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by frazbin 1637 days ago
Yeah the right in the US has always preferred to pretend like racism is an abstract idea rather than an embodied institution, and that the civil rights acts of 1866 and 1964 didn't happen-- or if they did, that disparate impact isn't a doctrine and that reverse racism is a thing.

The facts contradicting this position are self evident to everybody living in the United States, but feigning ignorance is a very popular political position at the highest and lowest levels. Just keep quiet, take your payout, and be glad you're not on the bottom rung. applies even to "poor whites" (and always has, even/especially antebellum).

So naturally whenever things shake out such that 'poor whites' experience even the tiniest disadvantage, the banners are marshalled and the trumpet is blown. Nothing new under the sun.

How about this: maybe we /should/ treat unvaxed minorities before unvaxed whites-- the latter group has infinitely more historical reason to trust these institutions. Or did I miss the bit where we shot Appalachians full of syphilis?

3 comments

>Yeah the right in the US has always preferred to pretend like racism is an abstract idea

Seeing how this is NY where the left had control and has had control for quite sometime, maybe they should try to actually fix it.

>that reverse racism is a thing.

Nobody believes reverse racism is a thing. There is only racism.

>How about this: maybe we /should/ treat unvaxed minorities before unvaxed whites

Seems like that would be continuing the institutional racism you are criticizing.

Democrats aren't the "left" by any stretch, the two parties are both wings of the same bird and it's amazing to see people pretend otherwise. They have the same corporate donors and belong to the same class. You have a center right corporate technocracy party and a far right blood and soil party. That's the best your "representative" (no universal suffrage until ~50 years ago when native women were allowed) democracy can offer as choices: slow violence or faster violence.

If you think people can meaningfully be racist against white people in America, let's put aside the semantic nonsense and get into the difference between discrimination (something anyone can experience) like "haha crackers can't dance" and racism, such as being 3.64x more likely to be arrested for drug possession despite nearly identical usage rates (and being a minority of the population).

Black and brown communities /are/ more vulnerable to COVID. Because the US is still de facto segregated, including in the "left" cities. We live in the consequence of redlining, and it's why "minority neighborhoods" have incredibly underfunded hospitals. Not to mention the very recent (one could argue still continuing) medical experimentation on minorities, like the Tuskegee Syphilis study, and maybe that would lead one to empathize with a hesitation to trust this country's medical institutions.

You have a tiktok view of history.

The Democrat south tried to block the civil rights act.

How about we vax by age groups not race.

> The Democrat south tried to block the civil rights act.

You do know that the racist southern White Democrats generally switched parties in the years following Johnson’s support of the Civil Rights Act and the Republican Southern Strategy which focused on appealing to those disaffected racists the way the Republican failed to the last time they got upset with a Democrat supporting civil rights in the 1940s, right?

There’s a reason its not the Democrats waving Confederate battle flags around and having their presidential candidates endorsed by the KKK any more.

> the civil rights acts of 1866 and 1964

For the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (HR 7152), there were almost three times as many Democrat votes against (96) as Republican votes against (34) and 3.5 times as many Democrat (21) as Republican (6) Senators voted against it.