Tom Paine 1949
Diamond Member
- Mar 15, 2020
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We have all seen media coverage of criminal looting and of statues being torn down, and maybe the much larger, peaceful, but less photogenic marches of hundreds of thousands in large cities. People mostly see and pay attention to what confirms their biases.
Yet looting, arson and violence today are nothing like on the scale of the 1960s, when Civil Rights leaders and liberal politicians were assassinated, and anger boiled over. Party partisanship and conspiracy thinking, however, certainly seem higher than ever. While the screamers are more emboldened today, I believe race relations in general have improved.
I watched recently some videos about black and white and integrated gun clubs, and how many organized to act if needed ... without overt racism and without lunatics starting trouble. In rural areas where gun ownership is most prevalent, where voters are much more conservative and “white,” and in areas where police, demonstrators and guns sometimes mixed on the streets, we seem to have gotten through this period — thank heaven — without any serious disasters.
The number of white demonstrators peacefully joining protests against racism and police violence, the increasing recognition among the young that racism is indeed a problem in American society — not just among police, whose jobs are difficult in the best of times — these are encouraging to me. I excerpt below from an article about largely white “Black Lives Matter” demonstrations in small communities in America:
On TV and on social media, the protest movement sweeping the country often looks grim and explosive, a montage of rubber bullets and teargas, activists facing off with police, low-flying military helicopters, broken store windows. When protests first started popping up in small towns across the country, some residents could only imagine they were the work of interlopers. Rumors whipped through dozens of rural and suburban communities about busloads of anti-fascist activists on their way to wreak havoc....
For people living in small towns, the dissonance between the dark fantasy of antifa marauders and the actual nature of local protests—many of which have included kids, dogs, and elderly people—has been hard to miss.... [Soon] armed counter-demonstrators largely disappeared. “They have been made to look kind of silly. You should have seen how they showed up. It was like a war—these people showed up for an enemy that was never there,” said [one black musician in almost all white Klamath Falls, Oregon]. Meanwhile, people continued to gather in town for Black Lives Matter rallies during the first two weeks of June. “I think it’s very important because it shows people, you know, a different side of things? It’s happening in these smaller towns with little to no black population. That shows people this is a human thing, and that there’s a lot of us out there who care about each other and want to stand up for each other. And you know, change can happen from anywhere”....
Some protests offered at least a temporary reclamation of public space in communities long defined by segregation and legacies of brutal racism—places like Vidor, Texas, a former Ku Klux Klan haven that Texas Monthly described as the state’s “most hate-filled town” during a struggle over court-ordered desegregation of public housing in the early 1990s....
“I’ve never seen so many white people give a darn about black people,” said Mildred Henderson, a 78-year-old woman and veteran activist who was interviewed by The Southern Illinoisan at a June 4 rally in Anna, Ill. In 1909, mobs drove black residents out of Anna after a lynching in a nearby town; for decades, Anna was known as a sundown town, where black people were not welcome after dark. Although Anna was originally named for a woman, the town’s racist history has given it an unofficial acronym: “Ain’t No [N-words] Allowed.” Kevin Jackson, who also attended the protest in Anna, told the Belleville News-Democrat that it was the first time he’d ever walked down the town’s Main Street... “I probably wouldn’t do it again without my white brothers and sisters,” Jackson said.
Black Lives Matter Protests Are Everywhere, Even in the Unlikeliest Places
Yet looting, arson and violence today are nothing like on the scale of the 1960s, when Civil Rights leaders and liberal politicians were assassinated, and anger boiled over. Party partisanship and conspiracy thinking, however, certainly seem higher than ever. While the screamers are more emboldened today, I believe race relations in general have improved.
I watched recently some videos about black and white and integrated gun clubs, and how many organized to act if needed ... without overt racism and without lunatics starting trouble. In rural areas where gun ownership is most prevalent, where voters are much more conservative and “white,” and in areas where police, demonstrators and guns sometimes mixed on the streets, we seem to have gotten through this period — thank heaven — without any serious disasters.
The number of white demonstrators peacefully joining protests against racism and police violence, the increasing recognition among the young that racism is indeed a problem in American society — not just among police, whose jobs are difficult in the best of times — these are encouraging to me. I excerpt below from an article about largely white “Black Lives Matter” demonstrations in small communities in America:
On TV and on social media, the protest movement sweeping the country often looks grim and explosive, a montage of rubber bullets and teargas, activists facing off with police, low-flying military helicopters, broken store windows. When protests first started popping up in small towns across the country, some residents could only imagine they were the work of interlopers. Rumors whipped through dozens of rural and suburban communities about busloads of anti-fascist activists on their way to wreak havoc....
For people living in small towns, the dissonance between the dark fantasy of antifa marauders and the actual nature of local protests—many of which have included kids, dogs, and elderly people—has been hard to miss.... [Soon] armed counter-demonstrators largely disappeared. “They have been made to look kind of silly. You should have seen how they showed up. It was like a war—these people showed up for an enemy that was never there,” said [one black musician in almost all white Klamath Falls, Oregon]. Meanwhile, people continued to gather in town for Black Lives Matter rallies during the first two weeks of June. “I think it’s very important because it shows people, you know, a different side of things? It’s happening in these smaller towns with little to no black population. That shows people this is a human thing, and that there’s a lot of us out there who care about each other and want to stand up for each other. And you know, change can happen from anywhere”....
Some protests offered at least a temporary reclamation of public space in communities long defined by segregation and legacies of brutal racism—places like Vidor, Texas, a former Ku Klux Klan haven that Texas Monthly described as the state’s “most hate-filled town” during a struggle over court-ordered desegregation of public housing in the early 1990s....
“I’ve never seen so many white people give a darn about black people,” said Mildred Henderson, a 78-year-old woman and veteran activist who was interviewed by The Southern Illinoisan at a June 4 rally in Anna, Ill. In 1909, mobs drove black residents out of Anna after a lynching in a nearby town; for decades, Anna was known as a sundown town, where black people were not welcome after dark. Although Anna was originally named for a woman, the town’s racist history has given it an unofficial acronym: “Ain’t No [N-words] Allowed.” Kevin Jackson, who also attended the protest in Anna, told the Belleville News-Democrat that it was the first time he’d ever walked down the town’s Main Street... “I probably wouldn’t do it again without my white brothers and sisters,” Jackson said.
Black Lives Matter Protests Are Everywhere, Even in the Unlikeliest Places