'How much time do you want for your progress?'
Police brutality, racism denial by hand-holding Dems and GOP, magical thinking & more
Democrats love to pretend there are significant differences between them and the Republican Party. When it comes down to most central issues (economics, civil liberties, human rights, empire etc.), however, they are in lockstep with one another.
Take, for example systemic racism. The United States was established on the myth that White colonists were “settling” an unoccupied place.
In fact our nation was founded on the systematic extermination of tens of millions of racialized indigenous peoples, and the enslavement of millions of others. At present, our economy relies on near slave-labor conditions of racialized peoples with little to no rights doing work in our fields, factories, and prisons, as we extend our brutal empire abroad and overturn the free elections, bomb, and otherwise dominate nations of majority Brown and Yellow people.
We are, of course, a nation founded on and sustained by racist ideology in service of capital. In short, and among other things, the United States is a racist country.
When Republican Senator Tom Scott responded to President Joe Biden’s congressional address this past week by saying “Hear me clearly, America is not a racist country,” he was immediately blasted by critics for the absurdity of his propaganda. It took Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris mere hours to agree with Scott, however.
“No, I don’t think America is a racist country,” she said.
America is so racist that not even the Black leaders of either corporate party, like Scott and Harris, believe that the U.S. is a racist nation. This is magical thinking, and it conveniently holds up our systems of oppression.
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In his first formal address to Congress Biden hit his liberal mark by saying that “White supremacy is terrorism.” He was repudiating his predecessor President Trump’s blatant ignoring of law enforcement’s highlighting of White supremacist violence as our leading cause of terrorism (which is a pretty strange phenomenon for such a “not racist” country like the U.S. to experience…) in hopes that his rhetorical recognition of this small piece of America’s overall systemic racism would earn him plaudits from liberals.
It has, unfortunately. We as a nation are all too often far too easily pacified and satisfied.
Biden may have said that White supremacy is terrorism but he has not and won’t acknowledge that his war on Iraq, his bombing of Syria, of Yemen, his extension of the war in Afghanistan (our deal with the Taliban was to end the 20-year war this month, but his recent announcement extended that so he can supposedly end it in September), his support of racial school segregation in the 1980’s, and the New Jim Crow system that he helped create through his 1994 Crime Bill, are all manifestations of America’s and his own White supremacy ideology.
Biden and Democrats discuss acts of White supremacist so-called “domestic terrorism” while ignoring far more lethal and damaging, on-scale, examples of our nation’s racism in service of capital because it allows them to leave the mechanisms of empire in place that serve our large corporations while also scaring us into giving up our sparse freedoms in the name of fighting terrorism. They did this after the attacks of September 11, 2001, when Democrats and Republicans alike grabbed the legislation Joe Biden wrote in the 90’s and added onto it a tad to make The Patriot Act as an excuse to spy on all of us, 24-7, hold us indefinitely without pressing charges, torture us, assassinate us without trial…you know, all the things they do to keep us safe.
They did it then, and they’re about to add onto it again because a few hundred weirdos stormed the capitol, assisted by the racist Capitol Police department, the FBI and U.S. military itself.
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Speaking of militarized police abuse, let’s briefly review police harassing, brutalizing, and breaking a 73-year-old woman with dementia as she picked wildflowers. If that wasn’t good enough, turns out police officers laughed at the body-cam footage of the elderly lady being terrorized by their badged colleagues.
Watch the footage. Then, check out police reaction to it.
That cannot be “reformed.” American policing insists on raining down terror on all of us each day, and so it must be abolished.
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Everyone knows politicians often say one thing while doing completely different things. For some reason, however, we are often blind to specific examples of that phenomenon when our favorites do it. Take progressive-darling Rep. Tulsi Gabbard.
On Twitter she recently called for an end to racialization…while racializing one of her bigotry’s favorite targets, Muslim people, in the same week while discussing the Armenian genocide. Gabbard called for the end of racializing people and then made up an alternate universe and history, blaming “Islamists” for the Armenian Genocide that was, in fact, committed by secular revolutionary groups who fought the Muslim Ottoman Empire.
Rep. Gabbard, the woman who signed up as an adult to help wage war on poor Brown people in the Muslim world years into what was obviously a cruel, genocidal effort, is evidently anti-racist in the same way that she’s anti-war.
That is to say, she is neither of those things.
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I want to end this column with a quote from the great 20th century American writer, political activist, and political theorist James Baldwin. It is tempting for many to look at the current stewards of our racist, classist empire, people who have the right biographies, sometimes say the right things, people like Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Tulsi Gabbard, as “improvements” over previous politicians, the ones we didn’t like.
At least they’re not Trump.
We’re improving.
It’s not enough, but it’s a start.
You have to give them time.
You’ve heard all the iterations. You may have uttered or thought some of them yourself.
As readers of this column know, I am not so convinced. Baldwin also rejected the tempting balm of moral relativism and political incrementalism.
“What is it that you want me to reconcile myself to? I was born here almost 60 years ago. I’m not going to live another 60 years. You always told me it takes time. It’s taken my father’s time, my mother’s time, my uncles’ time, my brothers’ and my sisters’ time, my nieces’ and my nephews’ time. How much time do you want for your progress?”