Support the Black Women Who Are Protecting Abortion

Everywhere you look for the Real Resistance, the fight on the ground to protect women's reproductive rights, Black Women are in the vanguard.  It's way past time white women stepped the fuck up and supported them in the best way white women can: with MONEY.

Crooks and Liars:

Winstead is co-creator of The Daily Show, and (to me) even more importantly, is founder of Lady Parts Justice League. As the sole white woman on Joy's panel discussion of the simultaneously psychotic and pathetic Republican march towards eliminating the protections of Roe v. Wade, Winstead offered the following advice to people wondering how they can help.

I've been to every single one of these [states,] I've been to Alabama four times, Georgia twice, Mississippi five times, Kentucky twice. the activists on the ground, and this is super important to realize, is that the activists on the ground are doing incredible work and a lot of this work legislatively, the abortion funds helping poor women are run by tremendously bad-@ss, if I can, women of color. So when these things happen, when people are like, "What can I do, what can I do?" the first thing you can do is just Google that state and find out where their abortion fund is, find out where those reproductive justice organizations are on the ground and donate to them first. Support them first.

Do we hear that, white ladies? Black women are already ON THIS. They have already mobilized, and have been for YEARS. Because white people did this to Black women FIRST. We have been for centuries. Name me a moment - just a MOMENT in American history when Black women had total control over their reproductive lives. I'll wait. (No, I won't — I have things to do.) White women are so blown away by the Handmaid's Tale, and meanwhile Black women are saying, "We've been living this for centuries."

Caught Showing Your Racist Ass? White Privilege to the Rescue!

Fuckhead's parents wasted money on a repug PR firm; the White Male Supremacy cavalry was already on the way with free excuses.

A corrective from Stephen Robinson at Wonkette:

No white guy's life is ever going to end because he was cruel to women or minorities. The sneering Nick Sandmann will probably be on the Supreme Court shortlist in a few decades. During the Trump era, the "cruelty is the point," and a disturbing number will rush to protect those who are cruel in Trump's image.

And this, from the Root.

Make Every Repug Candidate Pay For Kavanaugh

Rapey McLiarFace is now the raping, lying face of the republican party.  His despicable performance in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the screaming hysteria of repug fanatics spouting ludicrous conspiracies have laid bare the true nature of their party: despising and degrading women in order to promote and protect privileged, rich, straight, conservative, freakazoid white men.

 

To repugs, either you are one of them, or you are scum to be assaulted and kicked into the trash.

 

Which side are you on?

 

29 Days.

VOTE

The Repug Skeleton Key

Albert Burneko at The Concourse:

It’s a bit late for anyone not to have figured this out yet, but the skeleton key to understanding American conservatism is this: At bottom, it lacks absolutely any moral or ideological underpinning beyond the reactionary protection of moneyed white men—of their station, their wealth and power, and their egos. Its supposed ideas and abstractions are just a framework for spasmodic lashing-out against anything that can be interpreted as a threat to rich white dudes. It likes supply-side economics because the supply side is made of rich white dudes. It likes tax cuts because the taxes are mostly cut for rich white dudes. It likes cops and soldiers because cops and soldiers uphold a social order with rich white dudes at the top. It likes “traditional family values” because social, economic, and sexual dominion over women are the most traditional family values of all. It likes “Make America Great Again” because rich white dudes used to roll through society and over everyone else with even greater impunity than they do now. All of these things are just proxies for reiterating, over and over and over, forever, the power and security and primacy of rich white dudes.

Massa Bevin: Slaves Were Just Apprentices

When your racism and White Privilege are so ingrained that you can't even pretend any more.

Joe Gerth at the Courier:

When Master Matt Bevin thinks of the “good ol’ days,” who knew he thinks about the late 1700s?

Marse Bevin — according to WFPL — went to the Kentucky Registered Apprenticeship Summit on Monday and extolled the virtues of indentured servitude as being something akin to an early form of an apprenticeship.

According to the radio station, Marse Bevin said that a couple of his ancestors came to America as indentured servants, learned how to make bells from their master and went on to form their own company after they were freed.

He hailed the harsh practice of keeping people in bondage as a way to give workers hands-on experience.

Well shackle me up and teach me to cast bronze.

Indentured servitude, of course, was the practice of paying one’s way across the pond by selling oneself into bondage for a prescribed number of years — essentially a form of slavery.

