DEFEAT FASCISM BEFORE FASCISM DEFEATS YOU
"What's Past is Prologue..."
http://www.truth-out.org/…/38319-white-supremacy-elected-do…
I had no interest in watching the returns come in. Early Tuesday night, I was watching "Supernatural" reruns on my couch and only occasionally glancing at election updates on Twitter. Everything looked as predicted. The New York Times said Hillary Clinton was very likely to become the next president, as its irksome electoral meter bounced about. Like many, I had adopted the steadfast belief that Trump simply couldn't win. The polls were thoroughly damning. Wall Street didn't want him. The Republicans barely wanted him. But after a while, I felt compelled to turn off Netflix and switch to live election coverage.
I watched, drop-jawed, as it became clear the unthinkable was happening. Donald Trump was surging toward victory.
As the electoral tide turned, wounded Clinton supporters began casting blame on social media, accusing voters who supported third-party candidates of derailing a Clinton victory. The mud-slinging directed at anyone on the left who hadn't supported Clinton was predictably swift and devoid of insight. After all, Donald Trump was the opponent Hillary Clinton wanted. He was supposed to be an easy takedown. But Clinton's team had obviously underestimated Trump's cultural momentum. The media all but celebrated his despicable antics for shock and entertainment value, as large swaths of bigoted white people endorsed his racism and xenophobia.
The Democratic establishment was sure it would have Bernie Sanders' crestfallen supporters on lock, even as it insulted them. Clinton didn't even attempt to speak the issues that might have moved such people. The Democratic establishment assumed it would get what it wanted out of fear, without making any concessions to those who didn't trust it. The struggle at Standing Rock -- which Clinton weakly acknowledged in a noncommittal statement -- is just one example of how this campaign took people for granted, and took votes for granted.
Some issues never warranted engagement for Clinton and those issues often involved marginalized people -- because the Democratic Party was betting it all on one of its most basic electoral assumptions: There's no need to be loved when your opponent is feared.
But in spite of my distaste for Clinton, I likely would have voted for her if I lived in a battleground state. I didn't because I didn't have to. And given her track record and all the harm she's done -- supporting and enacting policies that expanded mass incarceration and our violent interventions abroad -- feeling like I didn't have to vote for her was a relief. I am willing to bet that some voters in states where Clinton was projected to win had that same feeling: a sense of relief that they didn't have to cosign a neoliberal nightmare's ascension. Wall Street wanted her. The establishment wanted her. Plenty of people who hated her seemed ready to suck it up, and the polls looked good. And then....
Enter President Trump.
What came as a shock to many of us probably shouldn't have. While Clinton seemed to have made a Thatcher-like assent, overcoming misogyny by embracing her own kind of casual brutality, white supremacy would not allow her to win so easily as Obama stepped out. The flames of white violence had been stoked at a time when white people had felt the displacement of a Black presidency, and the unapologetic momentum of a movement for Black lives.
Not even Wall Street could overrule the white rage and vanity that fueled Trump. The electoral dictates of Wall Street are institutional, but white supremacy is structural. White supremacy redistributed its power Tuesday night, and in such a spectacular fashion that even those of us who expect the worst of our country were left astonished. The United States, which seemed poised to usher in another Clinton presidency, instead rallied behind a dangerous, racist buffoon.
So what does the future hold? Ugliness, to be sure. The terrifying promises of Trump's campaign are ringing in the ears of all affected by them, myself included. I am afraid for everyone who will be harmed by this man's administration. I am afraid of just how much destruction one oafish reality TV star might bring, when life as we know it nears the edge of extinction.
Yet I am, as ever, certain in my own work. I will organize and take action. I imagine a few more people will be in the streets in the coming year than otherwise would. I'll be glad to see you all out there, though sorry about the circumstances.
This is going to be rough, but it's what we've got. So let's pull it together and figure out how to tear into our common enemies in the days ahead. I know loss is bitter, but it's time to get over it and learn what you can. In this case, that might mean learning that people may not bother to show up for a candidate they don't believe cares about them, no matter how scary the alternative. And it definitely means getting ready to throw down hard, because it's going to be a long four years.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Kelly Hayes is a direct action trainer and a cofounder of The Chicago Light Brigade and the direct action collective Lifted Voices. She is community relations associate and a contributing writer at Truthout and her photography is featured in the "Freedom and Resistance" exhibit of the DuSable Museum of African American History. Kelly's contribution to the anthology Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? stems from her work as an organizer against state violence and her ongoing analysis of movements in the United States, as featured in Truthout and the blog Transformative Spaces.
