stories about racism & what it is

An assault on an 18-year-old biracial woman in Wisconsin is being investigated as a hate crime after she was set on fire in her car, according to the Madison Police Department. https://t.co/fk0TrRUX5Z

— Good Morning America (@GMA) June 26, 2020

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FBI joins case of woman set on fire in racist attack

link https://madison365.com/fbi-joins-case-of-woman-set-on-fire-in-racist-attack/?fbclid=IwAR0mTXPecbk703–oG6gvwmbRgsvVMkDZ0MCh4lYvN_DYH7Tq-yAEdpTxSQ

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has joined the investigation into an alleged racist attack on an 18-year-old EMT and aspiring paramedic early Wednesday morning.

As Madison365 reported first Thursday, Althea Bernstein said she was driving through downtown Madison around 1 am Wednesday, just as protests were winding down on the Capitol Square. She said four white men approached her car, and one used a spray bottle to deploy a liquid — later determined to be lighter fluid — and lit it, giving her burns on her face and neck.

Madison Police Department spokesman Joel Despain said a detective has been in contact with the victim and is reviewing surveillance video and other evidence. He said the detective confirmed Friday that the FBI has joined the investigation due to the “egregious” nature of the assault and the national attention the case has received.

He said he was not aware of whether any specific evidence or information led to the FBI’s involvement.

The History Of The Word ‘Racism’”

Gene Demby
January 06, 2014

http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2014/01/05/260006815/the-ugly-fascinating-history-of-the-word-racism

The Oxford English Dictionary’s first recorded utterance of the word racism was by a man named Richard Henry Pratt in 1902. Pratt was railing against the evils of racial segregation:

Segregating any class or race of people apart from the rest of the people kills the progress of the segregated people or makes their growth very slow. Association of races and classes is necessary to destroy racism and classism.

Although Pratt might have been the first person to inveigh against racism and its deleterious effects by name, he is much better-remembered for a very different coinage: “Kill the Indian…save the man”: “A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one,” Pratt said. “In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.

We’re still living with the after-effects of what Pratt thought and did. His story serves as a useful parable for why discussions of racism remain so deeply contentious even now.

But let’s back up a bit.

Beginning in the 1880s, a group of well-heeled white men would travel to upstate New York each year to attend the Lake Mohonk Conference Of The Friend Of the Indian. Their primary focus was a solution to “the Indian problem,” the need for the government to deal with the Native American groups living in lands that had been forcibly seized from them. The Plains Wars had decimated the Native American population, but they were coming to an end. There was a general feeling among these men and other U.S. leaders that the remaining Native Americans would be wiped out within a generation or two, destroyed by disease and starvation.

The Lake Mohonk attendees wanted to stop that from happening, and they pressed lawmakers to change the government’s policies toward Indians. Pratt, in particular, was a staunch advocate of folding Native Americans into white life — assimilation through education. He persuaded Congress to let him test out his ideas, and they gave him an abandoned military post in Carlisle, Pa., to set up a boarding school for Native children. He was also able to convince many Native Americans, including some tribal leaders, to send their children far away from home, and leave them in his charge. “These [chiefs] were smart men,” said Grace Chaillier, a professor of Native American studies at Northern Michigan University. “They saw the handwriting on the wall. They knew their children were going to need to be educated in the ways of the dominant culture or they weren’t going to survive.”

For many Natives, Chaillier said, this wrenching decision came down to a grim arithmetic: the boarding school would provide their children with food and shelter, which were hard to come by on the reservations. “The reservations were becoming very, very sad places to be,” she said. “These were places of daunting poverty. People were starving.”

The Carlisle Indian Industrial School would become a model for dozens of other unaffiliated boarding schools for Indian children. But Pratt’s plans had lasting, disastrous ramifications. He pushed for the total erasure of Native cultures among his students. “No bilingualism was accommodated at these boarding schools,” said Christina Snyder, a historian at Indiana University. The students’ native tongues were strictly forbidden — a rule that was enforced through beating. Since they were rounded up from different tribes, the only way they could communicate with each other at the schools was in English.

“In Indian civilization I am a Baptist,” Pratt once told a convention of Baptist ministers, “because I believe in immersing the Indians in our civilization and when we get them under, holding them there until they are thoroughly soaked.” “The most significant consequence of this policy is the loss of languages,” Snyder says. “All native languages are [now] endangered and some of them are extinct.” Pratt also saw to it that his charges were Christianized. Carlisle students had to attend church each Sunday, although he allowed each student to choose the denomination to which she would belong.

When students would return home to the reservations — which Pratt objected to, because he felt it would slow down their assimilation — there was a huge cultural gap between them and their families. They dressed differently. They had a new religion. And they spoke a different language. “These kids coming from the boarding schools were literally unable to speak with their parents and grandparents,” Chaillier said. “In many cases, they were ashamed of them, because their grandparents and parents were living a life that nobody should aspire to live.”

But Pratt’s idea to assimilate Native Americans gained traction, and the government began to make attendance at Indian boarding schools compulsory. Families who didn’t comply were punished by the government. “For a period in the 1890s, federal Indian agents could withhold rations [from families] to kind of forcibly starve someone out,” Snyder says. According to Tsianina Lomawaima, who heads of the American Indian Studies program at the University of Arizona, the government’s schooling policy had more cynical aims. “They very specifically targeted Native nations that were the most recently hostile,” Lomawaima says. “There was a very conscious effort to recruit the children of leaders, and this was also explicit, essentially to hold those children hostage. The idea was it would be much easier to keep those communities pacified with their children held in a school somewhere far away.”

Unhappy, homesick students regularly ran away from the schools, and authorities were sent out to apprehend deserters, who were sometimes given asylum by Native communities who protested the mandatory school laws.

But since there was little oversight of the boarding schools, the students were often subjected to horrific mistreatment. Many were regularly beaten. Chaillier said that some of the schools were rife with sexual abuse. Tuberculosis or trachoma, a preventable disease which causes blindness, were rampant. All of the boarding schools, she said, had their own cemeteries.

Chaillier said that Pratt wasn’t always aware of these conditions. But these were the consequences of the popularity of his philosophies.

Chaillier, who is Lakota, told me a story that her mother often shared with her about her Indian school experience. One day, according to her mother’s story, a young student snuck out from his room at night, fell into a hole being dug for a well on the school grounds, broke his neck and died. His body was put on display and the students were assembled, forced to view their schoolmate’s corpse as a reminder of what happened to students who were disobedient.

But Chaillier’s mother insisted that she didn’t attend one of the bad Indian boarding schools. And she wanted Chaillier to attend one, as well. “If you were Indian, you went to Indian school,” she said, describing her mother’s feelings. Her mother felt that the Indian schools were a net good, even as they were calamitous for Indian cultures.

