Let’s add full on Newspeak to the list — The “Squad”, “Racist group of troublemakers... and not very smart.”

[timg]

All of this could well explain the number of "angry white man/woman calls the cops" or "angry white man/woman tells someone to go back to their country" stories.

For a little while I thought maybe it was just a spike in reporting the incidents, but I'm thinking now that people are just getting more emboldened.

[Ted King]

neophyte wrote:
"Not bigotry, but tradition. Not hatred, but respect for history and values."

I'm certain you know this is the central dogma of the white southern people hereabouts who are still fighting the American Civil War. It is dismaying to me that this attitude is spreading rather than dissipating.

Dismaying and disheartening. Really disheartening.

[rjmacs]

timg wrote:
All of this could well explain the number of "angry white man/woman calls the cops" or "angry white man/woman tells someone to go back to their country" stories.

For a little while I thought maybe it was just a spike in reporting the incidents, but I'm thinking now that people are just getting more emboldened.

I think that another part of this phenomenon is that we white folks have been broadly inured to the problematic nature of our turning to police to resolve all social discomfort, unease, or anxiety.

I know this partly because it's taken me a while to come to awareness of this tendency in myself. I'm pretty skeptical of police, but in public situations where disorder appears to be increasing (a rowdy crowd, an escalating argument, someone/something ambiguous - but possibly dangerous!), my mind automatically orients toward the police as a source of stability.

In other words, despite being a progressive guy in a liberal place with activist friends, my cultural training sends my brain right to the police to 'restore order,' without ever considering 1) how that will actually happen, or 2) what 'order' exactly is being restored. It's unpleasant to realize this; it means that unconsciously, part of me wants to eliminate discomfort in my world by policing it out of existence without really asking if anyone else might get harmed in the process. My impulse is to outsource my sense of safety to someone else, instead of owning that responsibility and actually engaging in the situation myself. Another way to say this is: I've been taught to put other people's safety on the line (the police, yes, but empirically also the non-white folks who encounter those police) in order to preserve my comfort.

In practice, I've reached a point where I will probably call the police if circumstances clearly indicate that imminent or additional bodily harm to vulnerable people will result otherwise. Since I'm a cisgendered white guy, that hasn't happened to me anytime recently. I share all of this because I think it's important to share that it's not just latent or overt racists who constitute this problem we all share. Sometimes it's just a well-meaning white person who thinks he's doing everyone a favor by asking a trusted third-party to intervene.

Edited for a formatting error. Oops!

[timg]

rjmacs wrote:
[quote=timg]
All of this could well explain the number of "angry white man/woman calls the cops" or "angry white man/woman tells someone to go back to their country" stories.

For a little while I thought maybe it was just a spike in reporting the incidents, but I'm thinking now that people are just getting more emboldened.

I think that another part of this phenomenon is that we white folks have been broadly inured to the problematic nature of our turning to police to resolve all social discomfort, unease, or anxiety.

I know this partly because it's taken me a while to come to awareness of this tendency in myself. I'm pretty skeptical of police, but in public situations where disorder appears to be increasing (a rowdy crowd, an escalating argument, someone/something ambiguous - but possibly dangerous!), my mind automatically orients toward the police as a source of stability.

In other words, despite being a progressive guy in a liberal place with activist friends, my cultural training sends my brain right to the police to 'restore order,' without ever considering 1) how that will actually happen, or 2) what 'order' exactly is being restored. It's unpleasant to realize this; it means that unconsciously, part of me wants to eliminate discomfort in my world by policing it out of existence without really asking if anyone else might get harmed in the process. My impulse is to outsource my sense of safety to someone else, instead of owning that responsibility and actually engaging in the situation myself. Another way to say this is: I've been taught to put other people's safety on the line (the police, yes, but empirically also the non-white folks who encounter those police) in order to preserve my comfort.

In practice, I've reached a point where I will probably call the police if circumstances clearly indicate that imminent or additional bodily harm to vulnerable people will result otherwise. Since I'm a cisgendered white guy, that hasn't happened to me anytime recently. I share all of this because I think it's important to share that it's not just latent or overt racists who constitute this problem we all share. Sometimes it's just a well-meaning white person who thinks he's doing everyone a favor by asking a trusted third-party to intervene.

Edited for a formatting error. Oops!
I think the problem is not with calling the police when the situation could possibly become dangerous, but really in the perception of danger. It seems many people are perceiving "imminent danger" when there is none and either taking things into their own hands (ala George Zimmerman all those years ago) or calling the police with their perceived threat, which to most thrid party observers would not constitute a threat.

Somehow, percentage of the "white american" population, large enough to be noticed, has gone back to equating race with danger.

[bfd]

It's always been about fear of one kind or another…Note the doll she's carrying

And this fine example was photographed in Pittsburgh, PA…

1949 - original



updated for 2019-

[DeusxMac]

bfd wrote:
It's always been about fear of one kind or another…Note the doll she's carrying

And this fine example was photographed in Pittsburgh, PA…

1949 - original

updated for 2019-

Telling at another level; note the doll in the little blond white girl's hand.

[Janit]

Ted King wrote:
[quote=rjmacs]
I think they're not just people who "don't see themselves as racist" - they are people who are watching national leaders refer to cultural chauvinism as a model to be emulated. They are seeing their prejudices reframed as a kind of American idealism - not racism, but Americanism. Not bigotry, but tradition. Not hatred, but respect for history and values. This kind of racism emphasizes how everything that is going wrong is connected to the erosion or corruption of white values and institutions.

When antiracists contest this ideology, especially when they do so by attacking the individuals and their personalities, they are just lumped into the great mass of people who want to destroy America, whether through decay and neglect or active sabotage. There's no space for debate. There's no interest in compromise, or accommodation, or half-measures. The tactics are hard, the attitude is bullying, and the rhetoric is brutal. It frightens me, because it all drives group psychological phenomena that attach one's sense of personal safety to the subjugation of external threats, rather than to actual risk.

Very well said. All of what you said.
Yes. And downright terrifying.

[Janit]

DeusxMac wrote:
[quote=bfd]
It's always been about fear of one kind or another…Note the doll she's carrying

And this fine example was photographed in Pittsburgh, PA…

1949 - original

updated for 2019-

Telling at another level; note the doll in the little blond white girl's hand.
Interesting that the threat in 1949 was perceived as light-skinned, and that blackness was dismissed as fully domesticated in the form of a doll.

Took me a moment to perceive the change for 2019, which makes me think perhaps it was just a bit too subtle. Maybe the doll should be changed too? What kind of doll would have the same meaning today that this type of doll had in 1949?

[bfd]

Janit wrote:
[quote=DeusxMac]
[quote=bfd]
It's always been about fear of one kind or another…Note the doll she's carrying

And this fine example was photographed in Pittsburgh, PA…

1949 - original

updated for 2019-

Telling at another level; note the doll in the little blond white girl's hand.
Interesting that the threat in 1949 was perceived as light-skinned, and that blackness was dismissed as fully domesticated in the form of a doll.

Took me a moment to perceive the change for 2019, which makes me think perhaps it was just a bit too subtle. Maybe the doll should be changed too? What kind of doll would have the same meaning today that this type of doll had in 1949?
Something a little Stormyesque comes to mind … will have to work on that in the next update.