All things Racist...USA edition (16 Viewers)

Optimus Prime said:

Except Lamar was announced like last spring or summer

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Don't let facts get in the way of a MAGA double-dip: a 'deep state' conspiracy + heavily implied racism is just too good for the MAGA performance artists to pass up.

Optimus Prime said:

Could have gone in a few threads

The immediate blaming of anything and everything bad in DEI makes me so mad

After the plane crash at Reagan Airport Trump more or less said:

“This tragedy just happened, we have zero information and don’t know anything yet but I’m sure the is because of DEI”
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……In the Republican “Southern Strategy”, enacted most clearly and powerfully under Reagan, federal programs that wealthy individuals supported eliminating in order to make way for tax cuts were described as “welfare.”

By describing such programs as “welfare”, Republicans intended to communicate that these programs were there to take money away from “hard working” white Americans and directed to benefit Black Americans, who, according to longstanding US anti-Black racist ideology, were associating with criminality, laziness, and corruption (there are of course far more white Americans on programsaimed to help the poor than there are Black Americans on such programs).

Scientists have repeatedly found, at least as recently as 2018, that this strategy was successful. Research has shownthat almost half of white Americans regard Black Americans as lazier than whites, and almost as large a percentage regard Black Americans as less intelligent.

By describing certain government programs as “welfare”, politicians can easily decrease their popularity among this group of Americans.

The original version of the Republican Southern Strategy was necessarily limited – it was, after all, hard to describe all federal grant-making as welfare, or all federal bureaucracy as welfare.

We are now witnessing a radical broadening of the Republican Southern Strategy, drawing on the same underlying racist attitudes towards Black Americans.

The idea behind the mechanism of extending the Republican Southern Strategy to all public institutions was due to Christopher Rufo, who realized that, in the expression “Critical Race Theory”, lay a potent weapon:

“Strung together, the phrase ‘critical race theory’ connotes hostile, academic, divisive, race-obsessed, poisonous, elitist, anti-American.” Most perfect of all, Rufo continued, critical race theory is not “an externally applied pejorative.” Instead, “it’s the label the critical race theorists chose themselves.”

By connecting all of federal bureaucracy to “Critical Race Theory”, Rufo could create negative attitudes towards the entire federal system.

There is, however, an obvious problem with radically extending the Southern Strategy by replacing “welfare” with “Critical Race Theory.”

The argument that the ideology of the federal government was Critical Race Theory was impossible to make. Critical Race Theory is a small academic subdiscipline, and the expression “Critical Race Theory” occurs almost nowhere in federal documents.

To argue that Critical Race Theory was somehow guiding the funding of (for example) Alzheimer’s research at Harvard and Yale would always sound like a conspiracy theory on the level of QAnon.

Even when Rufo argued that Critical Race Theory was guiding public schools, for example, his opponents could simply challenge him by asking for evidence that this academic theory had so much power. And it was evidence that, even in the much narrower range of education, was difficult to provide.

In short, “Critical Race Theory” could be deployed as an effective political weapon, for the reasons Rufo so clearly explains. But it was impossible to argue with any force that it was an ideology that governed the entire federal government.


Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs are there to help ensure that workplaces are free from discrimination, and accessible (for example to the disabled).

These programs are ubiquitous across federal agencies. Unlike Critical Race Theory, then, it is trivial to show that DEI is present across all federal agencies as well as institutions that the Trump administration deems hostile, such as universities.

The term “Welfare” was such a potent political weapon in the Republican Southern Strategy, as it was a useful shorthand for the deeply embedded racist attitude that Black Americans were lazier and less competent than whites.

Rufo and others quickly realized that “DEI” could also be used to evoke the same racist attitudes, that Black Americans needed special help to compete with white Americans, positions that they could only obtain through cheating because of their supposed lesser competence and intelligence.

We know that calling programs “welfare” made many Americans think less of them. The anti-DEI campaign is the Republican Southern Strategy on steroids, as “DEI” marshals racist attitudes as effectively as “welfare”, but against a vastly broader target.

The Republican Southern Strategy was a devastatingly effective weapon against America’s social safety net. By arguing that social programs were “welfare”, and benefitted supposedly undeserving Black Americans, Republican politicians could argue that funding to these programs should be slashed, and the savings handed over to the wealthy in new tax cuts.

