Outside of the Kansas City Police headquarters , statues memorializing fallen officers were wrapped in cellophane since the protests. All year, people protesting police brutality had been graffitiing them with “BLM” and “No Justice No Peace,” so the city covered them up. One statue, not wrapped, was a metal sculpture of a man plugging his own ears, his shoe in his mouth, and his tie around his eyes. It sat directly in front of one of the entrances to the building. The sign next to it read “Communications.”
Inside, cubicles are covered in children’s drawings, bobbleheads, plants, and family photos. An indoor putting mat stretches between the desks, leading to a conference table and a whiteboard with the words “Twitter is not real life” written above plans for the team’s social media strategy.
Pro-police paraphernalia faces Whitelaw’s desk from almost every direction: a pegboard sign reading “Blue Lives Matter KCPD,” the “thin blue line” flag on a large wooden police badge, a shelf designed like the American flag holding police badges in each stripe. Whitelaw’s boss, Jake Becchina, wears a Blue Lives Matter dog tag around his neck.
“I don’t have any Blue Lives Matter stuff,” he said flatly when I asked him about it when we were away from the office. “It ain’t my cup of tea. And that’s all I’m gonna say about that.”
The proper term for this kinda shit is “propaganda.” You could neologism it into “copaganda” if you want, but the underlying truth is flat out, old fashioned, fascist propaganda.
The murder police of Bodymore aren’t looking so great these days either.
Millions watch the copaganda, but how many pay attention to the ugly truth about the BPD and departments like it all over the country?
Racist asshole who ran his election for school board on getting rid of critical race theory says racist things in school board meeting.
There is video. His employer saw it. He has been fired. Employer even commented on video to share that he had been fired. They are committed to DEI.
He laments the threats he revived but will only apologize for his lack of eloquence.
He deserved to be fired.
I realize this is primarily a BLM thread, but ffs, can Asian folks get a break from this new trend of racism, please?
Four decades ago, people avoided Melvin Irons’ MOVE-oriented art ‘like the plague.’ This Black historian is bringing it out of the basement.
The paintings are being displayed in Atlantic City in a new context: alongside the traveling “Stitch Their Names” quilt project honoring victims of police violence, racism and hate.
It’s fine; the lives of Asian people also matter just as much as those of White people.
No really, this article belongs here.
Excerpt:
In his critical biography of Faulkner, The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War, Michael Gorra suggests that this device, the device of the gaping void, is part and parcel of Faulkner’s depiction of the white South, the culture that produced him. That culture, during Faulkner’s lifetime, from 1897 to 1962, was so determined to look away from its own crimes that its narratives were fragmentary by necessity, avant-garde via denial. Faulkner created narrators who told redacted stories of the South because he sought to dramatize the way in which the white South redacted its own story. “In sermons and stained glass, memoirs and works of history, in fiction and poetry and finally in film,” Gorra writes, the white South falsified its past, casting it as a struggle for a “divinely ordered white supremacy.” To do so, the white South omitted the most barbaric aspects of slavery and Jim Crow. That is, it skipped the most important parts.
You could also cross-post it in White Culture, too.
Killer Mike interviewed Bernice King on his show… Here is a clip
And here’s the shows website:
My favorite part is where she talks about her maternal Grandfather, who sounds like a bad ass!
More perspectives on how Dr. King’s words have been perceived, and sometimes misconstrued:
For those who may have to deal with “talking about race only divides us” asshats today,
