We are, if the president is serious here, a nation that has narrowly constricted its marketable talents to the deployment of violence. We can’t manufacture much of anything, but we can kill you. We can’t fix our schools, or build adequate levees to protect a city like New Orleans from floodwaters. But we can kill you. We can’t reduce infant mortality to anywhere near the level of other industrialized nations with which we like to compare ourselves. But we can kill you. We can’t break the power of Wall Street bankers, or jail any of those bankers and money managers who helped orchestrate the global financial collapse. But we can kill you. We can’t protect LGBT youth from bullying in schools, or ensure equal opportunity for all in the labor market, regardless of race, gender, sexuality or any other factor. But we can kill you.
Posts tagged tim wise
Posted 1 year ago
But if we are to survive as a nation, a culture — or as a planet, ultimately — we’d best begin to demand better of ourselves and others. We’d best commit to a recognition that most of us are just trying to do the best we can, in a world that can be tough and unforgiving. Trying to raise families, keep our heads above water, and do what we think is right. Occasionally we get it wrong, and so do our neighbors. But that doesn’t make us, or them, terrorists, or zombies, or stealth Stalinists, or baby-killers, or gun nuts, or Klansmen, or whatever. It makes us, and them, human.
Posted 1 year ago
Yet what had Williams done, exactly? He acknowledged his own biases, and then explained the fallacy embedded therein. He was being honest as a way to demonstrate an important fact, and in this case, a fact that the nice white liberals who predominate at NPR try to deny, especially for themselves. Namely, that even the best of us can be taken in by racism, by religious bias, by ethnic chauvinism, by prejudice. No matter our liberal bona fides, the bottom line is this: advertising works, whether for selling toothpaste, tennis shoes, or stereotypes.
Posted 1 year ago
For instance, the claim that black culture has been rendered dysfunctional by the modern welfare state (a common conservative argument) is racist in that it presumes African Americans are too weak to remain strong and self-reliant in the face of such programs, whereas whites are strong enough to do so. In European nations that are overwhelmingly white, social safety net programs are far more extensive, and yet, fail to generate the kinds of pathologies conservatives would here attribute to welfare provision. Why? The only possible answer, given the conservative position on the harm done by welfare programs, is that blacks have something uniquely wrong with them, which renders them pathological in the face of efforts that have no such impact on others.
Tim Wise, “Reading Racism Right to Left, Part I”
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