This week’s news juxtaposed two interesting stories that cast our structural racism in the spotlight and in stark relief contrasting the woes of being a white openly racist man in America with being an average Black person living in white culture. Let’s present the emotional turmoil news first and then move on to the effect of racism on Black folks.
Pity the White Racist
Over at Wonkette, the last news website, we get a story about the pro-Confederacy, and by pro-Confederacy we mean pro-slavery and pro-insurrection and anti-American individual freedoms, Manatee Middle School social studies teacher Jonathan Papanikolaou.
While Ye Olde Blogge was celebrating Autism Awesomeness month, the good white supremacists over yonder in America’s dangling bits were proving themselves worthy of all of the Florida jokes by celebrating Confederate History Month, by which they mean remembering all of the sacrifices of the brave men and women so were they could continue owning other real live Americans as chattel property.
Racism on Open Display
Apparently, Mr. Papanikolaou is a lot like Ye Olde Blogge and wanted to share his appreciation of his special month with not only his own students, but the whole dern school, so he made his very own special video using his very own special IT skills. In the video, this teacher says the following real live words right out loud using, one presumes, his very own mouth (From ABC-7; emphasis, mine):
- “Every year our state celebrates and memorializes that valiant, brave fight and the countless sacrifices by our men and women during that known [sic] as the Civil War, but may be more correctly titled the War To Prevent Southern Independence.“
- “[The Civil War was fought because of] slaves and property rights, over taxation and a variety of violations of state’s right and sovereignty.”
Of course some lib parents lied and said that the honest teaching on the Civil War caused their little snowflakes discomfort, which is a violation of Florida state law! So, the school district was forced to “investigate” wasting tax payer money and explain to the kiddos that Gawd condoned the owning of slaves as part of the Sermon on the Mount and that’s why it was written into the Constitution that Moses brought down with him from Mt. Sinai and handed to George Washington, allegedly.
Racism Institutionalized in the State of Florida
Since Florida not only celebrates Confederate History Month but also has state holidays for Robert E. Lee’s birthday, Jefferson Davis’ birthday, and Confederate Memorial Day and mandates that no teaching should cause any child of white nationalist parents discomfort, they did a thorough investigation supervised by Ron DerSatan personally (allegedly) and found no wrong doing on the teachers part, everything was good there, nothing to see here, move along citizen.
According to Mr. Papanikolaou’s HR complaint against the school district, his good white supremacist name would not have been besmirched, causing students, parents, peers, and community members to avoid him and ask him embarrassing questions if the district had done as Gawd, Jefferson Davis, and Ron DisneySanctions had instructed and praised his good intentions and judgment instead of investigating how an unauthorized off curriculum video had made it into the morning announcements. He claims that the investigation caused him these harms:
- “Created a hostile work environment”
- “Disrupted students mental psyche” and “receptiveness attitude to learn [sic]”
- Students and staff ask him why he’s a racist and supports slavery.
- He has suffered “grief and awkwardness in the classroom and school exchanges.”
The Consequences of Being a Racist Asshole
According to parents of students at the school, students don’t want to be in his class and aren’t participating in his classroom activities.
Mr. Papanikolaou is decrying the bitter experience of suffering consequences for expressing beliefs that run counter to America’s core principles. He is shocked, shocked, I tell you, that he is being accused — j’accuse! — of being pro-slavery and a racist all because he himself confessed his beliefs that the South shoulda won the Civil War and continue owning real live made-in-the-image-of-God human beings before his school, the country, God, and everybody. What has America become?
This disgusting episode in modern American current events brought to you by White Identity Politics. White Grievance, and White Privilege.
The Grief of Black America
Now, let’s contrast those fat Kyle Rittenhouse crocodile tears with the scientific fact of early death by Black folks due to the stress and strain of living everyday in the structural racism of the United States of Freedom for White Folks, but Fuck Everybody Else.
A study recently published inJAMA and reported on on NBCNews demonstrated that the perennially higher mortality rate for American Blacks has caused about 1.63 million more deaths of real live Americans who happen to be Black and only make up ten percent of the population than whites over the past twenty years. But, systemic racism ain’t real; Black folk jus’ wanna die young. They love dying of preventable causes! They refuse healthcare and shoot each other and attack the po-po when they come by. That ain’t racism. If they’ jus’ be white, they wouldn’t be having these problems, see?
Thanks for that insight, Uncle Inguus.
