Tag Archives: civil rights

Chris Hedges: Cancel Culture, Where Liberalism Goes to Die

Posted on February 16, 2021 | Leave a comment

A liberal excoriates fellow liberals for cancel culture. From Chris Hedges at consortiumnews.com:

Elites and their courtiers who trumpet their moral superiority by damning and silencing those who do not linguistically conform to politically correct speech are the new Jacobins.

(Original art by Mr. Fish)

The Rev. Will Campbell was forced out of his position as director of religious life at the University of Mississippi in 1956 because of his calls for integration.  He escorted Black children through a hostile mob in 1957 to integrate Little Rock’s Central High School.  He was the only white person that was invited to be part of the group that founded Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.  He helped integrate Nashville’s lunch counters and organize the Freedom Rides.  

But Campbell was also, despite a slew of death threats he received from white segregationists, an unofficial chaplain to the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.  He denounced and publicly fought the Klan’s racism, acts of terror and violence and marched with Black civil rights protestors in his native Mississippi, but he steadfastly refused to “cancel” white racists out of his life.  He refused to demonize them as less than human.  He insisted that this form of racism, while evil, was not as insidious as a capitalist system that perpetuated the economic misery and instability that pushed whites into the ranks of violent, racist organizations.  

“During the civil rights movement, when we were developing strategies, someone usually said, ‘Call Will Campbell. Check with Will,’” Rep. John Lewis wrote in the introduction to the new edition of Campbell’s memoir Brother to a Dragonfly, one of the most important books I read as a seminarian. “Will knew that the tragedy of Southern history had fallen on our opponents as well as our allies … on George Wallace and Bull Connor as well as Rosa Parks and Fred Shuttlesworth.  He saw that it had created the Ku Klux Klan as well as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. That insight led Will to see racial healing and equity, pursued through courage, love, and faith as the path to spiritual liberation for all.”

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Government, Media, Politics, Propaganda

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We Need a Martin Luther King Day of Truth, by Edward Curtin

Posted on January 22, 2019 | Leave a comment

We need the truth about Dr. King’s assassination, for a start. From Edward Curtin at off-guardian.org:

Atlanta, Georgia, USA — Martin Luther King Jr. listens at a meeting of the SCLC, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, at a restaurant in Atlanta. The SCLC is a civil rights organization formed by Martin Luther King after the success of the Montgomery bus boycott. — Image by © Flip Schulke/CORBIS

As Martin Luther King’s birthday is celebrated with a national holiday, his death day disappears down the memory hole. Across the country – in response to the King Holiday and Service Act passed by Congress and signed by Bill Clinton in 1994 – people will be encouraged to make the day one of service. Such service does not include King’s commitment to protest a decadent system of racial and economic injustice or non-violently resist the U.S. warfare state that he called “the greatest purveyor of violence on earth.”

Government sponsored service is cultural neo-liberalism at its finest, the promotion of individualism at the expense of a mass movement for radical institutional change.

“Nothing in all the world is more dangerous,” warned Dr. King, “than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”

How true those words. For the government that honors Dr. King with a national holiday killed him. This is the suppressed truth behind the highly promoted day of service. It is what you are not supposed to know. It is what Thomas Merton, as quoted by James W. Douglass, called The Unspeakable:

It is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said; the void that gets into the language of public and officials declarations at the very moment when they are pronounced, and makes them ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss. It is the void out of which Eichmann drew the punctilious exactitude of his service.”

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Government, Horseshit, Insurrection, Intelligence, Media, Politics, race relations

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Gun Control in America Has Always Been About Disarming Black People, by Carey Wedler

Posted on March 30, 2018 | 2 comments

Guns can even the odds between the weak and the strong. It’s no surprise that gun control has often been targeted at the most historically oppressed group in America—blacks. From Carey Wedler at theantimedia.org:

Americans calling for gun control in 2018 often argue that a cursory glance at history proves there was never meant to be an unrestrained right to own firearms — that there were always meant to be restrictions on gun ownership. In at least one respect, they are correct: United States history shows there has always been an element of racism underpinning gun control. From the colonial era to the post-civil war era to the 1960s, laws have sought to disempower African Americans by limiting their ability to protect themselves.

Adam Winkler, a UCLA law professor who has written extensively on the history of gun control in America, has explained the long legacy of gun control as it relates to this country’s long legacy of racism (though not all gun control measures were racist in measure, the institutional racism inherent in many policies is indisputable).

“In the colonies before the Revolution and in the states right after, racially discriminatory gun laws were commonplace,” he wrote in an article published by the New Republic in 2013.