It differed from the enslavement of Africans practiced throughout the South, though, in that with Southern slavery, there was no contract and the prescribed number of years was the rest of one’s life, and the rest of one's children’s lives and the rest of their children’s lives, and so on.

So, slavery was far worse. But indentured servitude was no picnic, either.

Sure, a few indentured servants learned trades, but the vast majority of serfs were field workers and household servants, working alongside the African slaves, or doing the same jobs in lieu of the African slaves.

For Master Bevin, this is not to be thought of as a time we should regret and think “thank heavens we’ve gotten past that and don’t allow such a barbarous practice any longer.”

No, for Master Bevin, it is the age of enlightenment. A time of great learning.

(Someone should point out right here that labor unions, which Bevin has harshly criticized and pushed to neuter or kill with right-to-work and other anti-union legislation, run amazing apprenticeship programs that don’t require bondage or a period of servitude.)

WATBs, Explained

From Wonkette:

It is not a coincidence that the people who face the least amount of injustice are the ones who can’t handle it when things don’t go their way.

All Lives Matter ... Not

vacuumslayer at LGM:

... nobody should be saying “All lives matter” because it’s a bullshit distraction from the unique systemic prejudice African Americans face.

The Return of Boiling Alive

Every single supposedly progressive white person who says "I don't see color" should be held to account for horrific torture like this.  Because it is exactly the refusal to acknowledge what happens every fucking day to non-white people that makes it not even a crime to murder them by literally boiling them alive.

Erik Loomis At LGM:

Another day, more police officers getting off scot free after the wanton murder of African-Americans.

On June 23, 2012, Darren Rainey, a schizophrenic man serving time for cocaine possession, was thrown into a prison shower at the Dade Correctional Institution. The water was turned up top 180 degrees — hot enough to steep tea or cook Ramen noodles.

As punishment, four corrections officers — John Fan Fan, Cornelius Thompson, Ronald Clarke and Edwina Williams — kept Rainey in that shower for two full hours. Rainey was heard screaming “Please take me out! I can’t take it anymore!” and kicking the shower door. Inmates said prison guards laughed at Rainey and shouted “Is it hot enough?”

Rainey died inside that shower. He was found crumpled on the floor. When his body was pulled out, nurses said there were burns on 90 percent of his body. A nurse said his body temperature was too high to register with a thermometer.

And his skin fell off at the touch.

But in an unconscionable decision, Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle’s office announced Friday that the four guards who oversaw what amounted to a medieval-era boiling will not be charged with a crime.

“The shower was itself neither dangerous nor unsafe,’’ the report says. “The evidence does not show that Rainey’s well-being was grossly disregarded by the correctional staff.’’

What is there even to say at this point?

 Only Blue Lives Matter.

Dead Wrong Then, Dead Wrong Now, Dead Wrong Forever

I grew up with these motherfuckers, too, and shame on Bill Clinton for absolving them of guilt for their crimes.

The Nation:

To be sure, the country still counts. America surely must hear the voice of the “forgotten” voters who put Donald Trump in the White House: the angry rural whites and the neglected high-school dropouts and the women for whom race and class weigh more heavily than gender. Bill Clinton spoke prophetically about them back in 1995, in the wake of an earlier revolution that became known as Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With America.” Back then, a wave of disgruntled rural voters elected 60 new and deeply parochial members of Congress, flipping the House of Representatives to Republican control and blocking most of what Clinton was trying to enact. The president spoke wisely at a Camp David confab I attended back then, where he took on angry liberal staffers and even his own wife:

I know how you feel. I understand Hillary’s sense of outrage. It makes me mad, too. Sure, we lost our base in the South; boys voted for Gingrich. But let me tell you something. I know these boys, I grew up with them. Hardworking, poor white boys who feel left out… Think about it, every progressive advance our country has made since the Civil War has been on their backs. They’re the ones asked to pay the price of progress. Now, we are the party of progress, but let me tell you, until we find a way to include these boys in our programs, until we stop making them pay the whole price of liberty for others, we are never going to unite our party, never really going to have change that sticks.

No, no, no, a million times no. If you took every whining white boy in the country, stripped him of every civil, constitutional and human right, forced him to work without pay, to starve and freeze and suffer rape in horrific conditions, and continued that punishment for him and all his descendants for five hundred years, you would not even begin to scratch the surface of what those white boys should have to suffer for what they inflicted on people of color, on women, on immigrants, on gays, on jews and muslims and everybody who is not them.

