It also implies that persons with advanced degrees can’t have some pretty myopic failures in logic and empathy, something that just does not match the world we live in.
Someone doesn’t have to be a caricature of Cletus the slack-jawed yokel to be willfully, cheerfully ignorant of the Southern Strategy and the Republican political system.
We are soon to have a cabinet packed with highly intelligent, probably well educated, folks who believe in racial management and exclusion. They sound and speak more fluently and intelligently than our President-elect.
Have they not heard of Engineer’s Disease? Probably not.
His advisor Peter Thiel is a good example of what you’re discussing here: a believer in “human biodiversity” (pseudoscientific racism’s newest incarnation) among other awful alt-right causes. One way or another and in short order, the intellectual thugs always supplant the street thugs at the top of right-wing authoritarian movements.
They’re not racist, they just believe in systemically denying housing to minorities who fail to meet the basic credit reporting scores!*
That’s objectively un-racist, because scores can’t see race.
*generic example of logic and not exemplary of the worst of these persons’ beliefs.
I did read it, and also read the articles linked to me by BB users. I have read the HuffPost article linked by Spunky TWS as well. I read it when I started looking for evidence if Trump’s antisemitism. I will read it again carefully, and reply when I have time to do so.
This- http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wolf/
seems to be a reasoned response to all the hysteria.
more later MB
I have to call BS right there. If you’d actually read the Tavis Smiley op-ed from Time you wouldn’t have characterised it as their publishing a piece “about the possibility of Trump bringing back Slavery,”* because that’s not what Smiley was talking about at all. Even the sensationalist headline doesn’t go that far. Your reading comprehension skills seem adequate enough for a Time article, so my only conclusion is that you just didn’t read it and instead thought the headline would serve as evidence of hysteria in the “liberal” media.
I know I’m not going to get an admission from you so I’ll just let you keep digging your hole while his surrogates talk about WWII Japanese internment camps as a model for dealing with Muslims.
[* before you try to claim that you were being figurative in the spirit of the article, you weren’t. You followed up by saying “No he won’t”, not “no America won’t”]
Im not saying that sexism and racism had no impact–they very clearly did.
But to say they were the primary motivator for all or even most Trump voters is not supported by the facts.
It would probably be more accurate to say that passive sexism and racism blinded a lot of people to some of the more odious aspects of Trump’s candidacy.
I could say it’s a mix of both; but it’s mostly due to gerrymandering, voter suppression, and outright human stupidity in rural areas.
Trump’s voters were mostly just the same old middle-class white GOP base. Who, yes, vote based upon bigotry, albeit with some variance as to which form of bigotry is any particular voter’s #1 issue.
There was no huge groundswell of working class support for Trump. There was a collapse in working class support for the Dems, but those folks didn’t vote Trump; they didn’t vote at all.
If you want to look at the cultural roots of racism in the US in its current form, you could go back pretty far but an interesting change happens after the Civil War with the rise of Social Darwinism - the idea that the people at the “top” of society, with the most wealth, are there because their (white) genes make them more “fit”, and therefore deserving of power regardless of the damage they do to the rest of society to get it. (sound familiar?)
The phrase “survival of the fittest” was coined not by Darwin but by Herbert Spencer, a eugenicist.
source: Inherently Unequal by Lawrence Goldstone
The roots are likely Bacon’s Rebellion, but your correct on the rise of social darwinism (also, scientific racism/ eugenics) as being a key to understanding race in America today.
That amounts to the same thing. While Trump voters may not admit (even to themselves) that they were voting for Trump because he is a white male who champions white identity, sexism and racism were the key to making a grossly unfit candidate acceptable and a fundamentally qualified candidate unacceptable.
So “white identity and sexism gave Trump the electoral college” is still an accurate statement. Take those things away and he couldn’t possibly win.
It sure would be nice if people put the effort into antiracist action that they did into explaining how they couldn’t possibly be a racist (because of reasons.)
It’s okay to be flawed so long as there’s a greater consciousness. But admitting and addressing flaws is far worse than possessing them, and so the world is as it is.
Like, say, if Trump supporters made up the bulk of people shouting down those Klan rallies instead of simply insisting they weren’t affiliated with them. Yeah, that would be nice.
It occurred to me some time ago that “Love Trumps Hate” could have been embraced as a slogan by the Trump supporters except that on some level even they know which side of the love/hate equation their candidate represents.
I dsylexically parse that slogan as “[I] love trump[’]s hate”
I’ve been thinking a lot about what any of us could possibly say to to a Trump voter that would make any difference. I often think about how to get a conservative to come halfway, and try and at least understand how liberals think even if they don’t agree. It’s clear there’s no way to do that, simply because we can’t agree on the basic elements of reality.
Reminds me of Morton’s Demon.
If the meaning of your slogan can be reversed with a minor change in prosody and punctuation, it’s a crap slogan.
They do love Trump’s hate.
Sounds like you have far too much faith in software configurable hardware.
(Citation Needed)
It is the passive sexism, racism, and classicism that should cause us the most concern. Active? Hell, yes, we are all (hopefully) against that. It’s the passive that is the most dangerous. It’s what hides behind the curtains as something else.
I’ll give you an example of my own passive sexism:
I’m watching the new Netflix series “The Queen” (it’s awesome) and this interaction occurs:
Prince Phillip to the new Queen Elizabeth II: “What kind of marriage is this? What kind of family? You’ve taken my career from me, you’ve taken my home, you’ve taken my name … I thought we were in this together.”
At first, I’m all sympathetic with him. Then, I realize. WTF? That’s what WOMEN HAVE HAD TO DO FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS, without any expectation of complaint. Sucks, doesn’t it, when you think about it? When you’re expected to submit to someone else, give up your dreams, your home, and your fricking name to be a part of something else. I don’t know the answer of how two people come together to form a life, especially in the 21st century, but this much I know is true: I am more proud of myself than I have ever been. I drew a very small and insignificant line in the sand and said: I will keep my maiden name. It is the name I was born with and the name with which I shall die.
If I, who, given the gestalt of my comments on BBS, am at first swayed by some random TV character’s rationale, then what does that mean for the rest of America?
Sexism had everything to do with this election. If you think it didn’t, I will gladly sell you some lovely land in Florida.