It’s that ambivalence that makes Pratt’s legacy so hard to neatly characterize. “Richard Henry Pratt was an incredibly complex individual in many ways,” Chaillier said. “Some of the worst outcomes that have happened in society have started out with someone thinking they were doing something good.”

“For his time, Pratt was definitely a progressive,” Snyder said. Indeed, he thought his ideas were the only thing keeping Native peoples from being entirely wiped out by disease and starvation. “That’s one of the dirty little secrets of American progressivism — that [progress] was still shaped around ideas of whiteness.” Snyder said that Pratt replaced the popular idea that some groups were natively inferior to others with the idea that some cultures were the problem, and needed to be corrected or destroyed. In other words, he swapped biological determinism for cultural imperialism. Given the sheer scale of the physical and cultural violence he helped set in motion, was Pratt himself a practitioner of the very ill he decried at the Lake Mohonk convention? Was he a racist?

Over a century after he was first recorded using the word, we still ask that question — is she or isn’t she racist? — in situations where no clear answer would ever present itself. We argue about the composition of the accused’s soul and the fundamental goodness or badness therein. But those are things we can’t possibly know. And as we litigate that question, other more meaningful questions become obscured.

Racism remains a force of enormous consequence in American life, yet no one can be accused of perpetrating it without a kicking up a grand fight. No one ever says, “Yeah, I was a little bit racist. I’m sorry.” That’s in part because racists, in our cultural conversations, have become inhuman. They’re fairy-tale villains, and thus can’t be real. There’s no nuance to these public fights. Someone is either seen as a racist and therefore an inhuman monster, or they’re seen as an actual, complex human being, and therefore, according to the standard view, incapable of being a racist.

Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic, who often writes about race, is one of several writers and thinkers who has drawn attention to this paradox:

The idea that America has lots of racism but few actual racists is not a new one. Philip Dray titled his seminal history of lynching At the Hands of Persons Unknown because most “investigations” of lynchings in the South turned up no actual lynchers. Both David Duke and George Wallace insisted that they weren’t racists. That’s because in the popular vocabulary, the racist is not so much an actual person but a monster, an outcast thug who leads the lynch mob and keeps Mein Kampf in his back pocket.

We can ask whether Richard Henry Pratt was himself racist even as he decried racism. But that question distracts from the concrete and lingering realities of his legacy. It’s far more valuable to wrestle with these two ideas at once: Pratt probably improved the material lives of many individual Native American children who lived in poverty and were at risk of starving. He also aggressively campaigned to destroy their cultures and subjected them to a panoply of miseries and privations.

Last Monday, a woman named Emily Johnson Dickerson died. She was the last person in the world who spoke only the Chickasaw language. That’s a reality interlaced with the difficult legacy of Richard Henry Pratt.

In the century since Pratt used the word racism, the term has become an abstraction. But always buried somewhere underneath it are actions with real consequences. Sometimes those outcomes are intended. Sometimes they’re not. But it’s the outcomes, not the intentions, that matter most in the end.

Backlash to Asian American wife in Floyd case reveals disturbing truth

Kimmy Yam

https://www.yahoo.com/news/backlash-against-asian-american-woman-121950813.html

As more details around the death of George Floyd are revealed, other developments, including that the ex-officer charged with murder in the case was married to a Hmong American woman, have prompted chatter — and a spate of hateful remarks — in the Asian American community around interracial relationships.

The ex-officer, Derek Chauvin, was fired the day after the shooting and now faces murder and manslaughter charges. The day after his arrest last month, his wife, Kellie, filed for divorce, citing “an irretrievable breakdown” in the marriage. She also indicated her intention to change her name.

The Chauvins’ interracial marriage has stirred up strong feelings toward Kellie Chauvin among many, including Asian American men, over her relationship with a white man, including accusations of self-loathing and complicity with white supremacy.

Some on the internet have labeled her a “self-hating Asian.” Others have concluded her marriage was a tool to gain social standing in the U.S., and several social media users on Asian American message boards dominated by men have dubbed her a “Lu,” a slang term often used to describe Asian women who are in relationships with white men as a form of white worship.

Many experts feel the reaction is symptomatic of attitudes that many in the community, especially certain men, have held toward women in interracial relationships, particularly with white men. It’s the unfortunate result of a complicated, layered web spun from the historical emasculation of Asian men, fetishization of Asian women and the collision of sexism and racism in the U.S.

Sung Yeon Choimorrow, executive director of the nonprofit National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, told NBC Asian America that by passing judgment on Asian women’s interracial relationships without context or details essentially removes their independence.

“The assumption is that an Asian woman who is married to a white man, she’s living some sort of stereotype of a submissive Asian woman, who’s internalizing racism and wanting to be white or being closer to white or whatever,” she said.

That belief, Choimorrow added, “just goes with the whole idea that somehow we don’t have a right to live our lives the way we want to.”

Little about the Chauvins’ marriage has been revealed to the public. Kellie, who came to the U.S. as a refugee, mentioned a few details in a 2018 interview with The Twin Cities Pioneer Press before becoming Mrs. Minnesota America that year. She explained she had previously been in an arranged marriage in which she endured domestic abuse. She met Chauvin while she was working in the emergency room of Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis.

Kellie Chauvin is hardly the only Asian woman who has been the target of these comments. In 2018, “Fresh Off the Boat” actress Constance Wu opened up about the anger she received from Asian men — specifically “MRAsians,” an Asian American play on the term “men’s rights activists” — for having dated a white man. Wu, who also starred in the culturally influential Asian American rom-com “Crazy Rich Asians,” was included in a widely circulated meme that, in part, attacked the female cast members for relationships with white men.

Experts pointed out that the underlying rhetoric isn’t confined to message boards or solely the darker corners of the internet. It’s rife throughout Asian American communities, and Asian women have long endured judgment and harassment for their relationship choices. Choimorrow notes it’s become a sort of “locker room talk” among many men in the racial group.

“It’s not [just] incel, Reddit conversations,” Choimorrow said. “I’m hearing this amongst people daily.”

But sociologist Nancy Wang Yuen, a scholar focused on Asian American media representation, pointed out that the origins of such anger have some validity. The roots lie in the emasculation of Asian American men, a practice whose history dates back to the 1800s and early 1900s in what is referred to today as the “bachelor society,” Yuen said. That time period marked some of the first waves of immigration from Asia to the U.S. as Chinese workers were recruited to build the transcontinental railroad. One of the preliminary immigrant groups of Filipinos, dubbed the “manong generation,” also arrived in the country a few decades later.

While Asian men made their way stateside, women largely remained in Asia. Yuen noted that simultaneously, limits on Asian female immigration were instituted via the Page Act of 1875, which banned the importation of women “for the purpose of prostitution.” According to research published in The Modern American, the legislation may have been meant to cut off prostitution, but it was often weaponized to keep any Asian woman from entering the country, as it granted immigration officers the authority to determine whether a woman was of “high moral character.”