The new version of the Southern Strategy is directed not just against the social safety net, but against the entire federal government, and all the programs it supports, from health research to foreign aid to basic science.

Right now, America’s legacy of racism is being now directed as a weapon against America itself.…………

We are witnessing the rise of a new Republican ‘Southern Strategy’ | Jason Stanley

How to make sense of the Trump administration’s attacks on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

www.theguardian.com

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This shirt was obvious to anybody that was educated and paying attention. Yet so many "educated" people went along with it anyway. Hate and being manipulated are an aphrodisiac like no other for these people.

In 1981, Lee Atwater, the most influential Republican party strategist of the late 20th century, sat down for an off-the-record interview with the political scientist Alexander P Lamis.

At the time, Atwater was a junior member of the Reagan administration, but he would later go on to run George HW Bush’s presidential campaign in 1988 and then become chair of the Republican National Committee in 1989.

In perhaps the most revealing, and most infamous, portion of the interview, the hard-charging Republican operative explained to Lamis how Republican politicians could mask their racism – and racist appeals to white voters – behind a series of euphemisms.

You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘[N-word, N-word, N-word]’. By 1968 you can’t say ‘[N-word]’ – that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites … ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘[N-word, N-word]’.

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Got that? No need to utter the N-word out loud as there were plenty of other “abstract” ways to say it.

Today, more than four decades later, DEI has become the new N-word; the new rightwing abstraction deployed by Republicans to conceal their anti-Black racism. DEI – short for diversity, equity and inclusion – is thrown around by high-profile conservatives, from the president of the United States downwards, for the express purpose of undermining Black people in public life.

Don’t believe me? In a recent interview on Fox News, the White House counselor and former Trump lawyer Alina Habba declared that the administration’s 27-year-old press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, “is overqualified, brilliant and was well-versed and ready … she didn’t need a thick binder ... unlike our last press secretary who was put in there for … DEI reasons”.

For the record, the “last press secretary”, Karine Jean-Pierre, is the Black daughter of Haitian immigrants. Is she less qualified than her successor? Well, let’s compare résumés, shall we?

Neither Habba herself, nor Leavitt, are Ivy League grads.

Jean-Pierre is.

Neither Habba herself, nor Leavitt, worked in two different administrations before securing their top White House positions.


Jean-Pierre did.

Neither Habba herself, nor Leavitt, has served on three different election-winning presidential campaigns across three different decades.

Jean-Pierre has.

So when Habba says Jean-Pierre was appointed White House press secretary for “DEI reasons”, what else could she be alluding to other than that she is a Black woman?……..

DEI is the new N-word. In fact, the Black podcaster Van Lathan argues that DEI is now “worse than the N-word” and has become “the worst slur in American history”. The term “DEI hire”, he explains, “is not just being used to undermine the qualifications, capability and readiness of Black people … DEI is placing the blame of all of society’s ills at the feet of these people.”

Plane crash? Blame DEI. Wildfires in LA? Blame DEI. Bridge collapse? Blame DEI.

DEI is a racist dogwhistle. Blame Black people is the not so unsubtle message.

You now cannot turn on the television or log on to social media without coming across a prominent conservative blathering on about the evils of DEI.

To quote the loathsome Fox host Greg Gutfeld, DEI “can be used to explain everything … except, unlike racism and climate change, which the left found under every rock, every issue, DEI is, indeed, under every rock because the Democrats put it there.”………..

I do wonder if when we get another Democratic president, with dem control of the house and Senate (Please 2028!) will we see corporate America do another 180 and reinstate all the DEI programs they just shuttered?

With shallow, meaningless PR written statements about how crucial diversity and inclusion is to a healthy company, economy and country and how important they always thought it was

good article about one of the most famous pictures from the civil rights era
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While segregation was declared unconstitutional in 1954, it would take years for white schools to integrate. For Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, that day was set for Sept. 4, 1957.

Nine Black students were due to integrate the first high school in a major southern city amid public outcry from segregationists – including the governor of Arkansas.

Governor Orval Faubuseven had even called up the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the students from entering the school, saying it posed a risk of rioting and breaching the peace.