Disproportionate Death
That’s the pertinent part, isn’t it? According to HHS, Black people make up about 12.1% of the 331.9 million Americans. That’s about 40 million people who are Black in America. About 75.8% of Americans are non-Hispanic White, or 251 million people.
According to this chart from the CDC in their trendy deaths of 2020 report, life expectancy for both men and women pivoted sharply to the right in 2020 like some kind of synchronized dance routine. That’s because of #COVID19 — thanks, Trump! That pivot erased twenty years of progress in life expectancy. Side note: see the sharp decline in 1918? That’s the 1918 flu. That’s how bad that was.
So in twenty years 40 million people suffered 1.63 million more deaths than 251 million people did. That statistic is what you call disproportionate. It’s worse than that, though.
Black people tend to die young, so if you look at years of life lost, it amounts to 80 million more years of Black lives lost than white lives. It’s almost as if Black lives didn’t matter, hunh?
As Stalin said, a million dead is a statistic, one dead is a tragedy. In today’s America, it is a million people dead of #COVID19 or gun violence is, meh, a statistic. One white person dead is a tragedy that must be prevented at all costs. A million Black people dead is, meh. And, one Black person dead is a criminal who if they didn’t deserve it then, probably deserved it for something else, amirite?
Institutionalized Racist Health Outcomes
We can tell that this is institutionalized racism because, just like in counties where there were higher percentages of slaves during the Civil War, there are higher scores on the Harvard Implicit Bias test, the neighborhoods that were redlined in the 1930’s because they were too “high risk” for mortgages are just as poor and sick today as they were then. This finding was also true during the #COVID19 pandemic.
Perhaps, the worst aspect of the unequal and unjust distribution of health care and life in our society is that it unfairly burdens the Black community with grief. Everybody in the Black community knows somebody who has died young.
I know from personal experience that grief is a lifelong companion. You spend the rest of your life remembering the people who were important to you that you lost. It keeps coming back in big ways and small. It never truly goes away.
Adding the stress of grief to the Black community just raises the toll of what it costs to be Black in America. The stress of daily discrimination and micro-aggressions and just uncertainty adds up like so much compounding interest. It takes its toll.
The doubt about why things happen to you when you are a minority in a society eats away at your soul. When death is involved, it gnaws from the inside out. The article gives an example from Khaliah Johnson, chief of pediatric palliative care at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. Her parents lost two sons, one just after birth and one as a toddler. They were plagued with doubt. Had they been white, would they have gotten different care? Would those boys be alive today?
It’s one thing to wonder if the store clerk who was rude to you was rude because you’re Black or because they’re a jerk, but it’s quite another to wonder if racism murdered your children. It changes how you relate to yourself, other people in your life, and to your country.
The deep profound pain of grief that our Black community carries is one more reason to carry on with Black Lives Matter and to, as a white person, work to end racism. If you ever needed motivation to start digging around in your own secret garden and start pulling the weeds of racism from your soul, the early death and incumbent grief that we inflict on our Black brothers and sisters should do the trick, don’t you think?
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Image Attribution
“Crocodile Tears” by Steve Corey is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.
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Categories: Racism
The Psy of Life 
Funny how the least evolved of the species think of themselves so.
It’s pretty thoroughly documented: the whites’ got no reason. Generally speaking they are the stupidest, the least informed; that white skin isn’t gonna’ do a teaspoon’s worth to protect them from the coming atmosphere; and they listen to little voices in their heads.
The whites don’t have what it takes to survive, and they know it. It’s why they’re trashing the place on the way out.
Line them up, eliminate them …
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I will cop to that. They were saying at the last meeting that we don’t have enough sunscreen to last us two years after everything collapses, so it’s better to go out in a blaze of glory and taking everybody else with us…
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There’s a reason why desert cultures tend to cover up head-to-toe regardless the heat. It is unfortunate at best that so much of what began as practicalities are so lost in mumbo-jumbo that we’ve forgot …
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We have forgotten a lot… I hope we can relearn it before it all goes away, but I doubt it. I’m going through one of my pessimistic phases now.
Huzzah!
Jack
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Reblogged this on cabbagesandkings524 and commented:
Calico Jack – two stories – a sick belief – race and health
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Amazing, isn’t it when a real live slavery loving, hard core racist white supremacist follower of the blonde, blue eyed, lily white Jesus just opens up their mouth and regurgitates the whole truth in it’s putrid completeness and people get their panties in a bunch. Dang, those woke-ist libs are such snowflakes, and the worst part is so many of them are white. And then, the poor guy gets pretend investigated when the investigators should have just given him a medal or, at least a standing ovation. And the, he finds that a lot of people don’t like him anymore. Such a horrible trauma.