Moreover, antimiscegenation laws, or bans on interracial unions, kept Asian men from marrying other races, Yuen noted. It wasn’t until the 1967 case, Loving v. Virginia, that such legislation was declared unconstitutional.

“Americans thought of [Asian men] as emasculated,” she said. “They’re not perceived as virile because there’s no women. Because of immigration laws, there was a whole bachelor society … and so you have all these different kinds of Asian men in the United States who did not have partners.”

As the image of Asian men was once, in part, the architecture of racist legislation, the sexless, undesirable trope was further confirmed by Hollywood depictions of the race. Even heartthrob Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa, who did experience appeal from white women, was used to show Asian men as sexual threats during a period of rising anti-Japanese sentiment.

Often, these portrayals of both men and women evolved with war, Yuen added. For example, the sexualization of Asian women on screen was heightened after the Vietnam War due to prostitution and sex trafficking that American military men often took part in. Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 film “Full Metal Jacket” infamously perpetuates the stereotype of women as sexual deviants with a scene featuring a Vietnamese sex worker exclaiming, “Me so horny.”

Asian women were seen as “the spoils of war and Asian men were seen as threats,” she said. “So always seeing them as either an enemy to be conquered or an enemy to be feared, all that has to do with the stereotypes of Asian men and women.”

Yuen is quick to point out that Asian women, who possessed very little decision-making power throughout U.S. history, were neither behind the legislation nor the narratives in the American entertainment industry.

The historical emasculation of Asian men stings to this day. A study from OkCupid found that Asian men were ranked least desirable among all demographics. Another study found that the majority of its Asian American female respondents reported their attraction, from a young age, was overwhelmingly to European American boys.

Pawan Dhingra, a sociologist and a professor of American studies at Amherst College, said this is in part due to the fact that Asian American women were not only consumers of Western media that perpetuated such stereotypes about Asian men while romanticizing the sensitive, “masculine” white man, they also internalized some cultural baggage from the often-patriarchal societies of their heritages.

“It comes from a set of assumptions we internalize ourselves. We see immigrant parents, or relationships between men and women in the homeland, that might be more traditional gender roles,” Dhingra said. “We assume that it applies to all people of our background, even no matter where they grew up.”

However, directing anger toward Asian women for their interracial relationships uncovers a host of problematic underlying beliefs, experts said. Some of the vitriol stems from erroneous assumptions that because women are seen as more sexually desirable, they are therefore more privileged. Anthony Ocampo — a sociologist who focuses on race, immigration and LGBTQ issues — bluntly referred to that particular argument as “unbelievably stupid.”

“Privilege is the ability to navigate the social world and experience social mobility without your identity hampering your journey. In what world do you see Asian women getting frontrunners for public office, being tapped to be CEOs of companies, to be considered for leads in Hollywood movies?” the scholar said. “Sure, Asian men aren’t being tapped for these opportunities either, but Asian women aren’t the problem — white gatekeepers are.”

Moreover, Choimorrow said the idea that Asian women are more privileged ignores the dangerous byproducts of their fetishization. This includes not only the dehumanization of these women, but also the susceptibility to harassment and violence due to the submissive stereotype.

From “21 to 55 percent of Asian women in the U.S. report experiencing intimate physical and/or sexual violence during their lifetime,” the Asian Pacific Institute on Gender-Based Violence reported. The range is based on a compilation of studies of disaggregated samples of Asian ethnicities in local communities. The National Sexual Violence Resource Center reported that about 1 in 5 women in the U.S. overall have experienced completed or attempted rape during her lifetime.

“I just hate this whole Olympics of the oppressed,” Choimorrow said. “I just think it’s such a short-sighted approach. Dude, you don’t walk out every day worrying about your physical safety. For women, that’s exactly what we worry about when we walk out our door.”

Yuen echoed her thoughts, adding, “Just because Asian women don’t share the same kinds of challenges as Asian men doesn’t mean that they should be held to a different standard or at their struggle within the racial sexual politics of the United States. It isn’t any less valid.”

Dhingra also acknowledged that there lies a double standard when it comes to Asian women, leading the group to be judged more harshly than their male peers. He explained that it comes down to a uniquely racialized brand of sexism. Being in relationships with other Asian Americans has been seen as a sort of litmus test for how “committed” one is to the race. Additionally, because of the existing stereotype of Asian women as submissive, particularly to white men, the sight of an Asian woman in an interracial relationship can trigger the idea that she is perpetuating existing stereotypes. He explained that there’s a perception that Asian women are reproducing racism toward Asian men and affirming the idea that they’re not worth dating.

He said the collision of sexism and racism has made it so that there’s a stricter, more unfair dynamic placed on Asian American women.

The burden placed on Asian American women to date within their own race also presents another problematic idea: that women are still thought of as property, Choimorrow noted. It’s just another form of toxic masculinity, she said, as the expectation that Asian women date Asian men means there is no agency in their dating choices. It’s a mentality that has been inherited through our heritages, she said.

“Even in Korea, as a woman, your value isn’t so much as you are marriageable,” she said. “So many of our cultures have these things very deeply ingrained in the way we value and think about women.”

Little has changed, Choimorrow believes. Even as many Asian Americans continue to fight for racial justice, some ideas have been slow to evolve.

“Especially in the progressive circles, they’re focused on their oppression as a racial minority, that they often don’t think about what they’re perpetuating as men,” she said.

The undue pressure toward Asian American women to “fix” the existing structures is not productive in helping mend the reductive perceptions of Asian men, Ocampo said.

Simply put, “You don’t need to subjugate women, including Asian women, to feel sexy. That’s just f—— lame.”

Dhingra is adamant that no assumptions should be made about any couple’s racial dynamic, particularly if there’s no personal connection to the couple. But he also emphasized that people need to push back on the perpetuation of the problematic ideas in society that devalue Asian Americans while upholding whiteness.

Ocampo had similar thoughts, explaining that more people should be demanding more complicated Asian male characters on screen, rather than those who fit “some perfectly chiseled IG model aesthetic,” he said, referencing carefully curated photos from models on Instagram.

While there are many social reasons for why we value whiteness that Dhingra said are “pretty messed up,” Asian Americans should seek to dismantle them and thus “get to the point where we have more confidence when people do form interracial relationships, because we actually care about that particular individual as a person.”

