Democracy is About Me, Not You

More Clues About Those Who Are Trapped in Whiteness

“Let my people go” was secretly sung in their heads to this white government soldier seen here violating their unalienable human rights [courtesy, I hope, of Amnesty International, who I link to transparently in the hope they don’t sue me, and yes, it is troubling this song I linked to is sung by a black man longer ago about Jews under Moses and I’m applying it to Muslims — but Paul Robeson did a master class in black appropriation that whites could cheer ironically]

When you consider America as a white-managed democracy America, something begins to become more apparent than when you look at it, hoping to find a pure democracy. You don’t. So, perhaps you feel less you are feeling less frustrated. You take what you can get.

Newly Guantanamo-released prisoners give me fresh insight into our dysfunctional, white-controlled democracy and why the problem, in contrast, will make it continue to get worse. I’ve linked to the AP story about President Biden’s release of some of the Gitmo prisoners because it is “neutral” and used by a lot of mainstream media, and you can see the phrase it contains repeated in the Washington Post story on the same subject.

It says that the remaining Gitmo prisoners — some still charged with nothing, no crimes, not even terrorism, America’s favorite — have reached a “pivotal moment.” Excuse me, what? I thought they reached a pivotal moment when “they were captured” [notice the deliberate use of white passive voice that gently removes the American government’s culpability] or bought off the “terrorist battlefield” and put into a black site and beaten, then a whole bunch of other pivotal moments happened when they were transferred to Guantanamo and tortured a lot more? Well, honestly, every day was one they achieved a pivotal…