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African American

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sheshe2

(88,106 posts)
Tue Apr 25, 2017, 05:02 PM Apr 2017

Welcome to the Terrordome: Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions ramp up their crusade against black and br [View all]

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised to “take care of our African-American people.” Trump also asked black Americans, “What the hell they [had] to lose” by voting for him.

Given his naked embrace of racism and bigotry, there was an undercurrent of menace and malice in Trump’s first statement all along. And the answer to the second question was always, “a hell of a lot.” Trump’s presidency is still in its infancy. But in that short amount of time he has repeatedly demonstrated his hostility toward African-Americans, Latinos, First Nations people and Muslims. Their sense of safety, security, happiness, health and freedom are of no concern to him.


https://www.thenation.com/article/report-occupied-territory/

Writing for The Nation in 1966, James Baldwin made the following observations about police and the color line in America:

Now, what I have said about Harlem is true of Chicago, Detroit, Washington, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and San Francisco — is true of every Northern city with a large Negro population. And the police are simply the hired enemies of this population. They are present to keep the Negro in his place and to protect white business interests, and they have no other function. They are, moreover — even in a country which makes the very grave error of equating ignorance with simplicity — quite stunningly ignorant; and, since they know that they are hated, they are always afraid. One cannot possibly arrive at a more surefire formula for cruelty.

This is why those pious calls to “respect the law,” always to be heard from prominent citizens each time the ghetto explodes, are so obscene. The law is meant to be my servant and not my master, still less my torturer and my murderer. To respect the law, in the context in which the American Negro finds himself, is simply to surrender his self-respect.

I have witnessed and endured the brutality of the police many more times than once — but, of course, I cannot prove it. I cannot prove it because the Police Department investigates itself, quite as though it were answerable only to itself. But it cannot be allowed to be answerable only to itself. It must be made to answer to the community which pays it, and which it is legally sworn to protect, and if American Negroes are not a part of the American community, then all of the American professions are a fraud.

This arrogant autonomy, which is guaranteed the police, not only in New York, by the most powerful forces in American life — otherwise, they would not dare to claim it, would indeed be unable to claim it — creates a situation which is as close to anarchy as it already, visibly, is close to martial law.



Social scientists and pollsters have determined that white racism propelled Donald Trump to the White House. This dynamic has been politely described as a “racist backlash” against Obama specifically and against African-Americans and nonwhites, more generally. A more direct way of describing the outcome of the 2016 presidential election is that millions of white voters wanted to put “uppity” and “arrogant” black people “back in their place” for committing the political equivalent of the Jim Crow-era crime known as “reckless eyeballing” by supporting Obama. It would seem that the psychological wages of whiteness are so intoxicating that they can even motivate many millions of white Republicans and independents to support a neofascist, racist, misogynist and incompetent boor if they believe such a decision will hurt people of color and Muslims.

For every action there is a reaction. In the courts, the streets and at the ballot box, black and brown folks and their allies will push back. Attorney General Jeff Sessions and President Donald Trump, as well as their voters and supporters in Trumplandia, will learn the limits of their power.

More: http://www.chaunceydevega.com/2017/04/welcome-to-terrordome-donald-trump-and.html

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There is so much in Devega's post, I did not know where to start. Black and brown you are the Democratic base, as are poc, women, lgbt . It is past time for us to support you. When we support you, it supports us all.

We must be allies. Together.
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