Tucker Carlson’s top writer resigns after secretly posting racist and sexist remarks in online forum
https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/10/media/tucker-carlson-writer-blake-neff/index.html

The top writer for Fox News host Tucker Carlson has for years been using a pseudonym to post bigoted remarks on an online forum that is a hotbed for racist, sexist, and other offensive content, CNN Business learned this week.
Just this week, the writer, Blake Neff, responded to a thread started by another user in 2018 with the subject line, “Would u let a JET BLACK congo n****er do lasik eye surgery on u for 50% off?” Neff wrote, “I wouldn’t get LASIK from an Asian for free, so no.” (The subject line was not censored on the forum.) On June 5, Neff wrote, “Black doods staying inside playing Call of Duty is probably one of the biggest factors keeping crime down.” On June 24, Neff commented, “Honestly given how tired black people always claim to be, maybe the real crisis is their lack of sleep.” On June 26, Neff wrote that the only people who care about changing the name of the NFL’s Washington Redskins are “white libs and their university-‘educated’ pets.”
Tammy Duckworth hits back at Trump and Carlson: 'These titanium legs don't buckle'
Tammy Duckworth hits back at Trump and Carlson: ‘These titanium legs don’t buckle’
And over the course of five years, Neff has maintained a lengthy thread in which he has derided a woman and posted information about her dating life that has invited other users to mock her and invade her privacy. There has at times also been overlap between some material he posted or saw on the forum and Carlson’s show.

CNN Business contacted Neff for comment Thursday night. After he or someone acting on his behalf passed that email to Fox News spokespeople, a network spokesperson on Friday morning told CNN Business that Neff had resigned. A Fox News spokesperson said Carlson could not be reached for comment. Neff did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Neff worked at Fox News for nearly four years and was Carlson’s top writer. Previously, he was a reporter at The Daily Caller, a conservative news outlet that Carlson co-founded. In a recent article in the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, Neff said, “Anything [Carlson is] reading off the teleprompter, the first draft was written by me.” He also acknowledged the show’s influence, telling the magazine, “We’re very aware that we do have that power to sway the conversation, so we try to use it responsibly.”
When asked in a 2018 appearance on Fox’s “The Five” about the writing process for his show, Carlson said he spends hours working on scripts, but referred to Neff by name, saying he was a “wonderful writer” and acknowledging his assistance. And Carlson credited Neff in the acknowledgments of his book, “Ship of Fools,” for providing research. In the acknowledgments, Carlson said that Neff and two others who helped with the book “work on and greatly improve our nightly show on Fox.”
During the years that Neff wrote for him at Fox, Carlson has hosted one of the most influential shows on cable news. In the last quarter, Carlson had not only the highest-rated program in cable news, but the highest-rated show in the history of cable news. Carlson also counts President Trump among his most loyal viewers. On multiple occasions, the President has tweeted out videos of Carlson’s program. Which is to say, the scripts that Neff likely helped write and shape were being shared by the President of the United States.

While working at Fox News, and while a reporter at The Daily Caller, Neff was a frequent poster on AutoAdmit. Also known as XOXOhth, it is a relatively unmoderated message board like 4chan aimed at lawyers and law school students in which racism and sexism run rampant. The board’s vulgar content was previously the subject of much criticism, and two Yale students sued anonymous posters on the site in 2007 alleging they had defamed them and made threatening remarks. The Hartford Courant reported in 2009 that the lawsuit was quietly settled after some of the posters were identified.
Neff, who posts on the board under the username CharlesXII, is widely revered on the forum, with many posters knowing the person behind the account works on Carlson’s show. He has spent years posting about history, offering his political opinions, and detailing aspects of his personal life.
After learning of Neff’s posts on the board through an email from an anonymous tipster, CNN Business was able to positively identify CharlesXII as Neff by reviewing messages he has posted throughout the years on the forum and matching them up with publicly available information about him.

Among the details which make clear that CharlesXII and Neff are the same person: CharlesXII indicated on the board that he had gone to Dartmouth; Neff is an alumnus. CharlesXII said he had been working for nearly four years in his current journalism job in Washington DC; Neff has been working for Carlson at Fox in Washington since February 2017, according to his LinkedIn profile, which appears to have been removed after his resignation from Fox News. CharlesXII said on the board that he got his start in journalism after he turned down law school and instead took a fellowship; Neff told the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine that he took a fellowship with the Collegiate Network.
CharlesXII also wrote a parody version of the song “We Didn’t Start The Fire” and posted about it on the board, including a screen shot of an email he received from Carlson praising a lyric in the song. Neff sang the parody song at a Daily Caller Christmas party a few years ago, according to a person familiar with the event.
The Daily Caller declined to comment.
And in a 2017 Washington Post Date Lab article featuring Neff, he dropped a number of Easter eggs for the board, including referencing an “alcohol is poison” meme that he has repeatedly posted about and carrying a book on Catherine the Great to a date. His username on the forum, CharlesXII, is a reference to Charles XII of Sweden, a king known for his military victories and who abstained from sex and alcohol. Neff, a history buff interested in wars and military battles, has repeatedly disclosed on the forum that he rarely drinks and The Post story said he rarely dates.

