The Buffalo Killings, American racism, and a Proposal

In my post Tucker Carlson Hypocrite? I wrote about the recent mass killing in Buffalo, NY and how American racism was behind these murders. Now I would point you to Derecka Purnell's Why do white supremacists want to kill Black people?

For example, decriminalization activists and scholars have demonstrated that calls for criminalization are not the deterrent to crime that many of us assume, especially since the US often perpetuates the violence that it seeks to punish. Instead, criminalization fuels surveillance, policing, incarceration, poverty, and communal violence that makes society less safe for us all. Anti-criminalization organizers argue that these consequences also bear down on the people that the law was theoretically intended to protect. In 2015, prosecutors charged and a judge convicted a Black person under an anti-lynching law for attempting to protect a Black Lives Matter protestor from being arrested.

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If Congress wanted to actually fight white supremacist violence, it could fund grants for schools to teach racial justice education. Biden signed the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act at a time when states are making it illegal to teach about Emmett Till. If the federal government wants to stop or at least slow down a new generation of potential white supremacists, it must make vigorous, affirmative efforts to openly and financially support schools and community organizations doing this work.

Replace the Great Replacement loons: This racist ideology should have political consequences from The New York Daily News is blunt and spot on:

Let’s be crystal clear: The theory of “great replacement,” the name given to the notion that there is some deliberate Democratic effort to supplant white voters with Black and Brown ones for political gain, is both deeply racist and completely farcical. It is not one interpretation of the facts, or a mere exaggeration, or a political disagreement. It is premised entirely on lies and insinuations that are projections of a white supremacist worldview.

The claim, for example, that Democrats have left U.S. borders “open” to gain voters is ludicrous on a number of fronts. The border is very much not open, and in fact is essentially the most restrictive it has been in U.S. history; those who do cross the border illegally can’t vote; and those who do gain asylum have gone through a formal, fully legal process that grants them eventual citizenship, the very legal immigration that many conservatives claim to want.

For too many years I withdrew from the world, that I can no longer do and you should not. Standing by and condoning become the same thing. Read and think on Ms. Purnell's argument.

America attains true greatness when it overcomes its racism.

Let me take this moment to nominate the Greatest American Band and a song that is spot on for us:

sch 5/18/22