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I am sharing these stories to make the point that the people most afraid of crime in Chicago — the people most likely to vote for tough-on-crime candidates and write letters to the editor declaring they will never again ride the L or venture onto the Magnificent Mile or eat at the ice cream parlor they loved so much as a child when it was still safe to go there — are the people least likely to experience crime in Chicago. White people. White people aren’t just safer in our wealthy, low-crime enclaves, we’re safer everywhere in the city. To research a story comparing the rise of the Loop with the decline of Englewood, I rode my bicycle around both neighborhoods, and experienced the same amount of crime in each, which was none.
In an essay for Salon, former New York City paramedic Daniel Jose Older related the story of treating a white man who was pistol-whipped during a home invasion in Brooklyn: “While film narratives of white folks in low-income neighborhoods tend to focus on how endangered they are by a gangland black or brown menace, this patient was singular in that he was literally the only victim of black on white violence I encountered in my entire 10-year career as a medic. The dominant narrative of the endangered white person barely making it out of the hood alive is, of course, a myth. No one is safer in communities of color than white folks. White privilege provides an invisible force field around them, powered by the historically grounded assurance that the state and media will prosecute any untoward event they may face.”
The numbers bear this out. Last year, according to the website Hey Jackass!, 567 Blacks were murdered in Chicago, compared to 35 whites. That means the Black murder rate was 70 per 100,000, while the white murder rate was 4.
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I’m sure Michael Harriot saw this:
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God saw fit to test my patience today. At the post office, lady ahead mailing a package. Told will arrive Thursday, because Wednesday is a holiday. Heavy sigh. “Don’t get me started on that. we can’t have Good Friday, but they can have some stupid, made up holiday!” Kept my peace, but wanted to say, “I know! Imagine wanting to celebrate the day you got your freedom. How crazy is that?” Sadly, racist assholes are not in short supply.
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Racism and ignorance of/opposition to the Establishment Clause: a classic pairing.
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Tropes done to death.
If only there were some way of finding out about racism in the United States other than sending intrepid explorers into that terra incognito to experience it directly… 
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(LA Times reprint)
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The force propping up Trump that we still don’t talk about
I could go on.
Granted, though, “we” should certainly talk about it more, and shout it from every rooftop too.
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Aside from being Trump’s new poodle, J. D. Vance is the author of the notorious New York Times bestseller “Hillbilly Elegy” published by Harper about 8 years ago, which was made into a film, and has re-entered the bestseller lists this week.
This book is a political manifesto thinly disguised as a memoir, and was lapped-up like milk and nectar by the urban chattering classes, who believed they had found their “man on the inside”, someone able to explain why an entire segment of American “white folks” seemed so singularly unable to lever their “white privilege” in economic terms. Even worse, while suffering the same economic conditions historically endured only by Black and indigenous Americans, they seemed to insist on voting for conservative political candidates.
How could this be?
In his book, Vance claimed to be a “hillbilly” descended from “Scots-Irish” people, before proceeding to punch-down hard from his position as a venture capitalist supported by pseudo-Libertarian billionaires like Peter Thiel. Vance essentially blamed 20th century Appalachian poverty on an inherited and unadapting “Scots-Irish” culture, and more recently, on a resigned and work-shy, “let’s live on food stamps” mindset.
Vance’s knowledge of the economic and ethnic history of Appalachia is not just limited - it is flat-out wrong.
In fact, his knowledge of HIS OWN ANCESTRY is even less informed - but that doesn’t stop him from developing an entire sociological thesis based on what looks like a quick Google search of his surname origins.
Southern Appalachia has been one of the most ethnically mixed places in the USA since the 1770s, and almost no one with deep roots there can legitimately claim that “Scots-Irish” forms the greater part of their genetic inheritance. This is a fact which can be backed-up with hard data, whatever the faceless editors of Wikipedia pages, and propagandists for a “white” history of Appalachia might claim.
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People with a far better grasp of history than J. D. Vance seem to have absorbed the ideas of writers like David Hackett Fischer (author of Albion’s Seed) and used these ideas as a springboard for the construction of an imaginary “Scots-Irish” identity. Fischer is a serious historian, but his vision of who first settled the American frontier has some serious blind spots.
Here’s how it works:
Pick a remote ancestor from your family tree with the ethnic identity you prefer. Vance has ancestors who have been in America for centuries, so he has 16 second great grandparents who were born in America during the 1800s. Let’s ignore the fact that NOT ONE of these 16 second great-grandparents can be proven to descend from Ulster folk - aka the “Scots-Irish”.
Ignore the fact that even if Vance had one second great-grandparent with a great-grandparent from Northern Ireland, this one single remote ancestor would still represent only a miniscule percentage of his overall genetic inheritance.
Of course “genetic inheritance” is only a tiny part of who we are. Our cultural environment has far, far more to do with our identity.
In Vance’s case, he would like to believe he is “Scots-Irish” both by blood and culture - perhaps because in the imagination of many insecure “white” American males, such a background speaks to their idealised, “white” Christian nationalist aspirations and preferred virtues.
Fighting for honor? Scots-Irish. Stubborn and independent? Scots-Irish. Clannish? Mistrustful of government? Loyal to a fault? Why, those are “Scots-Irish” things, of course.
