Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/02/13/kentucky-republican-demonstrates-the-need-for-dei-programs-with-a-callous-story-about-her-family-history.html
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She’s lacking empathy, a brain which sees regular use, and tops it off with a gigantic scoop of assholery.
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Jeeze I really wish I’d been there to ask questions of her. Like…
“The man whose land your father worked… did he ever rape you? Did he have children by you that he then sold off to other slaveowners? Because that’s what actually happens to slaves but doesn’t happen to people who are just poor sharecroppers.”
Or maybe,
“When you left that farm, did you have to get that owner’s permission? Did you have to carry a signed document saying you weren’t escaped property?”
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Ignoring the last part of that sentence for obvious reasons.
Kind enough, huh? Did he pay any child support while her mother was growing up? I’ll bet not, but hey, he did allow her parents to work for him when she was an adult.
Did he ever actually acknowledge her mother as his child? Even to himself? Or did he just ‘allow’ people to work for him because that’s all the peons were good for?
If you ever want to give yourself nightmares, think about how many people in that small town were probably also the result of (voluntary?) sex resulting in pregnancy. Her parents could have been more closely related than they realized. This was unfortunately more common than realized, now coming out as consumer DNA testing has turned over a lot of rocks.
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Exactly. Yes, capitalism exploited (is exploiting) millions of people to work for just enough to eat and a place to sleep, but as bad as that is, it is NOTHING like chattel slavery.
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First a comedy, then … whatever the hell this is.
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The Jerk… it’s the Jerk…
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Sure, that’s the Jerk, but what the hell is this?
Farce, tragedy. horror…? 
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The woman in question? All three?
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As a rough corollary, her view speaks to this: In order to have a chance at being considered ‘as good as a White person’ at a given task/occupation, a Black person must be at least twice as good at the same task/occupation.
It’s all about where they decide to set the bar.
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Not an excuse. She went to college and law school. The University of Kentucky College of Law is ranked 60th in the country by US News & World Report. I grew up in Texas. I don’t know how old she is, but I’m 55 and she seems to be probably no more than 5 or so years older, or maybe even younger. I didn’t have any DEI education in school, either. But in college, grad school, life, and law school, I learned shit. She did, too. She just doesn’t care. She’s a Christian White Nationalist.
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They go into how offensive it is, but, really: we know.
What I think is more important is just how terribly, factually, historically inaccurate the whole damn piece is. It’s not just that it makes people mad; it’s as ignorant as a chainsmoker in a kerosene plant.
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I was going to leave this exact comment. It’s so not the same thing it’s physically painful to watch people equate the two.
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That she needs to dye her roots?
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Don’t know the Lady or the context… But it might be a case of “modern slavery”.
The “Slavery was banned in 18something so there is no slavery” argumentation is a bit dangerous. The international labour organization ILO estimates about 50 million “modern slaves” ( ca. 5 millions in America).
The UK passed a “Modern slavery act” in 2015 and threre are about 4000 cases a year (mostly in farming, sex work & beauty salons)
No, sharecropping is not modern slavery, modern slavery is when organized crime uses people in precarious positions (usually people trying to emigrate to “first world” countries) as workers, often doing things like taking passports, threatening them with being reported to immigration, and so on. A great example is the UAE, or farm workers in the US, and of course, a lot of sex work (another reason to make it legal).
There’s also the fact that the slaves in the US, the exploited people are extremely unlikely to be white and born in the US.
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Working as a child unpaid in agriculture in a kind of “foster” situation is not the typical “sharecropping” 
There was an interesting BBC documentation about the “Modern slavery act” . One of the points was the misconception that its only concerning migrants. In fact in the UK its also a domestic problem for vulnerable groups ( jobless, homeless, mental problems)
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It’s far closer to sharecropping than slavery, and was a fairly normal situation for many children in agricultural scenarios. That’s why the US summer vacation from school is so long, when it finally became law that children attend school, they were still needed at the end of summer to help with the harvests.
Oh, there are definitely people who exploit mentally disabled people, and homeless ones, but these are still nothing like what she describes.
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