But there is one thing I know for certain: to smear with this kind of innuendo those insisting on the prioritization of war and civil liberties issues or devoting oneself to these causes is indescribably irrational and reckless. One driven by racial or other forms of privilege would seek to de-prioritize or ignore these issues, not highlight them. Indeed, a primary reason why these fully bipartisan policies of Endless War and civil liberties assaults largely go unchallenged is precisely because their primary victims are anything but privileged. That’s exactly why these issues are not a distraction from the cause of equality; they are an embodiment of it.
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20 January 2012
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15:38
Pollitt’s Perplexity about Pundits on Ron Paul
But HERE FOLKS! I am a brown woman (in case my bio didn’t clue you into that), and I am downright livid at policies passed during the Obama administration (which a number of folks will attest that I anticipated before the 2008 election), which are even worse than expected. I am as livid with progressives who affect a casual? studied? indifference to the Administration’s repeated support for warrantless wiretapping (remember Obama’s vote during the 2008 election season when he took a break in campaigning to return to Washington to vote for the renewal of FISA; for his support of the Justice Department’s withholding of evidence (and even habeas corpus) from detainees on grounds of national security; his commitment to indefinite detention (NDAA was not the first time it’s arisen. We saw his support in the gesture to move Gitmo detainees to a federal prison in Illinois—with only a casual suggestion that they might receive civilian trials—only to watch it die quickly under even modest resistance. Guantanamo is still open with detainees languishing); the expansion of troops into Afghanistan in the first part of his term; the unceasing drone attacks in Pakistan, etc.
That settles that.
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18 December 2011
The police should consider the consequences of a generation of young people who want nothing to do with them — distrust, alienation and more crime.
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4 September 2011
2011-09-03 New York City Police Department's secret CIA force targeted minorities
Among the list of 28 (mostly Islamic) “Ancestries of Interest” to the Demographics Unit were India, Somalia, Albania, and “American Black Muslim.” In response to these revelations, Congresswoman Yvette Clarke stated that “Americans would be outraged if police infiltrated Baptist churches looking for evangelical Christian extremists.”
Who cares what hypothetical Americans would or wouldn’t be outraged about, Clarke, this is the NYPD and it belongs to New Yorkers. Give us a time and place to be outraged over this obvious racism and disrespect for civil liberties and we’ll be there.
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29 August 2011
And so, what we want to do is, we want to give the president every opportunity to show what he can do and what he’s prepared to lead on. We want to give him every opportunity, but our people are hurting. The unemployment is unconscionable. We don’t know what the strategy is. We don’t know why, on this trip that he’s on in the United States now, he’s not in any Black community. We don’t know that.
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15 August 2011
Those People with no income tax liability
And Perry and Bachmann are the conservative candidates trying to win election by promising to raise the taxes of the very constituency to which they are trying to appeal. None of this would make sense if the issue in question were being determined based on rational self-interest and economic motivation. But it isn’t. This is a cultural issue for Perry and Bachmann.
At its heart lies the myth of the white suburban taxpayer being gouged to support blacks and Latinos in urban areas. Even though all the data shows that urban counties pay the bills of suburban and rural counties, and more urban states pay the bills of rural states, still the myth continues. It’s so pervasive that you see phenomena like red counties in California wanting to secede to create their own state, using “fiscal responsibility” as a talking point—even though the suburban counties in question are net drains on the state, while the Los Angeles and San Francisco counties from which they want to secede are net providers.
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27 July 2011
The general mood is one of treating accidents in China as evidence of a defective culture, which does not care about safety. More abstractly, it’s evidence that Asians don’t care about the individual, only about nationality and prestige.
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25 July 2011
It couldn’t hurt to market cycle chic specifically to black people. Courvoisier went from being an old white guy’s booze to a trendy ‘urban’ drink after being the subject of a rap song. It’s not like the car makers aren’t working in this market. If black people can’t see themselves riding a bike around like Katy Perry, what about Corinne Bailey Rae? Or does she not count because she’s English?
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4 June 2011
A labour of loathing
Pullman has also assailed Lewis for being racist, a charge that simply doesn’t stick. One of Lewis’s noblest characters is the dark-skinned Calormene, Emeth, while the vilest is the White Witch.
Well! That settles that.
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1 June 2011
Do you know what makes an ‘urban melee’ different from a regular ‘melee’? It’s not that it takes place within the city limits of a major metropolitan area. It’s that it involves the world’s most obvious code term for ‘scary black people.’
