♆ The Macho Response ♆: January 2015

FACEBOOK DECLARES WAR ON MISINFORMATION

Well, glory be: the funk's on me. It’s almost like people assume I, The Crack Emcee, will forget there was a time (not too long ago) when warning our NewAge/alternative medicine/anti-vaccine crowd they unleash the measles - specifically - was considered kinda radical. Kinda "out there." Kinda crazy: an insult to others intelligence. They got me to the point where I would take any opportunity not to think about it (or them) which is partially why I eventually, finally, said, BAM! Baby, watch yo step – America's 'bout to shift gears:

“It’s time for white northerners to wake up to the sometimes uncomfortable history of what are now liberal enclaves like Minneapolis, Minnesota and Portland, Oregon and Madison, Wisconsin,….”

The ugliness I blogged about here, and here, and here last year - saying Oregon Was Founded As A Racist Utopia (and still is one) has been a fact discovered by Gizmodo’s Matt Novak, which is now making the white supremacist rounds as the words of black people (who these things actually happen to) just don’t for some reason.

Sigh. Oh well, that's how America “works.”

As long as the message is getting out there. Here’s more from the guy at Gizmodo:

“America’s history of racism is most commonly taught as a southern issue. That’s certainly how I learned about it while going to Minnesota public schools in the 1980s and 90s. White people outside of the South seem to learn about the Civil War and civil rights movements from an incredibly safe (and often judgmental) distance.

Racism was generally framed as something that happened in the past and almost always ‘down there.’ We learned about the struggles for racial equality in cities like Birmingham and Selma and Montgomery. But what about the racism of Portland, Oregon, a city that is still overwhelmingly white? The struggles there were just as intense – though they are rarely identified in the history books.”

So here I be, one of the people this is eternally falling on, having to decipher and explain what’s been deliberately hidden, without pissing off the arrogant folks it was hidden from, so of course they could grow up to be so bloody arrogant. Intelligent? No. Arrogant? Yes. Mother. Fucker.

Not crazy-eyed U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, or Madison, Wisconsin's Ann Althouse (Hi, Ann!) or even Ann's favorite GOP golden ~~retriever~~ governor with the racist hiring practices, Scott Walker, but me. Me, the black guy. Because I HAVE to talk about it. Because I HAVE to live with it. Because the whites will never let it go.

[Scott] Walker concedes nothing to the conventional wisdom about what the GOP must do to compete in a more culturally tolerant, ethnically diverse and economically insecure America. And the GOP faithful love it.

It starts with ethnicity and race,...

Stay on target. And of course it does, because what else can a white guy with racist hiring practices do but take white's, and the nation's, biggest "original sin" and try to make it work for them - again? Their institutional racism that's lasted for over 100 years can last a little longer. If, while Ann Althouse is thinking "It's funny to see how outsiders are brought up to speed on the 'polarising' that's been going on here in The North," she also finds it as funny to ignore what the North doesn't want we outsiders to know: it's Wisconsin's polarizing historical foundation in racism that still probably makes it a great place to live - for someone white like her.

Or (of course) their whites-must-always-make-mention-he's-black sheriff, who deliberately sounds like few other blacks in America, or Wisconsin. Blacks who few get to hear from, deliberately, considering the conservative media saturation in the area. The assumption we'll not notice only one nigga in the whole area regularly gets to speak, or is listened to, is just more of the same racial nonsense.

Today, racial segregation and division often result from habits, policies, and institutions that are not explicitly designed to discriminate. Contrary to popular belief, discrimination or segregation do not require animus. They thrive even in the absence of prejudice or ill will.

It's common to have racism without 'racists.'"

- Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America.

It's kind of hard for me to believe under the circumstances - in a white country, set up and by whites, and where blacks have had to fight for justice over centuries - it could be any different. I mean how many whites have told me they "don't even THINK about race"?

That self-imposed ignorance serves a purpose for whites, going far beyond plausible deniability for what happens. No, the imperative to lie - overtly and covertly - is too strong, and white pride is (apparently) still far too fragile for getting at the truth of America, being what the new wrong-headed Amazon series on the Confederacy accurately calls a white person's Point of Honor.

A curiously thorough demonstration of the ways in which a refusal to think about racism is just another, slightly more subtle, form of racism.

And, Lord knows, whites also would never THINK of letting THAT little problem stop their continuing, centuries-long, despicable behavior. Oh well, as long as somebody black's still breathing: