"Defeating Trump is more important than all of us"

[Rev. Rye]

I think I can see where Athene is coming from. From what I can understand, one of the biggest threads of American history has been 401 years' worth of white people fucking black people over. For 246 of those years, the bulk were kept in actual, chattel, slavery and even for those few who ended up free, the Sword of Damocles that they could be put back into it was always a distinct possibility. For the other 155, it seems like many were (and still kinda are) kept in states that weren't much better, for the most part, whether it's Jim Crow or our incredibly fucked-up way of fighting crime which leads to us having the highest rate of incarceration on the planet (and, due to a combination of socioeconomic factors [many black people are STILL trapped in the cycle of poverty, which really creates a high risk factor for a life of crime] and persistent racism [racial profiling and rampant police brutality], those prisoners are very disproportionately black.) It's possible to argue that one of the biggest legacies of the Civil Rights era, is that white people went from being blatant in their racism to being more hypocritical about it. And in addition to increasingly blatant racism from the Republicans, a lot of those policies that have made life Hell for black people were passed with Democratic support. Just to name one example, The Crime Bill of 1994 that helped ensure that we'd have about 1% of the population behind bars? Bernie voted for it and Biden wrote the damn thing. And that's really not much of an outlier of an example. And I'm fairly certain I'm just scratching the surface in my attempt at trying to boil over four centuries of institutional racism down to a single paragraph.

If I'm interpreting her post accurately, it's a race-specific version of this Bill Hicks routine:




Feel free to disagree with her about whether or not her radical approach is likely to work in the long (let alone short) run, especially as the right becomes more powerful and goes further to the right (to the extent that even key Civil Rights legislation is now up for grabs). At least I can see where it's coming from.