The fact that they can DARE to whine about their slightly-less-than-perfectly-privileged existence today is proof they have learned nothing and never will.

Or as the Rude Pundit put it to the irredeemable residents of Beattyville, KY:

But for the poor who voted for Trump, you are going to be punched in the face repeatedly by your own fists. And you'll come running to Democrats to help you, and we will, 'cause that's who the hell we are, and then you'll run right back to the racist pricks because that's just who the fuck you are: ungrateful, uneducated bastards who have been brainwashed so thoroughly that you don't realize who is stabbing you and who is trying to get your wounds healed, willing victims asking, "Please, may I have another" as the knife is twisted in your gut.

Fuck the White Working Class

Let's concentrate on uniting the coalition of people who share our values and stop chasing after racist motherfuckers who don't.

Rude Pundit:

My friend Duke from West Virginia said something that had crossed my mind but had shoved aside as bitterness: "Fuck the white working class. Obama gave them health insurance and a chance to get new jobs and they hated him. Fuck them."

Without thinking, I immediately agreed, and as soon as I did, it made total sense. "You're right. Democrats need to abandon the white working class." By "abandon," I mean not trying to desperately court the votes of people who always vote against their best interests and against those who are trying to help them. See, Democrats don't have a working class white people problem. Working class white people have the problem. When you vote against those who are trying to help you for the very people who have harmed you, then you are not dealing with rational thought.

Yeah, that's patronizing and elitist. But nearly half of the voters in a presidential election chose the man who regularly lied to them. So you'll have to forget it if you want me to romanticize and normalize their ignorance.

By the way, that ignorance is a product of years of Republican fuckery at the local level to assure them that they do not get educated. That long game has finally paid off big time.

This is my solution, fantasy though it may be.  Devote even more resources to making sure a coalition of non-whites is united. Devote less to the hurt feelings of angry whites. Let's have this fuckin' fight for what the country is. They won this battle. Let's win the war.

Verdicts A Whiter Shade of Pale

Charlie Pierce:

There is a cruel, stupid irony about living in a country when, on the same day, a bunch of gun-toting rubes who have less understanding of the Constitution than a wombat does of nuclear fusion get acquitted after an armed takeover of federal property in Oregon while, half a country away, peaceful protesters doing nothing but praying on land to which they have a right guaranteed by treaty get rousted, roughed up, and hauled away by a militarized police force acting largely at the behest of a private company. For those of you who are sorry you missed the last Gilded Age, hang in there. You're going to get your wish fairly soon.

The white privilege embedded in the two competing narratives is almost too garish to contemplate, and it is beyond argument.

Kentucky Man Arrested for Brandishing Gun - in Florida?

Wait a minute.  Florida is the most infamous stand-your-ground state in the nation.  In Florida, you can shoot a teenager down in cold blood just for kicks and then walk.

If the kid is black.

And you are white.

Wonder what the racial breakdown was this time.

A Kentucky man made an impression in a popular Florida beach vacation spot and landed in jail.

Kendall Bryce McFarland, 19, of Russell Springs, was driving over the Marler Bridge in Destin, Fla., on Sunday morning when he allegedly started tailgating a silver Chevrolet, according to the Northwest Florida Daily News and WJHG. After he pulled up beside the couple’s car, he exchanged hand gestures before displaying a 9 mm handgun and pulling back its slide.

Sheriff’s deputies later found McFarland, and his apparently loaded gun was under the front seat, the paper reported. McFarland admitted displaying the gun but said he didn’t point it at the couple. Two of his passengers corroborated the couple’s account.

McFarland told deputies that the couple made him mad for driving too slowly, according to the Daily News and WJHG. His charges included aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and carrying a concealed weapon.

 

Post by Northwest Florida Daily News.

 UPDATE:  There is a facebook page for a Kendall Bryce McFarland who appears to be white.  No word on the race of his victims.

When is Terrorism Not Terrorism? When It's White and christian.

Zandar:

But because Cary Lee Ogborn is a 50-year-old white guy who plotted to blow up a building, he gets a few paragraphs in the Houston Chronicle and nobody cares to ask "Where was he radicalized?" or questions about his religion or his international travel or if Houston police should be racially profiling middle-aged white men.  Nobody is on CNN or FOX or MSNBC asking if Christianity is really just a terrorist ideology masquerading as religion and if it should actually receive any First Amendment protections as a result, or whether we should just accepting Christians at all in this country, and maybe deport all the Christians we already have here just to be safe.