OK, enough snark and sarcasm (but it was fun).
As for the shortened lives of Black people, the process has a name, “Weathering”. Just as mountains get worn down to hills, the day in and day out, week in and week out, month in and month out, year in and year out stress of just living in systemic racism wears folks down, little by little, but inexorably. And add in living in a cancer alley inside a food desert on top of a toxic waste dump. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/03/28/1166404485/weathering-arline-geronimus-poverty-racism-stress-health
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Thank you for yet another quality referral. I’m glad to learn about weathering — the appropriate analogy and term for the phenomena. I will get her book and report on it, I hope. The toll of racism is just staggering. When you see it in its totality, some part of it will resonate with everyone. Hopefully, that will help white people, in general, find the wherewithal to end systemic racism.
Snark and sarcasm can be addictive. It’s that dopamine hit in the liking and wanting system. My work here is done.
Huzzah!
Jack
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The understanding of the toll of systemic racism that would make the most difference with white people is how it has damaged them rather than advantaged them. It is hard to crack the mindset of the zero sum game when people have been sold the mythology that they have to sacrifice their own prosperity and health if it hurts POC first and worst. The cutting edge of breaking that con job has been and still is organized labor, unions, class consciousness, not political parties or the media and journalism.
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I think you’re right about the class consciousness being the key to undermining MAGA’s hold on MAGA. Someone in the Democratic Party and the Biden administration must be thinking the same thing with their emphasis on jobs and labor unions. Bernie Sanders always promoted a more economic populist message rather than racial politics. It hurt him in building the multi-racial coalition he would need to win, but it might be the message in the long run that breaks the Republican stranglehold on white identity politics.
Jack
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I can’t think of anything else that would. It’s pretty apparent that this is understood on the other side. The Wilmington Insurrection of 1898 was triggered by a cross racial alliance of workers and the black business community that terrified the white power structure. And a key part of the long standing GOP coalition is between the white supremacists and anti-union business interests.
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William Barber is carrying on the work of MLK and others who were trying to find such an alliance in his Poor People’s Campaign. When Republicans show that they are serious about destroying the Social Security-Medicare safety net and their anti-immigrant policies actually start hurting the economy by leaving food rotting in the fields and meat and poultry plants understaffed and whatever other unsavory jobs immigrants do for us, then we may see a stronger economic alliance.
Jack
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It is important to remember that the political economic coalition of the Democrat Party and Organized Labor was really created out of the New Deal in response to the Great Depression which was, if not caused, certainly exacerbated by Republican fantasies about the economic system.
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Yeah, but it also drove a wedge between New Deal Democrats and Blacks, or at least ensured that their wouldn’t be any crossover since to get it passed, FDR had to make sure it didn’t help Blacks.
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Yes, the Blacks had to wait for LBJ to get the civil rights bills passed and the GOP to scoop up the Southern racists.
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It is “funny” how that division has switched labels, but never healed. And, they’ve never tried to hide it. I was reading the other day that one of the Southern Democrats wouldn’t vote for the Civil Rights bills because they were an open attack on the “Southern way of life.”
Jack
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Ah, “The Southern Way Of Life”, isn’t that what the Civil War was about? And the 3/5ths compromise? And all those statues of Southern “heroes”? No, they never tried to hie it, and they’re still not, but now, a lot of the time they call is something else, like “Family Values”, or “The Right To Bear Arms”. In that vein, there is this: https://www.salon.com/2023/05/25/violence-is-the-new-grift/
And, we were talking about the power of shocking images, and we are not alone in that speculation: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/5/21/2170581/-Show-America-the-photographs-of-kids-decapitated-in-school-massacres
What scares me about that proposal is not how traumatizing it would be, but that it might not work.
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Howdy Bob!
Showing MAGA photos of kids shot in massacres would likely increase violence because of vigilante justice and knowing better than the experts. The trauma and emotion it would unleash would drive people to desperation. It would be ungodly.
It’s funny how all of the anti-abortion, pro-guns, godly things, and anti-different people issues all correlate so strongly with racism. I guess that is just some funny coincidence.
Huzzah!
Jack
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As the common saying in 12 Step programs goes; Never underestimate the power of denial. Given MAGA’s ability to see these horrible events as hoaxes with “Crisis Actors”, false flag operations, and simply fake news, and isolated acts of the mentally ill, it is easy to picture them deciding to hunt down the imagined bad guys, identified out of their list of favorite boogeymen. Another large portion of the population would, if presented with such images too many times (probably less than 10), just tune it out, change the channel, or worse, go numb to it. For some twisted souls, it would be snuff porn. And those woke enough to understand the problem don’t need to be shown.