Even more clearly identifying, however, were photos that CharlesXII posted to the forum in 2018 to the forum after visiting a museum in Egypt. In three of the photos, a reflection of Neff is visible snapping the pictures in the artifacts’ glass enclosures.
While at Fox News, Carlson has been accused by critics of making racist and inflammatory comments on air. His show has long appealed to extremists who agree with his hardline views on immigration, his emphasis on the preservation of Western culture, and his commentary on topics of race.
Carlson has at several points in his Fox News career found himself in hot water when commenting on such topics. In August 2019, for instance, Carlson became engulfed in controversy when he said the very real problem of white supremacy in America was a “hoax.” Most recently, Carlson saw more advertisers — including Disney and T-Mobile — flee his program in June after he said the Black Lives Matter movement was “not about black lives” and warned viewers to “remember that when they come for you.” (A Fox News spokesperson later said Carlson was referring to Democratic leaders, not Black Lives Matter protesters, when he made the comments.)
Carlson himself has in the past pushed back against allegations of racism. He told The Atlantic in December 2019 that such accusations are “so far from the truth” that it has “no effect at all other than to evoke in me contempt for the people saying it” because he thinks “it’s that dishonest.”
Bigotry and vitriol
In 2015, Neff started a thread on AutoAdmit mocking a woman, with whom he was friends on Facebook and whom he described as an “Azn megashrew,” sharing posts she had written about her dating life. He has continued to post to the thread and mock the woman, whom CNN Business is not identifying, as recently as late last month. In his first post in 2015 starting the years-long thread, he explained that “through circumstances” he couldn’t “quite recall,” he became Facebook friends with the woman and thought her posts about dating were amusing.
“So, I thought I’d post them,” Neff wrote. “I won’t put up a pic but it’s probably relevant to say that she’s a slightly overweight Azn woman who is in her mid-30s and definitely looks it.”
Through the years, the thread has generated nearly 1,000 comments — many of which used vulgar racist, sexist, and dehumanizing language to mock the woman. Neff also said he did not want other posters to harass her, but did not stop them from identifying her and posting links to her account. He also posted some photos from her account that did not show her face and continued posting about her dating life for years after the other posters had identified her.
Reached for comment, the woman told CNN Business, “When I was recently made aware of Blake’s posts about me on racist websites, I was overcome with disappointment which eventually mixed with bewilderment that he spent years dedicated to creating a false narrative based on my satirical writing about my life. The nature of online media is that your identity, while nominally under your control, is vulnerable to being misused. Any public figure can attest to this problem.”
In March 2020, Neff started another lengthy thread mocking a separate woman with whom he was connected on social media. The woman had posted about freezing her eggs, and Neff apparently found that worth deriding in the AutoAdmit forum. He began posting about her in March of this year, in a thread he titled “Disaster: WuFlu outbreak endangers aging shrew’s quest to freeze eggs.” Neff posted to the thread, which racked up dozens of comments as users ridicule the woman, as recently as June 28.
I was overcome with disappointment which eventually mixed with bewilderment that he spent years dedicated to creating a false narrative based on my satirical writing about my life.
On the forum, Neff has also expressed bigoted views. In 2014, he joked about “foodie faggots.” And in the same year, he started a thread titled, “Urban business idea: He Didn’t Do Muffin!” He joked one item could be, “Sandra Bland’s Sugar-free Shortbreads!” In August 2019, a user started a thread titled, “We should just buy Canada and kick the Canadians out.” Neff commented, “Okay but what do we do with the millions of Chinese people.”
More recently, in February 2020, Neff called Mormonism “an inherently cucky religion.” On June 5, a user on the forum commented in a thread, “Didn’t Michael Brown rob a store and attack a police officer? And wasn’t [George Floyd] a piece of shit with a long criminal record? Jfc libs.” Another person commented, “It doesn’t matter to these people.” Neff then replied, “It does. The violent criminals are even MORE heroic.” On June 16, a user started a separate thread about a video showing a Black man assaulting an elderly white woman in New York. Neff commented on the thread, “And to think, if this guy got killed in some freak incident while being arrested, we’d have to endure at least three funerals in his honor.”
On the Fourth of July, Neff started a thread in which he jokingly “rated” members of the community using images from a 1990s video game from the makers of “Oregon Trail” that was pulled from the market due to its racist depictions of slaves. In the game, users play as slaves trying to break free and escape north. Neff assigned users on the forum images from the game, many of which depicted Black slaves using racist stereotypes. For instance, Neff assigned one user an image of a slave catcher, to which the user replied “[thank you] massa Charles for dis.”
On May 27, Neff wrote that Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib — known collectively as “The Squad” — want to “MAKE YOUR COUNTRY A DUMPING GROUND FOR PEOPLE FROM THIRD WORLD SHITHOLES.” Responding to a thread on June 27 about whether “whites fear what’s going to happen to them in 10-20 yrs,” Neff wrote that he has “no plans to stay” in the country “that long.” In December 2019, he said that “once Democrats have the majorities to go full F**K WHITEY, things are going to get really wacky really quickly.” He argued at the time that there is a “large minority of whites who are fully supportive of a F**k Whitey agenda” and that “there’s a suicidal impulse to Western peoples that honestly feels almost biological in origin.”
When not making his own bigoted comments, Neff has shown a willingness to respond to others who were, without expressing any hesitation, much less disgust, about what they’ve said. For instance, in 2016 he replied to a thread with the title, “Mary Poppins getting raped by a pack of wild ni***rs at the park; kids watching.” That same year, he commented on a thread titled, “DIKES get wrong CUM at CUMBANK. N****R pops out.” Just last month, Neff replied to a comment on the thread that said, “And the n**s are always honor students or some bullshit.” (The language on both posts was not censored on the forum.)
Analysis: Tucker Carlson's attempt to smear senator who lost both legs in Iraq War crosses the line
Analysis: Tucker Carlson’s attempt to smear senator who lost both legs in Iraq War crosses the line
Last month, Neff mocked a user who said they were leaving the board over concerns about the rampant racism on it. In a now-deleted comment, the user implored others to “consider the current environment,” writing, “The country is undergoing a great awakening to racist injustices throughout society. Maybe you should take this opportunity to consider whether continuing to post here is morally defensible at all, even if you aren’t posting deranged shit? I don’t think it is defensible, which is why I am leaving.”
On June 16, Neff responded by quoting the user’s words and adding, “LMAO if you think this shit will save you when the mob comes for you. Good riddance.” The language notably echoed Carlson’s comment, eight days before, when he had said “remember that when they come for you.”
In February 2018, a user on AutoAdmit posted, “At some point in the future, all ur xo posts (w/IRL name) will be public record.” One person commented, “I stand by every poast.” Neff upvoted that comment.
Easter eggs
When he had just started working at Fox News, Neff was apparently less cautious and more willing to risk exposing his identity for a chance to show off to his fellow posters.
One night in February 2017 — which, according to his LinkedIn, would have been Neff’s second month with Carlson at Fox News — Carlson tripped over his words as he introduced a guest. The phrase Carlson was trying to say was, even for the host’s florid style, a little out of place: “Sweet treats of scholarship.”
Within minutes, Neff was posting to AutoAdmit about Carlson’s use of the phrase, which other posters gleefully noted was a reference to something said on the forum.
Neff’s caution since then may have resulted in fewer Easter eggs being slipped into Carlson’s scripts. But there has still been at least some overlap between the forum and the show, including in recent weeks.
Sometimes, material Neff encountered on the forum found its way on to Carlson’s show. For instance, on June 25, Neff responded to a post that quoted a news story about coronavirus-related interest in Montana real estate. He wrote on the forum, “Interest in real estate in Bozeman, Missoula, and the Flathead Valley has been on the rise for years.” That night, in his monologue, Carlson said, “You’re starting to consider maybe moving to Bozeman, and why wouldn’t you?”
In some cases, language Neff used on the forum ended up on the show. The night of June 15, in commenting on a football coach who was the subject of controversy over a sweatshirt he’d worn, Neff wrote on the forum, “t is your f***ing right as an American to wear whatever T-shirt you want, and hold whatever political views you want. Christ.” The next night on his show, Carlson said, “And they can wear whatever shirts they want. You thought that was true. You thought that was your right as an American.”
Other times, Neff may have used knowledge he had gained in his job at Fox News to post to the board. On the afternoon of July 1, Neff started a thread titled, “Two GOP senators propose replacing Columbus Day w/Juneteenth.” In the thread, he wrote, “Coming out this afternoon if it isn’t out already.” That afternoon, it was public; that night, the proposal was discussed on Carlson’s show.

