Michael Harriot covers how Nikole Hanna-Jones debunked common misconceptions about age and racism:
Great article, thanks for posting.
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Michael Harriot covers a revealing conversation between two white supremacists:
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The article shows that white people are less willing to prevent covid when they think that it mostly hurts people of color. It makes some good points but leaves out the key thing that all “backlash” pieces do: these people were already acting selfishly and would continue to do so whether we pushback or not. Secondly, except for a single sentence, it leaves out any mention that maybe not all news stories should be written with a target audience that is only about half of the country.
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Hmm, sure, but then when they hear news that disaster has struck or may well strike (in effect) white people and THAT alarms them, then they often think and act in what amounts to a group-identified way, no?
Islamic terrorism was the big threat du jour a decade or so ago, because it threatened ordinary “Americans,” that is, mostly white people. OTOH, the increasingly virulent threat of domestic white supremacist terror has long elicited little more than a shrug from most white Americans, because it supposedly doesn’t threaten white people.
I don’t think that common white selfishness should be extricated from the group-bound identity that is “white.” They’re paradoxically bound together. As the article notes, "Previous research showed that people tend to care about things less when they seem more distant from themselves and their peer group."
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Other than the “paradoxically” I agree completely. Selfishness (both individual and group selfishness) is a required aspect of whiteness. (that’s why I posted the story on this thread)
The linked article implies that being presented with information on covid racial disparities is what lead to the selfishness. I was trying to make the point that they were already acting selfishly before that. I didn’t mean to imply that the scope of that selfishness was limited to just themselves.
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The Unbearable Whiteness of Ken Burns
The filmmaker’s new documentary on Benjamin Franklin tells an old and misleading story
No paywall:
There is a deeper problem at work in Burns’s portrait of Franklin, a problem that emanates from the same qualities that make his work so popular. Throughout, Franklin and America are viewed through what the sociologist Joe Feagin has called a “white racial frame.” In such a perspective the interests, problems, and fortunes of white Americans are prioritized, while those of nonwhite others are discounted, viewed as lesser and available for sacrifice. White framing silently assumes that the “us” and the “we” in thinking about America are white people.
That framing is evident throughout Benjamin Franklin . For example, when the documentary discusses the Junto, a club for fellow young artisans organized in Philadelphia by Franklin, Isaacson comments, “Franklin believed that the virtues and values of a working middle class were going to be the backbone of American society. The artisans, the shopkeepers, the people who put on leather aprons early in the morning to help serve the public.” Of course, in Franklin’s time, only white artisans, white shopkeepers, and leather-apron-clad white people were eligible for membership in mutual-aid clubs like the Junto. The white part doesn’t have to be said out loud: The volunteer fire departments, lending libraries, and free colleges that Franklin helped organize, except for the specifically named “Negro” school, were for whites only.
White framing is also evident in Burns’s segregation of commentary. Most of the expert comments dealing with race, racism, or slavery come from the only two scholars of color among the dozen or so historians featured in Benjamin Franklin : Christopher Brown and Erica Armstrong Dunbar. Conversely, while Brown and Dunbar are deeply learned scholars with much to say about the world of the 18th century in general, they are rarely asked to discuss topics beyond slavery or racism. Indeed, the stories of people of color are generally sequestered as the possession of Black historians, a “special interest.”
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Acknowledging history would hurt our fee fees and that wouldn’t be fair at all. /s
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Far too many white people when faced with uncomfortable, historical facts…
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Feed on a steady diet of myth and the truth becomes hard to digest.
This
This
This
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That’s definitely a huge part of it, but in my conversations there’s this other piece. White dudes (it is mostly dudes) interpret any discussion of privilege or just generally how things are set up in the US as someone saying, “you didn’t work for what you have!!!” (even though that’s not at all what I’m saying), and they react defensively by bristling and pointing out that they have worked hard for what they have.
So on top of everything else, they take discussions of the topic as a personal insult to their work ethic, I think. And refuse to acknowledge that other people with different melanin levels work just as hard if not harder yet don’t have the same rewards to show for it. 
Anyway, fuck those guys.
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When racism backfires.
More people need to be like that Lyft driver.
I hope the racist shitheads business doesn’t suffer. /s
Not posting a link to the Yelp reviews because there’s no confirmation they own it, but that hasn’t stopped the pile on.
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Absolutely.
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All human behavior is overdetermined and has multiple influences.
Sometimes you do the right thing and it sucks to do it. It doesn’t make you feel better- it’s just something you have to do to.
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Prove him wrong people who are sick and tired of this, prove him wrong: 
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