On the first day of school, hundreds of segregationists had gathered to harass and obstruct the Black students, who would become known as the Little Rock Nine. Civil rights organizers had told them to arrive with their parents and meet as a group so they could go in the school’s back entrance together, but they were turned away by the Arkansas National Guard.

Fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Eckford did not get the message to meet, and arrived alone at the front entrance of the school. She was immediately surrounded by a mob of segregationists as she walked to guards at the entranced of the school.

Eckford recounted the day in a 1998 interview with the Guardian newspaper.

“I walked up to the guard who had let the white students in. He too didn’t move. When I tried to squeeze past him, he raised his bayonet and then the other guards moved in and they raised their bayonets. They glared at me with a mean look and I was very frightened and didn’t know what to do,” she said. “I turned around and the crowd came toward me. They moved closer and closer. Somebody started yelling, ‘Lynch her! Lynch her!'”

Television and newspaper reporters, including Arkansas Democrat Photographer Will Counts, captured the mob harassing Eckford. Counts captured the above image of a white student, Hazel Bryan Massery, shouting “Go home, (n-word)! Go back to Africa” at Eckford.

That photo would be shared across the world and give international attention to the struggle to integrate U.S. schools.

Eckford saw a nearby bus bench and walked to it thinking it would give her some form of safety.

“I sat down and the mob crowded up and began shouting all over again. Someone hollered, ‘Drag her over to this tree! Let’s take care of that (N-word).’ Just then a white man sat down beside me, put his arm around me and patted my shoulder. He raised my chin and said, ‘Don’t let them see you cry,'” Eckford said in the Guardian interview.

The man was Benjamin Fine, a reporter for the New York Times, who had a daughter around Eckford’s age. Soon Grace Lorch, a white civil rights activist and teacher stood up for Eckford and escorted her onto a city bus to safety.

The school district later condemned the governor’s actions and President Dwight Eisenhower asked the governor to withdraw the troops, but chose not to take any federal action until two weeks later, when the Little Rock Nine attempted to integrate again.

With a police escort, the Black students entered the school on Sept. 23. That day an even larger white mob had gathered and were able to trespass into the school. The Black students were taken to the principle’s office and then evacuated for safety.

Outside, a group of white segregationist attacked and beat L. Alex Wilson, a Black reporter Memphis Tri-State Defender who was covering the story. One person jumped on his back and choked him, and another man hit him on the head with a brick, causing an injury that likely shortened his life. He died three years later at the age of 51.

The image of Wilson’s attack, also taken by Will Counts, and a telegram from the mayor of Little Rock urging presidential intervention prompted Eisenhower to finally use the Insurrection Act to send federal troops to Arkansas.............

Eckford never graduated from Central High School and ended up taking correspondence and night courses for her diploma. She enlisted in the army and later served as a probation officer. As she got older, she was diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder.

The white student in the iconic photo, Hazel Bryan Massery, left school at 17 when she married. In the years since that photo, her views on desegregation had changed, writes Author David Margolick in his book “Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock”.

Massery realized that her children would one day see her as the snarling girl in history books and in 1963 she called Eckford to apologize. Eckford accepted and the two didn’t speak again for decades.

Massery later got involved in peace activism and social work.

“She taught mothering skills to unmarried black women, and took underprivileged black teenagers on field trips. She frequented the black history section at the local Barnes & Noble, buying books by Cornel West and Shelby Steele and the companion volume to Eyes on the Prize,” Margolick writes.

“She read David Shipler’s study of black-white relations in America, A Country of Strangers, a book Elizabeth herself had helped inspire.”

In 1997, on the 40th anniversary of Central High School’s desegregation, Journalist Will Counts arranged for the two women to meet again for another photograph at the school. That year they also made speeches together at a reconciliation rally. The photograph of the two women decades later would later become a poster promoting racial healing.

The meeting sparked an actual friendship, Margolick writes.

“They went to flower shows together, bought fabrics together, took mineral baths and massages together, appeared in documentaries and before school groups together. Since Elizabeth had never learned to drive, Hazel joked that she had become Elizabeth’s chauffeur,” Margolick writes.

The two women even took a months-long racial healing seminar together discussing race relations.

But the close time they spent together led to hard realizations for both women, and by 2000 they had stopped being friends.

Eckford told Margolick that she felt Massery “wanted me to be cured and be over it and for this not to go on… She wanted me to be less uncomfortable so that she wouldn’t feel responsible anymore.”

