.
Of course, there are limits to how much time and energy one can spend on trying to convince someone who completely refuses to listen to reason. So when is it time to throw in the towel?
Research shows that in back-and-forth dialogues, if a person hasn’t been persuaded by the fourth round, it is likely a lost cause. Move on to the next irrational American that needs saving, because the war against ignorance and intolerance is one we must face head on.
Most of these people aren’t in the klan. They aren’t doing it out of spite, they may think quite seriously—like Dylann Roof—that they are justified somehow by facts and figures which have been feed to them by not very closeted bigots like the CCC, or Bill O’Reilly, or Tucker Carlson.
The Klan was never the majority, the rest of us are—and we need to start opening up our minds, looking at broader perspectives, and paying attention to all the people around us or we’ll go through yet another hundred years of continued strife while nothing will have changed. Nothing will have been solved, nothing will have improved. If we don’t open our hearts, open our minds to one another’s perspectives, to the facts of our everyday lives peppered with microaggressions and Permit Pattys—after a century we’ll still be here, fighting. We need to end the war, or else it will go on endlessly.
Maybe I was right when I once said America is permanently fractured along racial, economic, ideological and political lines. Maybe those fractures can never been healed and repaired. But then again, maybe I was wrong.
All I know is that violence won’t change this. Riots won’t change this. Punching a ton of Nazis won’t change this. Only a sea change in our point of view, where we’re no longer arguing about “if” calling a black woman a dog is a problem, when we all know it’s a serious problem considering the last several centuries of strategic racial dehumanization without having an argument over it , perhaps then we’ll be on the fight track. It doesn’t mean we all have to agree, but at least it would be good to be starting from the same collective facts and reality. Only that kind of change, where we all understand better and are far less insouciant and complacent can do what we need to end the strife, end the discrimination, and end the war.
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Thanks very much.