“Fearing revolts, lawmakers enacted statutes barring slaves from possessing firearms or other weapons. That ban was often applied equally to free blacks, who otherwise enjoyed most rights, lest they join in an uprising against the slave system. Where blacks were allowed to possess arms, as in Virginia in the early 1800s, they first had to obtain permission from local officials.”

After the civil war, Southern states passed the Black Codes, which banned black Americans from owning guns. Acknowledging that gun control laws are not always effective, Winkler explained:

“You can draw up any law you like, but people don’t necessarily comply. To enforce these laws, racists began to form posses that would go out at night in large groups, generally wearing disguises, and terrorize black homes, seizing every gun they could find. These groups took different names depending on locale: the Black Cavalry in Alabama, the Knights of the White Camellia in Louisiana, the Knights of the Rising Sun in Texas. In time, they all came to be known by the moniker of one such posse begun in Pulaski, Tennessee after the war: the Ku Klux Klan.”

To continue reading: Gun Control in America Has Always Been About Disarming Black People

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Racism-O-Rama, by James Howard Kunstler

Posted on January 15, 2018 | Leave a comment

De jure. American blacks are certainly better off than they were in the 1963 when Dr. Martin Luther King led the march on Washington. The Jim Crow regime in the south is gone, and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts are law. However, de facto, are blacks any better off? From James Howard Kunstler at kunstler.com:

The New York Times worked itself into a fugue state this morning of the MLK holiday with a front-page orgy of reproving headlines: “[Charles] Blow: Trump is a Racist, Period;” “Donald Trump’s Racism, the Definitive List;” “’I’m Not a Racist,’ Trump says, as DACA Hopes Dim;” “In Trump Remarks, Black Churches See a Nation Backsliding.”

I suspect these are not so much the cries of a people yearning for redress of unfair laws — as was the case in 1963 when Martin Luther King led the now-hallowed march on Washington against the Jim Crow regime in Dixieland — but the hue and cry of a political machine desperate for attention that has otherwise run out of principles and purposes.

Donald Trump is certainly a vulgar fellow of questionable intelligence, and the country might be better off with someone else in the White House, but where exactly would that leave black America? We’re not going to re-run the civil rights campaign of the 1960s, which culminated in explicit federal laws that abolished the southern state’s Jim Crow laws.

What is government supposed to do now to improve the lives of black America? There is, for instance, the quandary of public assistance — welfare of various forms, transfer payments, SNAP cards, housing subsidies. I don’t believe these policies were concocted deliberately to keep people-of-color down, but they’ve been hugely destructive to family formation because of the “man-in-the-house” rule that strongly promotes single-parent households headed by mothers. And these policies have surely shaped a dysfunctional ghetto culture in many other ways. I don’t hear any calls from the black caucuses, or from their professional colleagues in the lobbying industry, or from the black churches, to change that rule. There is no movement at all to get rid of public assistance per se.

We’ve had several generations who, in one way another, have enjoyed the benefits of “affirmative action,” and American black people are still under-represented in the professions, except in government jobs. Affirmative action has been challenged in the courts, but it finds new ways to assert itself, especially in academia. Black public intellectuals — Sowell, McWhorter, Steele, et al — have argued that affirmative action stigmatizes all of black America, and it’s worth considering if that is true. They are in a tiny minority of black non-Leftists who even dare to raise the question.

Who is actually responsible for the murder rate among black men in cities like Chicago, Baltimore, and Milwaukee? Is “structural racism” behind the decision to pull the trigger? Are gang-bangers depraved on account of they’re deprived, as the old lyric from West Side Story goes?

To continue reading: Racism-O-Rama

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He Said That? 10/31/14

Posted on October 31, 2014 | 2 comments

From Charlie Rangel, Representative from New York, at a campaign rally for New York Governor Andrew Cuomo:

“We have to win. We have to be able to send a national message with Andrew Cuomo. And the thing is: Everything we believe in — everything we believe in — they [Republicans] hate. They don’t disagree — they hate! They think if you didn’t come from Europe 30 years ago, you didn’t even make it. Some of them believe that slavery isn’t over and they and think they won the Civil War!” Rangel shouted.

http://www.businessinsider.com/charlie-rangel-some-republicans-believe-that-slavery-isnt-over-2014-10

Mr. Rangel may want to check the history books. It was a Republican Commander-in-Chief, Abraham Lincoln, who led the North to victory in the Civil War, so in that sense the Republicans did win the Civil War. It is a fairly well-known fact that Lincoln was against slavery and was in fact instrumental in ending it. While one faction of the Democratic Party opposed slavery in the 1860 election, a southern faction supported it. If Rangel were to dig further, he would find that the Republicans’ record on civil rights since the Civil War, while not without blemishes, is exemplary compared to the Democrats’, whose “Solid South” block stymied Civil Rights legislation and integration efforts for decades.

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Posted in Government, History, Law

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