Yep, it’s gotta be just a coincidence. Nothing systemic to see there at all.
Then, there’s this report from the BBC about the exoneration of some people hanged as witches long ago. One lawmaker voted against the bill because: The senator who voted against the move, Rob Sampson, said that he believed it was wrong to “dictate what was right or wrong about periods in the past that we have no knowledge of”.
“I don’t want to see bills that rightfully or wrongfully attempt to paint America as a bad place with a bad history,” he was quoted as saying by the Associated Press.
I bet he’s a Republican.
“https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65724066
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Howdy Bob!
Yep, he’s a Republican. That is the quote, ain’t it? “…to paint America as a bad place with a bad history.” Says it all: denial, white nationalism, nostalgia for a past that wasn’t.
If we put pictures of the corpses shot by AR-15s on every AR-15 sold like we do on cigarette packages, it would have about the same effect. People who smoke just ignore them or grunt and mumble about quitting, and people who don’t smoke just look away. It would just make it “normal” to see such horrific imagery.
What we really need are national leaders who are willing to stand up and be counted. We just don’t have enough of them. And, it isn’t a litmus test for office, but it should be.
Huzzah!
Jack
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I think that humans’ ability to get used to something like shocking images is well described by that quote from Stalin about one death being a tragedy and a million deaths being a statistic.
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Life must continue on. What can you do for a million? One, maybe, right?
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It often comes down to that. But then, don’t real change and real healing happen one at a time? And the masses only move when the ones add up to critical mass.
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Howdy Bob!
If we accept that people don’t change unless they are in enough pain to change, then it is remarkable that the gun lobby, the Republicans, and 2nd Amendment enthusiasts have been able to blunt the pain of the more than daily mass shootings and 40,000 annual gun deaths we endure. Roe happened because of the accumulating pain of back alley abortions. Prohibition was overturned because of the accumulated pain of being denied access to quality alcohol as we’ve become accustomed. These big changes happen when we have had enough of the pain of the status quo when the change to alleviate that pain is relatively simple.
We’ll see if the Republican dystopia puts us in enough pain to vote en mass against them.
Huzzah!
Jack
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One difference in the guns issue is the use by the pro-gun forces of the pain and fear caused by the problem to promote more guns in more hands as the solution. It’s the, “If you don’t feel safe, buy a gun.” message.
Then, there’s the question of how it came to be that the Confederate Battle Flag became a more general symbol for the far Right, along with many associated attitudes among such as the MAGAs, the Southernification of the GOP. NPR supplies consideration of part of the answer in this piece on the other great migration. https://www.npr.org/2023/05/29/1178699045/how-the-migration-of-southern-whites-in-the-20th-century-shaped-americas-landsca
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Howdy Bob!
That’s funny. I’m working on a blog post right now on this very topic. I found a study — probably the same one that triggered this story — on the correlation of slavery and gun ownership, not only in the counties where slavery was prevalent in the 1860’s but also in the counties that white people from those counties migrated to.
Again, it is that geographically linked culture and how much it influences our behaviors. It is also the stubbornness of our racist compatriots in giving up their racism. People move to the racist counties in the south and become more racist. The racists move out of their counties in the south and make the counties they move to more racist. They don’t become less racist adopting the culture of where they move.
And, all the while the fascists and oligarchs among us find common ground with the racists to keep the rest of us off balance enough while they destroy our democracy and milk us for every last farthing before climate change kills us all.
Huzzah!
Jack
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It is interesting that local, time limited disasters like tornadoes and earthquakes, tend to bring our more of our better angels than our bad ones, but prolonged stress from things like climate change and COVID tend to have the opposite effect. Populations under prolonged stress tend to hunker down and take refuge in attitudes about “others” that they can suppress when times are good.
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Howdy Bob!
Natural disasters and even a few people-made ones like fires and building collapses are very visible and the damage has a cause. Like you said, they are time limited. Very specific. All of those things help us manage our stress over them, even though they are very stressful.
That prolonged exposure to stress creates the conditions for mass psychosis in which thinking gets to be difficult and fear and anger become pervasive, especially when manipulated by bad actors. Those attitudes about “others” help us feel more in control of a situation that is out of control. It’s where leadership is really necessary so we don’t end up hurting people.
Huzzah!
Jack
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Exactly
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