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"What's Past is Prologue..."
https://newrepublic.com/…/joe-biden-destructive-politics-wh…The Destructive Politics of White Amnesia
Joe Biden set the stage for Donald Trump's racial scapegoating. Why can't he admit that he was wrong?
by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw
August 6, 2019
The New Republic
For all of his bumbling verbosity and avuncular artlessness, Democratic front-runner Joe Biden serves as a remarkably elegant illustration of all that ails the Democratic Party’s bid to retake the White House in 2020.
Trump’s breathtaking weaponization of the Republican Party into the party of white nationalism should, at minimum, make the parameters of the Democratic primary campaign clear. Where conservatives in the past have employed dog whistle rhetoric to mask the manipulation of racial tensions, Trump’s itchy Twitter fingers dole out something more like smart missile rhetoric. The precision-guided invectives hurled at Representative Elijah Cummings, “the Squad,” and civil rights leader the Reverend Al Sharpton represent an escalation that Trump’s eventual general election challenger cannot meet with appeasement.
To counter such terrifying demagoguery, the party must be as unified in its repudiation of racism, xenophobia, and misogyny as the Party of Trump has been in enabling them. One would think, therefore, that candidates angling to become the standard-bearer of the loyal opposition should be capable of articulating not only the danger of this political moment, but also how their own party helped create this tragedy. Democratic candidates will never be able to steer a fresh course so long as they continue decades of denial and dissemblance. Joe Biden’s status as the 2020 field’s front-runner, in spite of his cringeworthy efforts to account for his part in that history, speaks volumes about how far today’s Democrats still have to go before they can meet the challenges of Trumpism head-on. A good deal of Biden’s inflated standing comes from an all-too characteristic Democratic posture of risk aversion, compounded by a talismanic faith in Biden’s mystic “electability.” Many party leaders and voters clearly view a Biden candidacy as the safest post-Trump course correction—and Biden as a pragmatic man of the people with the unique ability to build coalitional bridges between coastal elites and the so-called forgotten men and women of America’s heartland.
As if to underscore the inherent limitations of this posturing, Biden has trafficked enthusiastically in images of good ol’ boy politicking as evidence that he is the right man for the job. As his reminiscences of Senate business in the sepia-toned (but decidedly white) past tripped up his early campaign efforts, Biden has tried, gingerly to grudgingly, to walk his comments back. But those overtures point up a disquieting fear about his bid to defeat Trump: He may well perpetuate the fallacies of elite comity that marked his early career—and that continue to animate Democratic strategies to win back voters who are not as yet scandalized by the racist and misogynist rabble-rousing that is Trumpism. Falling back on that strategy alone may be fool’s gold. Not only is it questionable whether Trump’s heartland faithful will ever return to the Democratic column; the clouds that hang over Biden’s candidacy also suggest that when the going gets tough, the tough might find themselves going it alone. Biden’s missteps present a troubling pattern of sacrificing the interests of the very constituencies that stand to lose the most if the 2020 battle is undercut by the politics of appeasement. Voters who are activated to battle tooth-and-nail against the resurrection of our white supremacist past have every reason to press candidates for evidence that their failing marks on some of the most consequential issues affecting race and gender justice won’t be repeated. So far, the current front-runner has offered little substance in his defense, beyond Obama stardust and affability. That’s not enough in the best of times, and it is certainly not sufficient now.
For starters, Biden has yet to accept any genuine responsibility for how he helped preside over a process that depicted women—African American women—as conniving bottom-feeders. As chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991, Biden actively enabled the humiliation and stigmatization of Anita Hill in that terrible spectacle of patriarchal impunity. He failed to call the multiple existing witnesses who could corroborate Hill’s testimony, while granting future Justice Clarence Thomas the ability to testify both before and after his accuser. From his chairman’s perch, meanwhile, Biden took a sharply inquisitorial line of questioning toward Hill, and reassured the country that Thomas’s character was beyond reproach.