When asked what she felt after seeing the photograph Massery responded that she was “just hamming it up and being recognized, getting attention” and that it wasn’t worth remembering.

But Eckford said that she learned that Massery had had weekly contact with the students on a local dance show “and she was part of an organized group that attacked us physically in the school,” Eckford told NPR.

Meanwhile Massery felt like she was under attack...............

wasn't sure where to put this
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Missouri’s attorney general sued Starbucks, accusing it of engaging in discrimination with its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies and alleging that such initiatives have made the coffee giant’s workforce “become more female and less white.”

The federal lawsuit filed Tuesday by Andrew Bailey, a Republican, accuses Starbucks of engaging in “systemic racial, sexual, and sexual orientation discrimination” through hiring quotas, advancement opportunities and board membership.

Such practices force Missouri consumers to “pay higher prices and wait longer for goods and services,” he argued, because making hiring decisions “on non-merit considerations will skew the hiring pool towards people who are less qualified to perform their work.” He did not provide evidence of how this would pass on increased costs to consumers.

The Seattle-based chain disputed the allegations as “inaccurate” in a statement to news outlets. “Our programs and benefits are open to everyone and lawful. Our hiring practices are inclusive, fair and competitive and designed to ensure the strongest candidate for every job every time.”
The federal lawsuit comes as corporations across the country are rolling back their diversity programs as the Trump administration moves to shut down all federal DEI programs.

“We disagree with the attorney general and these allegations are inaccurate,” Starbucks said in a statement shared with The Washington Post. “Our programs and benefits are open to everyone and lawful.”.................

Missouri AG sues Starbucks, says workforce is ‘more female and less white’​

Optimus Prime said:

wasn't sure where to put this
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Missouri’s attorney general sued Starbucks, accusing it of engaging in discrimination with its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies and alleging that such initiatives have made the coffee giant’s workforce “become more female and less white.”

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wholly crap racist much?????

So white people are a protected class now?

CoolBrees said:

So white people are a protected class now?

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under trump yes. you mean white guys.

Fragrance brand Brown Girl Jane’s perfume bottles sit on shelves at Sephora near some of the most storied labels in the fashion and beauty world, including Prada and Dior.

For the Black-owned brand, getting a retailer to bet on it was just the start, Brown Girl Jane CEO and founder Malaika Jones said. She said Sephora has supported the company so it can better compete with well-known brands with huge marketing budgets and glossy celebrity endorsements.

Brown Girl Jane received a $100,000 grant last year from Sephora to help grow its business and participated in Sephora’s Accelerate program, which aims to boost founders who are people of color. Sephora spotlighted the fragrance brand in an email to customers in early February, putting it in front of potential shoppers who don’t know its name. Brown Girl Jane’s sales more than doubled after Sephora began carrying the company’s fragrances online and at select stores about a year ago.

While Sephora has put its weight behind its brand incubator, much larger retailers like Walmart and Target recently scaled back similar efforts focused on finding and funding more brands founded by people of color. Without that support from the retailers themselves, brands like Brown Girl Jane could face a tougher time getting on shelves — and succeeding once they get there.

“For small brands, but for any brands, really, it’s a constant fight for relevance and for visibility,” Jones said. “And so when you don’t have that commitment or even that understanding from the retailer side, it becomes quite difficult for small brands to survive — even when they’ve made it on shelves.”

When retailers launched supplier diversity programs — many of them in the months after police killed George Floyd in 2020 — top industry leaders including Walmart CEO Doug McMillon and Target CEO Brian Cornell spoke out about the institutional barriers that people of color face, including when financing their businesses. Now, as more retailers drop diversity, equity and inclusion programs, Black-owned brands may find it harder to clear those hurdles.

In January, Target dropped specific DEI pledges that it made four years ago after Floyd was murdered a short distance from its Minneapolis headquarters. Among those goals, the big-box retailer had committed to adding products from more than 500 Black-owned brands to its shelves or website and spending $2 billion with Black-owned businesses by 2025.

Late last year, Walmart confirmed that it was ending key diversity initiatives, including winding down the Center for Racial Equity, a nonprofit that the retailer started and funded with $100 million to tackle racial inequities. It had chosen finance as one of those focus areas, noting the gap in funding for Black entrepreneurs.