What It’s Like To Be Biracial And Arguing With Your White Family Right Now
For multiracial Americans, having conversations with white relatives about the Black Lives Matter movement and racial injustice is often an uphill battle.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/biracial-white-family-argument_l_5f08a9f2c5b6480493cfa0a5

Rachel Elizabeth Weissler, a Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan, has the kind of close-knit relationship with her dad most people would envy. He lives in Southern California, where Weissler spent most of her childhood, but the two talk frequently. She calls him her “biggest cheerleader.”

But there’s one topic they always seem to dance around: race.

Weissler is biracial: Her dad is white and her mom is Black. Though her dad loves Black culture (“Black TV especially,” Weissler said) and clearly, Black women, he tenses up when his daughter wants to talk about what it’s like to be Black in America.

“He avoids the subject, and when he does bring it up, it’s often in an extremely superficial way,” Weissler said.

In the wake of the murder of George Floyd and ongoing protests against police brutality and systemic racism, her father’s silence became deafening for Weissler. While she was preoccupied with work and taking care of herself in the days after the shooting, she wondered what her dad thought. It had been radio silence on his end, so she decided to text him. She couldn’t help but take a sardonic tone.

“What do you think about all the black people that keep getting murdered!” Weissler wrote.

Radio silence again.

“Yes, he left me on ‘read,’” Weissler told HuffPost a month after the exchange. He called her the next day.

“He said he didn’t know what to say about what’s going on in the world right now and focused on asking me if I was safe due to all the ‘looting’ going on,” Weissler said. He probably also mentioned Trump, she said.

“In almost every conversation with him, he tries to remind me that he ‘didn’t vote for Trump,’ as if that exonerates him from being complicit in racism,” she said.

Weissler has learned to redirect, though.

“I often remind my dad that he has a Black child, and he usually just laughs,” she said. “I will say that I have deep love for my dad, and something I am so grateful for is that as I’ve grown up and into my ideologies and feminism, I feel empowered to share with him when I think he’s said something wrong or racist or insensitive, and he does listen and let me talk.”

It’s hard to broach these conversations. While her dad never corrects her or dismisses her experience, Weissler can only hope that he’s truly hearing what she says.

“Is he absorbing what I tell him? That I can’t tell you. But I am grateful he lets me call him out, and listens,” she said.

Weissler’s story isn’t unique: As the national conversation about race and longstanding systemic racism continues online and in our homes, many biracial adults say they are struggling to connect and get through to the white side of their families when discussing what it means to be Black in America.

Family or not, it’s impossible for a white person to fully understand the deep-seated grief a Black or biracial person experiences every time another Black person is needlessly killed by the police.

You might assume that a white person with Black family would have an easier time understanding that pain ― that hearing about the racism and lived experiences of, say, your granddaughter or cousin, would move you beyond the naïveté or willful ignorance most white Americans have about modern racism. That you wouldn’t have the luxury to remain complacent or indifferent to racial injustice because you’ve seen your own flesh and blood experience it.

But as many biracial people in the U.S. will tell you, dynamics in multiracial families are a lot more complicated than that. Sometimes, the silence is more comforting on both sides. When you’ve been vulnerable with your white relatives and shared your experiences with racism and they still deny it exists, it’s exhausting. In a scenario like this, avoiding any and all talk of race is a way to preserve your sanity.

Last month, Nicole Holliday, an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, tweeted about that very disconnect.

“Shoutout to all my fellow biracial folks who are dodging calls from white family members right now, because they can’t risk having to hear some racist BS from their own parents,” she wrote.

Holliday, who identifies as Black and biracial “in that order,” grew up in a racially mixed neighborhood.

Her dad, who’s Black, wasn’t in the picture much during her childhood, but his family was. Her mother, who’s white, made sure Holliday understood Black history. In college, Holliday’s Black social and political identity took hold and flourished.

But for the white side of her family, “it was very important to my family that I was always referred to as ‘biracial,’ never ‘black.’”

“I think my family members, many [of] whom are conservative, really struggle with understanding how the entire social and economic system of this country was built on black exploitation, and they’re pretty quick to give excuses for racist behavior, especially when it comes from Trump,” Holliday wrote HuffPost. “I think they think he’s a buffoon who’s been good for their pocketbooks, but who isn’t genuinely a racist person.”

As Holliday’s tweet suggests, she isn’t in the habit of discussing race with those family members, but her mom is a different story.

After Eric Garner’s murder, there was a long period when they didn’t talk (“I felt like she was unquestioningly defending the cops”), but given the relentlessness of similar incidents in the past six years, Holliday thinks her mom is starting to get it. It’s impossible to look away.

“She seems to understand how routine police violence against black folks is, and how it creates a situation in which we live with everyday terror,” Holliday wrote.

That said, sometimes getting through to her mom feels like one step forward, two steps back.

“It’s really complicated lately because I know she’s really heartbroken about the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, but I’m not sure she sees the other victims in the same light,” she said. “I talk to my mother but for the first time, I’ve actively started shutting her down and changing the conversation if she starts to defend racists, especially Trump.”

Holliday is wary of what her white grandma will have to say each time the police kill another Black person, but she usually reaches out anyway. She refuses to give up on either woman.

“I’ve been avoiding calling my grandmother because I’m afraid she’ll be really negative about the protestors and I just don’t want to hear it,” she said. “I’ve already been out of touch with the rest of my white family because of their reactions to racist incidents in the past, but I really don’t want to lose my mom and grandma.”

The idea of “losing” or giving up on a family member due to their failure to recognize racial injustice in this country is all too real for Ethan HD, a professional wrestler and comic shop owner in Chicago. Luckily, he said his mother, who’s white, has been incredibly understanding about what’s going on.

She, like many white parents, tries to learn and understand how she can help.

“She’s witnessed racial prejudice firsthand when she would be out with my father in public back in the 80s,” HD told HuffPost in an email. “She’s never once tried to play devil’s advocate when discussing our country’s systemic racism.”

But his extended white family views things differently. He’s had to cut off contact, at least on social media, with some family members, including a cousin he’s gotten into Facebook arguments with often in recent years.

When quarterback Colin Kaepernick first took a knee in 2016, that cousin told HD that siding with the NFL player was “disrespecting [their deceased grandfather] who served in the military.”

At the height of the protests, the same cousin started posting videos of police hugging children and Black citizens on social media.

“I explained that she’s covering up the issue by pretending like there aren’t dozens of videos being posted daily showing police officers assaulting black folks and people fighting for the Black Lives Matter movement,” HD said.

His cousin argued that she was married to a police officer and had to be careful about what she posted online.

“I replied that agreeing that ‘Black Lives Matter’ shouldn’t be something you get in trouble for saying and then I dropped the issue because I knew where it was heading.”

“I finally gave up contact with my cousin and my aunt when I saw them posting ‘All Lives Matter’ nonsense,” he added. “I decided to block them on social media.”