Biden’s long-overdue apology for his central role in the Hill-Thomas fiasco was typical Biden—that is to say, the rough equivalent of a reckless driver’s acknowledgment that a hapless bystander may have been harmed while he was behind the wheel. But well into the #MeToo era, Biden’s entire driving record warrants explaining, in close detail. Almost three decades after the Thomas hearings, he seems unaware of how his penchant for Senate friendliness made him a prime choreographer of a cultural debacle steeped in the toxic brand of white-male privilege that Moya Bailey and Trudy have come to call misogynoir.
The harm done to Anita Hill, to Black women, and to sexual harassment victims overall is not the half of it. The mishandled hearings put Thomas on the Supreme Court, and Thomas has gone on to be the most influential justice currently sitting. Any basic review of the long train of recent high court decisions dismantling the modest protections erected to safeguard our democracy against the unlicensed rule by the wealthy and racially privileged can’t help but highlight their common thread: The majority are 5–4 opinions in which Thomas’s vote has turned the country inside out.
In the same discursive vein, Biden’s wistful recollection of working alongside segregationists James Eastland and Herman Talmadge sent up clear alarms. To be sure, from a certain realpolitik vantage, one can defend Biden’s collaboration with white power as a necessary evil. At the same time, however, Biden’s nostalgia for his pragmatic former alliances with segregationist lawmakers bespeaks a foreshortened moral compass, one prone to equate bigotry with collegial rascalry.
Rather than citing abhorrent figures like Eastland and Talmadge as exemplars of a bygone civility, Biden might just as easily have lamented the many ways in which the postwar Senate majority amplified the power and influence of segregationists—a pivotal fact that Biden only glancingly acknowledged after the public uproar greeting his comments. This glib moral embrace of unyielding racists for the sake of “getting things done” buttressed a vicious anti-Black social and political order for generations on end. When those who think of Black people as subhumans are the arbiters of policy, it’s no great surprise to see them endorse policies that are at best indifferent and at worst inimical to the interests of Black people. When it came to defining issues like busing and, subsequently, mass incarceration, Biden was an accommodating enabler in the regressive politics of race.
Biden’s selective—and at times flatly deceptive—invocation of his history of course mirrors the countless ways in which American political culture at large relies on robustly denying the truth about our own collective past. His very candidacy, pitched on a vice presidential tenure under the glorious “post-racial” interregnum of the Obama years, elides much of his public career. American leaders can indulge in such self-exculpating flights of fancy via a stolid ideological refusal to deny the true implications of a state built on racial power. However much we love to pretend otherwise, the legitimacy of segregation and chattel slavery is inscribed in many of our most hallowed rhetorical and constitutional traditions—and extend right up into the present, as the Trump White House and the rise of the alt-right remind us nearly every day.
Biden’s difficulties are not personal; rather, like many of our white leaders, he’s inherited them from institutional, societal, and cultural patterns of denial. In our near-schizophrenic consensus view of racial progress, this legacy of denial operates to celebrate the nation’s preferred self-image as a clearinghouse of equal individual opportunity, open to all, while obsessively rationalizing away slavery, colonialism, and extermination as the singular, hermetically contained responsibility of the individual bad actors long ago who perpetrated these harms. This very denial is what has set the stage for the riotous resurrection of white entitlement and scapegoat politics.
Before there is reconciliation, there must be truthful engagement with the conditions of Trumpian reaction. If Biden’s campaign fails to channel and instead diminishes the energies of constituencies mobilized to resist 45, Trumpism still wins.