Gutting those efforts could jeopardize a valuable pathway for Black founders to build their businesses and reach the millions of shoppers who browse the websites and aisles at the nation’s largest and best-known retailers..............

Remember how the radical MAGAts were all mad about this SNL50 Tom Hanks skit???

Here's how they react IRL:

From under the floorboards of a large, white building in Maysville, Kentucky, African American slaves making the arduous, secret escape from the south would hide one final time. Freedom, across the Ohio River to the north, was in clear sight.

The Underground Railroad term was thought to have first been coined in Maysville, when Tice Davids, a slave, escaped a life of cruelty in 1831 by swimming across the roiling Ohio River. For tens of thousands of people such as Davids, the river was the final barrier to freedom, separating the free state Ohio from slavery in the south.

But today, more than 150 years since the legal end of slavery, shards of a hateful past appear to live on.


A local resident has attracted attention by using Maysville’s post office as the so-called “national office” of a Ku Klux Klan faction called the Trinity White Knights.

The extremist, who is known to local police and an FBI field office in Louisville, is believed to have been involved in several flyer drops across Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee and in Springfield, Ohio, in recent months, causing anger and unrest.

“I don’t agree with promoting the negative aspect of what he’s putting out here. He’s using a PO box here in town to promote a negative message that we don’t condone, but he is also versed in his first amendment rights,” said Michael Palmer, Maysville’s chief of police.

“We do not appreciate it in this city. We have a very good community. We do not support it at all.”

Recently, long-dormant white supremacist activity has ramped up in northern Kentucky, Ohio and Indiana.

A gathering of KKK members at a “Klan grounds” in northern Indiana was organized last Saturday, according to flyers distributed across Kentucky last month by the Trinity White Knights faction.


An hour’s drive north-west of Maysville, in Ludlow, Kentucky, flyers depicting an “Uncle Sam” figure kicking a Muslim family and the words “Leave now. Avoid deportation” and calling for people to “track and monitor” immigrants were found on the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration last month. Flyers have also been distributed by the Trinity White Knights group in Indiana and east Tennessee in recent weeks.

A call to a phone number printed on the flyers was answered by recorded voicemail that describes a way for people to join the group and said: “Come stand with us and help fight illegal immigration, homosexuality, and every other form of wickedness and lawlessness,” among other racist troupes.……..

I will say this is the least visible Black History Month I’ve ever experienced

I feel like I’ve only seen it mentioned a half dozen times so far

Used to see it more than that daily

Optimus Prime said:

I will say this is the least visible Black History Month I’ve ever experienced

I feel like I’ve only seen it mentioned a half dozen times so far

Used to see it more than that daily

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PRIDE this year will be even worse. Although I won't necessarily miss all of the fake corporate sponsorship, even if it is a sign of the decline of our society. At least the truth is exposed for all to see.

Sigh, the ol’ ‘slavery wasn’t as bad as you think’

This book will soon be required reading in public schools soon I’m sure
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The pastor of an evangelical church with ties to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth once claimed slavery promoted “affection between the races” in the South.

Doug Wilson, founder of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), wrote in his 1996 book Southern Slavery: As It Was, that there had “never been a multi-racial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world.”

Hegseth’s church, Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship outside Nashville, Tennessee, is a member of CREC, according to Tennessee Lookout, which has congregations in nearly all 50 states and several foreign countries.

“Slavery as it existed in the South was not an adversarial relationship with pervasive racial animosity,” Wilson wrote in his book.

“There has never been a multi-racial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world. The credit for this must go to the predominance of Christianity.”

He added that “in spite of the evils contained in the system, we cannot overlook the benefits of slavery for both blacks and whites. “Slavery produced in the South a genuine affection between the races that we believe we can say has never existed in any nation before the War or since.”

Wilson attempted to defend his writings in a 2020 blog post titled “Not That Simple,” in which he claimed the passages had been taken out of context.………

Optimus Prime said:

Sigh, the ol’ ‘slavery wasn’t as bad as you think’

This book will soon be required reading in public schools soon I’m sure
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The pastor of an evangelical church with ties to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth once claimed slavery promoted “affection between the races” in the South.

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crap trump will hire this asshat soon. what a Peice of work. this is what Christian nationalism will bring us.