Jessi Grieser, an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee, is multiracial and transracially adopted. Her family members on both sides are white, except for one of her two brothers, who is also adopted. She’s never had to block a white relative on social media. Her family, she said, is very “Midwestern nice.”

“It’s common for my family to just not talk about things which are contentious. So mostly [BLM] hasn’t come up,” she said. “At first I was really grateful but it then eventually did start to feel a little bit like, ‘Um, are you noticing what’s going on?’”

Grieser said she thinks her parents wait for her to initiate these kinds of conversations, which seems thoughtful but inevitably creates “extra work” in terms of emotional labor for her.

She credits them with paying attention to Black issues in the news, seeking out Black-owned businesses, and staying in their integrated neighborhood long after their Black kids had moved out. And they read all the obligatory books about being anti-racist that topped The New York Times bestseller lists the last month.

But she says they struggle to conceive of themselves as doing racist things, outside of simply being a part of a racist system.

“I do get accused of picking on them ‘about everything,’” she said. “For instance, if I point out that asking the taxi driver (micro)aggressively ‘where are you from?’ isn’t actually a friendly thing to do. Everyone’s feelings get hurt pretty fast.”

She added: “I’m really not supposed to point those things out, and if I do point them out and they say they’re sorry, that’s clearly supposed to be the end of it, whether it happens again or not. It’s exhausting.”

Her extended family hasn’t reached out since the protests, but she’s actually glad about that.

“I don’t usually talk to them, so if anyone got in touch to ‘check in and see how our Black relative is doing’ it would have been very performative and probably would have made me mad,” she said.

Grieser said her family, like many white families, likes to flaunt having a Black relative as “proof” of how post-racial they are. As biracial artist Nicole Linh Anderson recently pointed out, “people love biracial babies because it feeds into a feel-good melting pot narrative.” Of course, a multiracial person and/or their white relatives can still benefit from white supremacy and hold racist views.

Grieser said most people in her extended family “seem to think racism is pretty much just over, or if it’s not, it really only exists in the form of people yelling the N-word. White people adopt Black kids, my cousin is married to a Taiwanese man, obviously, all this is evidence that we left racism behind a few decades ago.”

That “evidence” makes it incredibly hard to get through to them that racism is alive and well. Griesler said the majority of her white relatives subscribe to the “good/bad” binary of racism that sociologist Robin DiAngelo talks about in her book “White Fragility.” It’s the idea that racism is only inflicted by “mean” or evil people who engage in deliberate racist actions.

“They think that as long as they weren’t deliberately trying to be cruel, nothing they say or do could possibly be racist,” she said. “I had to actually tell my aunt to her face at Christmas that Sierra Leonians not being nice to her when she was in the Peace Corps is not a glimpse into what it is like to be Black in the United States and that it was a very wrongheaded thing to say to me.”

Griesler gets frustrated to think that relatives might use her as an excuse to claim they’re not racist, especially when they make her uncomfortable all the time with comments about racism. She wants her white family members to see race so they can recognize racism ― boldfaced and obviously cruel, or quiet and systematic ― and realize that you can be a good person while still existing in and benefiting from a society that’s deeply rooted in racism.

For many biracial adults, what’s almost more frustrating than silent white relatives are white relatives who claim they can’t be racist because they have biracial kids in their family, Holliday said.

“There’s a regular scholarly conference called Critical Mixed Race Studies and a few years back I went to a panel about white moms who claim that they ‘get it’ because of their black kids.”

It’s the oldest story in the book, she said; multiracial kids hear it all the time.

“In my case, I think some of my family members truly don’t understand that proximity to blackness isn’t the same as being black, and that there are parts of my experience that they’ll never understand,” she said. “Their investment in colorblind racism is an emotional shield for them, but I feel like it also keeps them for really and truly seeing me.”

Like many white people, Holliday’s relatives endeavor to look beyond her race ― as a sort of “favor” to her ― when all she really wants is for them to acknowledge her Blackness.

“If they ‘don’t see race’ then I think that they’re choosing to ignore seeing the part of me that they don’t like,” she wrote, “because that’s also the part that’s most different from them.”

My God pic.twitter.com/lQa1OICgnQ

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) July 30, 2020

Isabel Wilkerson’s ‘Caste’ Is an ‘Instant American Classic’ About Our Abiding Sin

link https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/books/review-caste-isabel-wilkerson-origins-of-our-discontents.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

A critic shouldn’t often deal in superlatives. He or she is here to explicate, to expand context and to make fine distinctions. But sometimes a reviewer will shout as if into a mountaintop megaphone. I recently came upon William Kennedy’s review of “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” which he called “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.” Kennedy wasn’t far off.

I had these thoughts while reading Isabel Wilkerson’s new book, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.” It’s an extraordinary document, one that strikes me as an instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far. It made the back of my neck prickle from its first pages, and that feeling never went away.

I told more than one person, as I moved through my days this past week, that I was reading one of the most powerful nonfiction books I’d ever encountered.

Wilkerson’s book is about how brutal misperceptions about race have disfigured the American experiment. This is a topic that major historians and novelists have examined from many angles, with care, anger, deep feeling and sometimes simmering wit.

Wilkerson’s book is a work of synthesis. She borrows from all that has come before, and her book stands on many shoulders. “Caste” lands so firmly because the historian, the sociologist and the reporter are not at war with the essayist and the critic inside her. This book has the reverberating and patriotic slap of the best American prose writing.

This is a complicated book that does a simple thing. Wilkerson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting while at The New York Times and whose previous book, “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration,” won the National Book Critics Circle Award, avoids words like “white” and “race” and “racism” in favor of terms like “dominant caste,” “favored caste,” “upper caste” and “lower caste.”

Some will quibble with her conflation of race and caste. (Social class is a separate matter, which Wilkerson addresses only rarely.) She does not argue that the words are synonyms. She argues that they “can and do coexist in the same culture and serve to reinforce each other. Race, in the United States, is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste. Caste is the bones, race the skin.” The reader does not have to follow her all the way on this point to find her book a fascinating thought experiment. She persuasively pushes the two notions together while addressing the internal wounds that, in America, have failed to clot.

A caste system, she writes, is “an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits, traits that would be neutral in the abstract but are ascribed life-and-death meaning.”

“As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance,” Wilkerson writes. She observes that caste “is about respect, authority and assumptions of competence — who is accorded these and who is not.”

Wilkerson’s usages neatly lift the mind out of old ruts. They enable her to make unsettling comparisons between India’s treatment of its untouchables, or Dalits, Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews and America’s treatment of African-Americans. Each country “relied on stigmatizing those deemed inferior to justify the dehumanization necessary to keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom and to rationalize the protocols of enforcement.”