The playwright Eve Ensler recently referred to the American inability to confront the country’s past injustices as a form of “diabolical amnesia.” This forgetfulness so dulls the tip of progress that we repeat the same unjust narratives over and over again. At a minimum, defeating the existential menace of the Trump movement means waking up, once and for all, from the many fatally compromised half-measures—and worse—that make up Joe Biden’s fond imaginings of bipartisan comity. The good old days of the good ol’ boys were never good. No one equipped to stem the MAGA tide would pretend otherwise.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Kimberlé Crenshaw J.D. Harvard; L.L.M. University of Wisconsin; B.A. Cornell University) is founder and executive director of the African American Policy Forum. She is also Professor of Law at UCLA and Columbia Law School, and a leading authority in the area of Civil Rights, Black feminist legal theory, and race, racism and the law. Her articles have appeared in the Harvard Law Review, National Black Law Journal, Stanford Law Review and Southern California Law Review. She is the founding coordinator of the Critical Race Theory Workshop, and the co-editor of the volume, Critical Race Theory: Key Documents That Shaped the Movement. Crenshaw has lectured widely on race matters, addressing audiences across the country as well as in Europe, India, Africa and South America.
A specialist on race and gender equality, she has facilitated workshops for human rights activists in Brazil and in India, and for constitutional court judges in South Africa. Her groundbreaking work on “Intersectionality” has traveled globally and was influential in the drafting of the equality clause in the South African Constitution. Crenshaw authored the background paper on Race and Gender Discrimination for the United Nation’s World Conference on Racism, served as the Rapporteur for the conference’s Expert Group on Gender and Race Discrimination, and coordinated NGO efforts to ensure the inclusion of gender in the WCAR Conference Declaration.
Crenshaw has worked extensively on a variety of issues pertaining to gender and race in the domestic arena including violence against women, structural racial inequality, and affirmative action. She has served as a member of the National Science Foundation’s committee to research violence against women and has consulted with leading foundations, social justice organizations and corporations to advance their race and gender equity initiatives.
In 1996, she co-founded the African American Policy Forum to house a variety of projects designed to deliver research-based strategies to better advance social inclusion. Among the Forum’s projects are the Affirmative Action Research and Policy Consortium and the Multiracial Literacy and Leadership Initiative. In partnership with the Aspen Roundtable for Community Change, Crenshaw facilitated workshops on racial equity for hundreds of community leaders and organizations throughout the country. With the support of the Rockefeller Foundation, Crenshaw facilitates the Bellagio Project, an international network of scholars working in the field of social inclusion from five continents. Currently, she serves as Committee Chair for the U.S.-Brazil Joint Action Plan to Promote Racial and Ethnic Equality, an initiative of the U.S. State Department. A founding member of the Women’s Media Initiative, Crenshaw writes for Ms. Magazine, the Nation and other print media, and has appeared as a regular commentator on “The Tavis Smiley Show,” NPR, and MSNBC.
Twice awarded Professor of the Year at UCLA Law School, Crenshaw received the Lucy Terry Prince Unsung Heroine Award presented by the Lawyers’ Committee on Civil Rights Under Law, and the ACLU Ira Glasser Racial Justice Fellowship from 2005-07. Crenshaw has received the Fulbright Distinguished Chair for Latin America, the Alphonse Fletcher Fellowship, and was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University in 2009 and a Visiting Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy in 2010. Currently, Crenshaw is the Faculty Director of the Critical Race Studies program at UCLA Law School.
IMAGE: Arnie Sachs/Picture-Alliance/DPA/AP Photo (Biden) Jennifer Law/AFP/Getty (Hill)
Ilhan Omar responds to Trump's racist attack: "He spreads the disease of hate"
September 23, 2020
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) responds to President Donald Trump making a racially divisive attack against her at a campaign rally in Moon Township, Pennsylvania.
He also denigrated the Minnesota congresswoman in her home state last month as "a horrible woman who hates our country" and insinuated that she may not have won her recent primary election.
"Let's check the mail-in vote," Trump told the crowd, adding. "Where are the people that would vote for her?"
Last summer, in a series of racist tweets, Trump told Omar and the other members of the "Squad" who have been outspoken against his policies -- Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib -- to "go back" to their supposed home countries, though they were born in the United States and Omar is a naturalized citizen.
Following his tweets, Trump's supporters at a campaign rally in North Carolina chanted "send her back," which was directed at Omar, as the President stood silently. He later claimed to disavow the chants.
Trump has also promoted false smears against Omar and questioned her patriotism, highlighting some of her controversial comments on issues including Israel, law enforcement and the September 11th terrorist attacks.
VIDEO:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_WQcqnQSpg