I’ll stop right there, and let you read quotes which Vance included and seemed to endorse in his book “Hillbilly Elegy”:
“In traveling across America, the Scots-Irish have consistently blown my mind as far and away the most persistent and unchanging regional subculture in the country. Their family structures, religion and politics, and social lives all remain unchanged compared to the wholesale abandonment of tradition that’s occurred nearly everywhere else. This distinctive embrace of cultural tradition comes along with many good traits - an intense sense of loyalty, a fierce dedication to family and country - but also many bad ones. We do not like outsiders or people who are different from us, whether the difference lies in how they look, how they act, or, most important, how they talk. To understand me, you must understand that I am a Scots-Irish hillbilly at heart.”
This sort of palpable nonsense is problematic and dangerous on multiple levels.
Number 1, Appalachia is NOT primarily Scots-Irish, and Vance certainly isn’t primarily “Scots-Irish” by genetic or even cultural inheritance. Not even close. How do I know this? By spending twenty years tracing the ethnic roots of heartland America. Vance is a distant cousin on multiple lines, and I happen to be aware of who “his people” really were, because they are “my people”.
Number 2, the persistence of certain cultural traits in 21st century Appalachia has nothing to do with any continuity of a “Scots-Irish” subculture from the 1700s. Every single trait Vance sees as “Scots-Irish” might equally apply to Appalachians of Welsh, German, English, Scottish, Dutch, Swedish, Jewish, Romani, or indeed, Cherokee, Shawnee, or African ancestry. One might quite rightly speak of “Appalachian” or “Mountain” culture, but this culture is the product of DIVERSITY and centuries of inter-ethnic mixing.
There actually IS one aspect of “Scots-Irish culture” seen in America which might be described as especially “Ulster Protestant”, but self-identified “Scots-Irish” people rarely mention it.
This would be a familiarity with the actual mechanics of colonialism, and how to use violence to maintain economic supremacy over a disenfranchised indigenous population…the “Scots-Irish” did it first in Ulster, and many did it later on the Appalachian frontier. Read up on “The Paxton Boys” for an introduction to this subject.
Number 3, this elevation of traits supposedly unique to the “Scots-Irish” is just another, more subtle face of an older American belief in race and race eugenics. Instead of attributing certain local traits and behaviors to the complex cultural environment created during the violence of the frontier era, people like Vance just call it innate “Scots-Irishness”.
This is all a bit reminiscent of those old newspaper horoscopes which were always intentionally vague - so people could always find a way to relate the words to their own circumstances…
Instead of looking at Appalachia’s past and current problems through the lens of racism, reliance on hunting and subsistence farming, bad economic policies, poor infrastructure, corporate pillage of resources, and revivalist religion creating a legacy of poor education going back to frontier times, let’s just call it “Scots-Irish hillbilly culture”.
In other words, Vance and other charlatans like him - even when using the word “culture” instead of “race”- actually want to believe that certain things are exclusive to certain groups. That certain things are “in their blood”.
This sort of fake history, this cherry-picking of ancestors, this claiming of “true American values” as being mainly synonymous with only certain groups, this, this, bullshit quite frankly- it goes to the very heart of the current social and ideological divisions seen in the USA. The center can no longer hold.
Half of America wants to grow-up and confront the past with open eyes in order to move forward in a fact-based reality.
The other half wants to drag everyone into a world based on a conjured reality - a world of propaganda and historical whitewashing, a world of jingoism, blind nationalism, and Christian faith.
This is why politicians are banning books. This is why American history teachers are being put under pressure with new restrictive legislation, why Florida’s current governor now endorses new history books claiming that African-American slaves actually benefitted from enslavement in certain ways.
White Christian Nationalists want to “own” American history, and by extension, they can then “own” American identity itself.
And when the facts don’t match their fake identity, they will simply lie, or attack the person laughing at The Emperor’s New Clothes.
After all, “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past”, as George Orwell warned in his famous novel, “1984”.
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I’ve given so much time to Vance’s claims of so-called “Scots-Irish” ancestry because many, many people who claim this identity in Appalachia are fully as multi-ethnic as anyone else there.
And this includes people like J. D. Vance, who is happy to embrace a scant, possibly non-existent ethnic component of his “white” ancestry to suit an ideological political narrative, while ignoring his closer ties to the mixed-ethnic “Carmel Indians” of Ohio and other brown people of Eastern Kentucky like the Melungeons.
This does a great, a serious disservice, to the complexity and fascinating real history of the region - and an even worse disservice to truth.
It is White Christian Nationalist propaganda worthy of anything spoken by German National Socialists about “pure Aryan” people back in the 1930s and 1940s.
Never, ever, become a book-burner. But after you’ve read “Hillbilly Elegy”, make sure to place it firmly in the “fiction” section of your book collection.
About the symbols in the Vance pedigree.
The modern national flags are only meant to give a general indication of the predominant ancestry on each line. But even the people behind, say, an English flag will be mixed to some degree.
You will note the complete absence of any flag indicating Ulster or “Scots-Irish” ancestry.
The little circular “Before We Were White” logo indicates lines with “Melungeon” or what I call “Old Mix American” people - meaning people of non-Northern or Central European background:
Indigenous American, sub-Saharan African, Malagasi, South Asian Indian, North African, Spanish, Portuguese, Sephardic or Ashkenazi Jewish, Romani, and others.
The fact that J. D. Vance is not “Scots-Irish”, and has innumerable “non-white” ancestors is not important in and of itself.
What matters profoundly is the attempt by Vance and the GOP to rewrite history in an effort to make it match a White Christian Nationalist ideology.
Whether Vance or Trump believe this stuff is beside the point.
They will use it to mobilise a section of the American people large enough to bring down democracy.
#JDVance #fake
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