Wilkerson does not shy from the brutality that has gone hand in hand with this kind of dehumanization. As if pulling from a deep reservoir, she always has a prime example at hand. It takes resolve and a strong stomach to stare at the particulars, rather than the generalities, of lives under slavery and Jim Crow and recent American experience. To feel the heat of the furnace of individual experience. It’s the kind of resolve Americans will require more of.

“Caste” gets off to an uncertain start. Its first pages summon, in dystopian-novel fashion, the results of the 2016 election alongside anthrax trapped in the permafrost being released into the atmosphere because of global warming. Wilkerson is making a point about old poisons returning to haunt us. But by pulling in global warming (a subject she never returns to in any real fashion) so early in her book, you wonder if “Caste” will be a mere grab bag of nightmare impressions.

It isn’t.

Her consideration of the 2016 election, and American politics in general, is sobering. To anyone who imagined that the election of Barack Obama was a sign that America had begun to enter a post-racial era, she reminds us that the majority of whites did not vote for him.

She poses the question so many intellectuals and pundits on the left have posed, with increasing befuddlement: Why do the white working classes in America vote against their economic interests?

She runs further with the notion of white resentment than many commentators have been willing to, and the juices of her argument follow the course of her knife. What these pundits had not considered, Wilkerson writes, “was that the people voting this way were, in fact, voting their interests. Maintaining the caste system as it had always been was in their interest. And some were willing to accept short-term discomfort, forgo health insurance, risk contamination of the water and air, and even die to protect their long-term interest in the hierarchy as they had known it.”

In her novel “Americanah,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie suggested that “maybe it’s time to just scrap the word ‘racist.’ Find something new. Like Racial Disorder Syndrome. And we could have different categories for sufferers of this syndrome: mild, medium and acute.”

Wilkerson has written a closely-argued book that largely avoids the word “racism,” yet stares it down with more humanity and rigor than nearly all but a few books in our literature.

“Caste” deepens our tragic sense of American history. It reads like watching the slow passing of a long and demented cortege. In its suggestion that we need something akin to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, her book points the way toward an alleviation of alienation. It’s a book that seeks to shatter a paralysis of will. It’s a book that changes the weather inside a reader.

While reading “Caste,” I thought often of a pair of sentences from Colson Whitehead’s novel “The Underground Railroad.” “The Declaration [of Independence] is like a map,” he wrote. “You trust that it’s right, but you only know by going out and testing it for yourself.”

So

If you’re black & “successful”, you shouldn’t speak out about the struggle of being black, because you’re successful.

If you’re not successful, you can’t speak out, because, well, you’re black & not successful.

It’s as if once you become successful, you’re no longer “black”

— Emmanuel Acho (@EmmanuelAcho) August 5, 2020

Esther Choo, MD MPH@choo_ek
I was taking care of a patient the other day who was very seriously injured. And I stepped out to talk to his family briefly and give them an update. For context, he was Black. I told them what was going on quickly and asked if they had any questions. And this is what they said.

They told me that he worked for [well known company]
And that he was a [respected role] at that company
That he was on his way to work
That he is loved in the community
A good brother and son
That he was well dressed before the blood soaked his clothes

Nothing in recent memory has broken my heart as much as gradually realizing that a family of a shattered man

whose chief concerns should have been – when can i see him, when does he get out of surgery, do you know his meds and allergies, his mama gets to go in first…

…had to worry that the racism inherent in the system and in people everywhere meant they had to spend their few moments with me putting him in a favorable light, shifting any possible implicit negative frame I had (e.g., “hoodlum” or “criminal”) to get him the care he deserved.

What is the goal of all our anti-racist pledges over the past summer? It’s that this family can walk in with full confidence that their loved one is valued and cherished here and that we will fight for his life with everything we have, no questions asked.

I had one minute to the next trauma. I babbled stuff incoherently and am pretty sure I got it wrong. The words of one random disheveled Asian doctor don’t change much against a lifetime of experience to the contrary. But I will carry this with me. We have so much work to do.

from Facebook

Former President George W. Bush’s chief speechwriter, Michael Gerson, has a message for people who are excusing President Trump’s racism:

“I had fully intended to ignore President Trump’s latest round of racially charged taunts against an African American elected official, and an African American activist, and an African American journalist and a whole city with a lot of African Americans in it.
I had every intention of walking past Trump’s latest outrages and writing about the self-destructive squabbling of the Democratic presidential field…
But I made the mistake of pulling James Cone’s ‘The Cross and the Lynching Tree’ off my shelf — a book designed to shatter convenient complacency.
Cone recounts the case of a white mob in Valdosta, Ga., in 1918 that lynched an innocent man named Haynes Turner. Turner’s enraged wife, Mary, promised justice for the killers. The sheriff responded by arresting her and then turning her over to the mob, which included women and children. According to one source, Mary was ‘stripped, hung upside down by the ankles, soaked with gasoline, and roasted to death. In the midst of this torment, a white man opened her swollen belly with a hunting knife and her infant fell to the ground and was stomped to death.’
God help us.
It is hard to write the words.
This evil — the evil of white supremacy, resulting in dehumanization, inhumanity and murder — is the worst stain, the greatest crime, of U.S. history. It is the thing that nearly broke the nation. It is the thing that proved generations of Christians to be vicious hypocrites. It is the thing that turned normal people into moral monsters, capable of burning a grieving widow to death and killing her child.
When the president of the United States plays with that fire or takes that beast out for a walk, it is not just another political event, not just a normal day in campaign 2020.
It is a cause for shame. It is the violation of martyrs’ graves. It is obscene graffiti on the Lincoln Memorial. It is, in the eyes of history, the betrayal — the re-betrayal — of Haynes and Mary Turner and their child.
And all of this is being done by an ignorant and arrogant narcissist reviving racist tropes for political gain, indifferent to the wreckage he is leaving, the wounds he is ripping open.
Like, I suspect, many others, I am finding it hard to look at resurgent racism as just one in a series of presidential offenses or another in a series of Republican errors. Racism is not just another wrong.
The Antietam battlefield is not just another plot of ground. The Edmund Pettus Bridge is not just another bridge. The balcony outside Room 306 at the Lorraine Motel is not just another balcony. As U.S. history hallows some causes, it magnifies some crimes.
What does all this mean politically? It means that Trump’s divisiveness is getting worse, not better. He makes racist comments, appeals to racist sentiments and inflames racist passions. The rationalization that he is not, deep down in his heart, really a racist is meaningless.
Trump’s continued offenses mean that a large portion of his political base is energized by racist tropes and the language of white grievance. And it means — whatever their intent — that those who play down, or excuse, or try to walk past these offenses are enablers.
Some political choices are not just stupid or crude.
They represent the return of our country’s cruelest, most dangerous passion.
Such racism indicts Trump. Treating racism as a typical or minor matter indicts us.”