The Real Reason Against CRT
Two Years on: Remembering George Floyd Leads to New Signaling for Me
I enjoyed a good thoughtful response from a white man about a black American issue. I enjoy that openness of intelligent exchange that lasts more than a few angry sentences. Constant bickering and flaming is not intelligent discourse and the type of hateful abuse he said he received from people on the left is not acceptable. But I would still say the death threats black Americans have received are far greater than the type and kind he as a centrist, leftist liberal or right centrist have received ever. No one on either side though should be allowed to make such threats and at a minimum there should be a rule or law to “unmask” these people’s identities.
Arrest might be too much as it would overwhelm the system but forcing media companies to unmask those making threats would tamper way down on the death threats in particular.
I do blame myself for not clarifying in my response to him, and always glad to have another chance to explain something said in haste or even slight anger. I was not talking about the trolls that were threatening him, but politicians. I have not heard of all the threats and nastiness lodge by “left wingers” or “extremist liberals” at those on the right, especially the center right, who are trying to explain their viewpoint. They probably do not honestly believe as a white person that something they are saying to set off a “nasty” liberal response is embedded with ideas or comments that historically point to racist tropes.
For instance, the phrase “law and order” I heard Trump say in a debate with Biden I think, was tossed out as though he forgot to say it. What does it mean? Is he going to explain this phrase? I wanted to hear his notion of what that meant, as he never exemplified or expounded. But then I came across the originator, presidential candidate and Democratic senator Strom Thurmond, who used “law and order” to refer to his racist platform of segregation (thank goodness he lost that election). This phrase is not to be explained; it’s a racist trope, a signal repeated to signal his support for segregation, how whites were better “back then”, and his support of segregation.
Suddenly I was almost relieved: I was living in ignorance and wasn’t a part of that white supremacist tribe with their sign-off signal.
The examples though the commentor gave me of the left-wing politicians were Pelosi and the governor of California Newson, and I agreed that they did exhibit hypocrisy are not acceptable: when Nancy got a haircut without a mask after telling her constituents to use mask, or when Newson went to dinner in a group unmasked at a five-star restaurant against the code he just endorsed as governor. It showed their elitist hypocritical arrogance, like they are above the law.
But they are not examples of politicians spewing vitriol or tweeting hate speech, or signaling racial hatred, like that decades old code from Thurmond signaling adherence to supremacy. They are minor in comparison to Congressmen Gosar, Greene, Gaetz, and Trump, the king of angry insults and violent vitriol. Politicians’ words and actions do matter, and deliberate incitement to violence is horrible, can be treasonous, and beyond “merely” hypocritical acts. I’m no fan of Pelosi and her outdated elitism that smacks of whiteness.
But vituperative, vial insults by Trump are worse and transform into policy that affects the lives of millions of black Americans or reinforces the staunch automatic rejection of laws that could help prevent racial violence, and reinforces the automatic acceptance of the Republican rejection of helpful laws, like Biden’s acceptance that the John Lewis Act would not pass or the police reform bill would not pass, even watered down. “You or I” (I wrote, meaning white men) have not been stopped by police on a regular basis at a traffic stop and even when we did, did not experience the policeman draw his gun for “nothing.” My stops have been civil.
The fear of ordinary blacks can’t be compared to that us, as it was the whites doing the violence against blacks for minor infractions for one hundred years after slavery and the horrors of it. Whites were doing the lynching, the beatings, the jailing, the denial of voting for 200 years (and yes, blacks — free blacks in particular — had a write to vote in most states, with North Carolina for instance changing its laws to fully deny votes to blacks in 1835, only 30 years before the civil war).
Thus, the vitriol spewed by politicians and media trolls from the right is far different — or taken far differently by those on the left. I can “easily” shrug off the insults and threats, though I was “scared” at first of the open hatred of me and whites by black Americans. I’ve made faux pas in my support and continued research into black American history, now two years after George Floyd’s murder. I’ve been worried my comments would be misinterpreted by black Americans as I attempt to understand and support substantive change.
But the comments black Americans get don’t need to be misinterpreted, as they directly receive racial slurs, racial threats, racial animus from violence signaling. I don’t have hundreds of years of government repression, and physical brutality, backing up any vial comments or rants against me as a white man, few that I received. I don’t know what the anonymous hatred made against me in comments sections will lead to.
But black Americans do. They know the end result: brutality, arrests, jail. Whites are the ones with a long irrational history of violence against black Americans, and most of that violence went unpunished, with no arrests and trials leading to real convictions for the racist act of lynching until the 1981 lynching in Alabama.
I am from Buffalo and was raised there. I know that Democrats are responsible for building the “inner city” that the black Americans live in and shop in. I was born in a neighboring blue collar “sundown” town. The sundown ordinances were made and enforced by Democrats from the late 19th century until 1970. It was a union town and jobs and “home values” were protected from the influx of “Southern blacks” “flooding” “our” border, (to put it in modern phrasing) the Mason-Dixon line.
Towns like mine were made by thousands of white Democrat politicians on the local and county level who deliberately made them to keep black Americans out of town after sundown — or else. They were made to be the first redlining laws to segregate black Americans out of the community, to not let them live there. Democratically elected politicians made these “ordinances” overwhelmingly outside of the South — which didn’t need them. They were made in towns on the west coast, Wisconsin (that had an all-white county like other states), 600 or so towns in Arkansas, in New York State, like my birth town. They were all unconstitutional ordinances and laws against blacks. There was never a “reckoning” with Democrats in their party, never an apology.
There were no laws made by any black Americans against white Americans equivalent to them that led to more formal segregation, as is the case of redlining. And never were these racist laws overturned or repudiated officially.
There were not black equivalent laws because history is vastly lopsided.
So, I would agree with this commentor that Democrats are not deserving of your vote, but for the same reason as Republicans — denial of recognizing what black Americans went through under white rule. Knowing your American history — both black and white American viewpoints — is getting a full report of it in history books and can make children (and middle-aged white men in particular) more sensitive to what black Americans have gone through to get here, not less. As much as we can learn though, we older white commentators and supporters can never walk a mile in their shoes, we’re older and have walked more than half the way. We can only try the shoes on and stroll for a bit.
Please remember George Floyd. Reparations now. (That’s now my signal and sign off.)