Harsh Truth for White Liberals

Just read it.  Then get the fuck out there and work.

Fuck "Unity." Give Us Justice.

Yeah, this afternoon in Shelbyville there was a "unity rally."  The liberal white folks were so glad that it was organized by a black kid who never once referred to structural racism or injustice or a long-overdue promissory note still awaiting payment. His pastor must be so proud.

No, they could go to the "unity rally" with their black friends from the NAACP without fear they might have to confront actual injustice and instead pretend that if we all just prayed and were nice to each other racism would disappear.

I wasn't there for reasons of it would make me puke but I am quite sure that the phrase "All Lives Matter" was spoken with deep reverence more than once and "Black Lives Matter" was not.

As far as I can tell, "All Lives Matter" is a euphemism for "Only White Lives Matter," but PZ Myers has a more nuanced view:

Saying all lives matter is not racist. Trying to deny the reality of racism against minorities by drowning out their specific concerns with platitudes is.

Or, via Erik Loomis at LGM:

Stacey Patton convincingly argues that Hillary Clinton speech about racial unity was wrongheaded.

Beyond that, Clinton’s call for everyone to “do the work” to unite against hatred overlooks the fundamental fact that it’s whites — and only whites — who must work to fix the racist structures in our society.
…

To quote another historical figure, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “The thing wrong with America is white racism. … It’s time for America to have an intensified study on what’s wrong with white folks.” Clinton could have spoken about racial justice.

Instead, like so many others, she focused on the rhetoric of unity. And calling for unity places yet another burden on black people.

Look at what happens in the wake of a shooting by police like the ones last week in Minnesota and Louisiana and Texas: The relatives of the victims are clearly grieving and traumatized, yet they are pushed to extend empathy and forgiveness to those who killed their loved ones, and to the system that profits from these tragedies. Routinely now, we encounter scenes of black folks hugging racists, praying with and dancing with police officers, being asked to do the additional work of teaching white folks how not to be racist and help them find solutions to a racist system we didn’t invent — while we struggle to keep ourselves and our loved ones alive.

Talk of unity, reconciliation and restoring trust is a diversion from the raw, ugly, excruciatingly painful work of addressing the systemic racism that is tearing our nation apart. In their rush to avoid the real work in favor of a kumbaya fantasy comfort zone, they refuse to confront history and the truth about present moment.

Justice, motherfuckers.  Then we'll talk about unity.
 

The Limitless Benefits of Being White

Not to mention the infrastructure and economic foundation built by slaves and slavery.

Erik Loomis at lGB:

White people benefit each and every day from the legacy of slavery and racism. They can move to the suburbs to “give their children the best education” because they have better jobs and histories of redlining, restrictive covenants, job flight, and violence made the suburbs traditionally a white-only space. They benefit from a lack of police violence. They benefit from better jobs and education. They benefit each and every day. The middle class is built on a foundation of slavery and racism. If we are going to accept those benefits, we also need to pay up to even the playing field. Otherwise, we are just continuing to invest and benefit from a racist society.

The Terrible Oppression of White Men

White men are the greatest terrorist threat to the nation, but their privilege still protects them.

 

Erik Loomis asks What’s the Sentence for Being a White Man Found Building a Bomb to Blow Up a Mosque?

90 days.

William Celli, a 55-year-old man from California, will spend 90 days in jail after being caught in possession of an explosive device and threatening to kill Muslims. Celli took a plea deal that places him on probation for a further three years and bans him from operating an active Facebook profile.

Celli was arrested on Dec. 20, 2015 after yelling “I’m going to kill you all” outside the Islamic Society of West Contra Costa County in Richmond, California. Police later found and detonated an explosive device at Celli’s residence after receiving tips that he was constructing homemade explosives.

Celli had taken to social media in the past to express his admiration of Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump. “Donald trumps on again I’m happy leaders okay but this guys a great point man I’ll follow this MAN to the end of the world,” Celli wrote on Facebook in October.

90 days. Did I mention this individual is white?

The Attraction of the '50s

Digby:

The Republicans want to go back to the 50s, and we always assume it's because it was a time when America was the colossus left standing after the war and the country was prosperous. I don't think that's right. They want to go back to the 50s because that's when white people were allowed to dominate people of color and the red scare gave the right wingers license to use the government to intimidate and harass their political enemies with impunity.

Welcome back to the 50s.

American Freedom Still White Only

I want to see that racist white bitch adult who started it in prison. After she has to turn over every dime she has, plus her house and cars, to the black kids she insulted and sicced the cops on. So she gets a public defender for her trial and gets sentenced to life.  Wait, no - Texas still has the death penalty.  Excellent.

Digby:

Every one of the kids I've seen interviewed are just average American teens. These aren't crips and bloods, hardcore street toughs or even slightly threatening people. They are just kids and it's completely obvious. They didn't know they were endangering their lives by simply being teenagers.

We knew that it was terrifying to have a black teenage son in America. Now we know it's just as terrifying to have a black teenage daughter. That white father had obviously taught his daughter to have integrity and stand up for the underdog and she paid a price for that by being handcuffed by the cops. But black parents cannot afford to teach their children to speak up and speak out. Those kids could very well die because they don't know that what they learn in school about rights and free speech and justice doesn't apply to them. Those two handcuffed young boys who were trying to explain themselves to the police officer certainly know better now. They'll never really feel free again, will they?

Being White Does Not Make You A Special Snowflake

Oh, just fucking stop it, whites.  This is pathetic.  And it's destroying the fucking country.

Aurin Squire at TPM:

Recently released records show that Cleveland Police charged 12-year-old Tamir Rice with inducing panic and being an “aggravated menace.” He was shot and killed by an officer in less than two seconds while sitting in the park with a toy gun. This development is juxtaposed with the news that a violent biker gang in Waco, Texas shot up a restaurant parking lot and killed nine people. Police arrested 170 armed gang members. Apparently they weren’t an aggravated menace worthy of immediate death. Tamir Rice was an African American, while the biker gangs were not.

This scenario has repeated itself too many times to be coincidence. An 8-year-old child shot and killed by officers while she slept, a 17-year-old killed in the by police in his own home, a 22-year-old immediately shot and killed in a Wal-Mart, and many more cases of unarmed African Americans immediately getting shot down as and labeled as a menace. While on the other side of reality, the Aurora shooter, Timothy McVeigh, and many other armed mass killers are arrested without a scratch on them.

The most dangerous uprising that's threatening America's stability isn't black protests in places like Ferguson or Baltimore. It's taking place among an aging white majority that is losing its bearing on reality and destroying the gears of government, media and public welfare. At its center is an inexplicable, illogical and dangerous fear that some sociologists are now defining as white fragility.

SNIP

White fragility is a termed coined by Robin DiAngelo, an associate professor of education at Westville State University in Massachusetts. In her 2011 academic pedagogical analysis titled “White Fragility,” DiAngelo goes into a detailed explanation of how white people in North America live in insulated social and media spaces that protect them from any race-based stress. This privileged fragility leaves them unable to tolerate any schism or challenge to a universally accepted belief system. Any shift away from that (like a biracial African-American president) triggers a deep and sustaining panic. Racial segregation, disproportionate representation in the media, and many other factors serve as the columns that support white fragility. Professor DiAngelo said she came up with the term when she was a diversity trainer for the state of Washington.

“The participants were mostly white, working [in] offices that were 98 percent white, living lives of never having to see people of color, and they were incredibly hostile and mean when discussing anything about race,” said DiAngelo, who’s white. “Some guys would pound their fists on the table in fury at being in a room where this discussion was taking place, many sulked silently.”

SNIP

The strangest thing about white fragility politics is that the detrimental policy results are spread out across race and class. Yet, the political results for the conservative movement priming the pump of white fragility and rage is election victories. And why should they change when they can get large sections of an aging white population to consistently vote for policies proven to statistically hurt their economic chances, personal health, their children’s education, and their very safety?

What do you say to a state like Indiana that rolls back Planned Parenthood for political points based in white fragility and then watches as HIV infection rates explode in the community? What can be said of Kansas Governor Sam Brownback and the legislators who knowingly bankrupt the state’s treasury to promote an economic philosophy of tax cuts to the wealthy that result in fewer services, broken infrastructure, suffering in schools, and—in the long run—more deaths? These are not rational decisions. These are fear-based politics that create avoidable disasters in which all suffer. This new wave of segregation fear is surging across the country. In response to the continued white fragility panic of 2008, conservative political movements are set to capitalize on the cycles of manufactured hysteria.

“We are watching the repeal of the 20th century,” Wise said.