We started out with the death of Kobe and what was looking like the start of another war in the Middle East. And then it just got more and more batshit.
We all know what happened. We watched as Covid-19 shut down the country. Then, the majority of Americans watched gobsmacked as a bunch of protesters started demanding that we "reopen the economy". Then, just as the whole Covid situation was starting to look like it was behind us, we watched a cop murder a man by sticking his knee on his neck and suffocating him over a potentially counterfeit $20 bill. Then the protests and uprisings afterward. That's just the really easy to see stuff. Hell, that's not even mentioning the murder hornets. It's been a wild year.
If you look across the internet, we've all been lamenting that "this is the worst year ever!" With everything going on, it feels like we're just getting hit on all sides. This year has felt like an oldies radio station-the hits just keep on coming.
But it's pressure that makes diamonds. And the pressure we're experiencing this year is starting to have the potential for things to get even better.
This is going to be a long post, so let me break it down into parts to make it easier to digest.
Part One: The End of Civilization
This is going to be a long post, so let me break it down into parts to make it easier to digest.
Part One: The End of Civilization
Let's start at the Mid-March, the beginning of quarantine. Just before quarantine, the canary in the coal mine was sounded on coronavirus when Tom Hanks said that he became sick with the virus. For most people, myself included, this was the "oh shit" moment when, after hearing sporadic reports about the virus for months, the plague was now upon us. It was right after that, that everything shut down. The world just slowed down to a stand still. Schools were closed. Gyms were closed. It seemed that everything except grocery stores and fast food restaurants has closed.
Leftists first joined the chorus of people that were screaming, "Holy shit! Civilization has collapsed!", but then we got the look of Kevin McAllister when he realized he made his family disappear:
Leftists first joined the chorus of people that were screaming, "Holy shit! Civilization has collapsed!", but then we got the look of Kevin McAllister when he realized he made his family disappear:
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| Civilization has collapsed. :D :D :D |
Going on social media, and we were looking for ways to help each other. People were making face masks to give away for free or for the cost of materials. We were sharing recipes for making bread, as the first days of the run on grocery stores even had the bread aisles wiped out. There were people on local Facebook groups and the Nextdoor App offering to pick up groceries for disabled or immuno-compromised people. When capitalism shut down, what was left was just people helping people. And even though we were supposed to be six feet away from each other at all times, somehow we found a way.
The first days showed what a sham capitalism is to the world. One of the first articles I saw on the subject listed all of the ways that our capitalist world just turned benevolent in the interest of public safety before saying that all of these malevolent forces that have just been suspended didn't need to be there in the first place. To quote:
We saw a lot of working class solidarity in those beginning days. At least if you were seeing the things that most news wasn't reporting on, at least not often. Rent strikes were starting. Amazon warehouse workers were walking out. Leftist podcasts and pages were talking about gardening tips and building prepper pantries. We weren't about to wait on the state to help us. We had to look out for each other.
For a leftist watching this, it was looking like a bright future might emerge when the dust settled on Covid.
Part Two: The Capitalists Strike Back
Then, seemingly out of nowhere:
For those that follow social media enough, you know that a Facebook group doesn't get 300k followers in a couple of days unless there's a combination of a lot of bots and a lot of money involved. While I'm not sure how many members of MAEQ were bots, I was right about a lot of money being involved.
The entire effort to politicize the quarantine has a whole bunch of big money backing it. A bunch of big money that just so happened to show up when local neighborhoods were developing a sense of solidarity. Where we were learning how to look out for each other and develop mutual aid.
If you're like me, you're with the majority of people that were watching this all unfold. The majority of Americans watched in horror while a small group of Americans were screaming for the economy to be reopened.
Renegade Cut, a YouTuber who uses pop culture to discuss politics, made a video called Misinformation for Fun and Profit that discussed what was going on. While it is easy to make fun of the people and call them "covidiots" (and holy shit, I do a lot), they're really just on the receiving end of a decades long misinformation campaign whose intention is to destroy solidarity among the working class and to manipulate the media. There were over 150 worker walkouts and rent strikes taking place during the height of the quarantine. The media was fixated on the quarantine protesters. The big money backing the protests were also the people that built the Tea Party a decade prior. Their goal is to keep just enough of the working class misinformed so that it will prevent worker solidarity. So while the more sensible of us are pulling our hair out wondering why people would be so goddamn dumb as to protest a fucking quarantine and cause us to be in this mess for even longer, the reality is that the protesters are victims of propaganda.
Admittedly, I should feel bad for making fun of the protesters knowing this. I should feel bad. I don't. Because there's something that feels so satisfying that knowing that these assholes spent years calling us "snowflakes" and telling us that we're soft. We, the "soft, easily offended, #triggered" millennials took quarantine on the chin and hunkered down. We sucked it up, drove on, and even learned how to make bread and shit. These right-wing covidiots couldn't handle things being abnormal for a few weeks before they snapped. They literally begged the government to pretend that things were normal in the middle of a goddamn plague because they couldn't handle shit being abnormal for a few weeks. Fucking soft motherfuckers.
And so it went for a few weeks. Soft ass motherfuckers that were brainwashed by propaganda would protest the quarantine, the rest of us would laugh at them. Until...
Part Three: A New Protest
I'll admit, when I first heard about George Floyd's murder by the Minneapolis police , I was both still so rocked by quarantine and so jaded from all the unjustified deaths of black men by the police before him, that I didn't think anything was going to come from this. I thought it was bad, but hell, we're in a quarantine. WTF are we going to do about any of this right now?
And then:
Holy shit, they set a police station on fire!
Just looking at that image causes my brain to play Sublime's "April 29, 1992" in my head. LET IT BURN, WANNA LET IT BURN, WANNA LET IT BURN, WANNA, WANNA LET IT BUR-URN!
The energy was different over this. Different than it was over Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, or the many other black folks killed by cops or wannabe cops. The protests spilled over into the suburbs. My own, majority white, boring ass Southeast Michigan suburb had two protests over this.
Once again, the future was looking bright if you were an anarchist. A section of Seattle had been claimed by leftists and turned into the Capital Hill Autonomist Zone. There were rumors that anarchist collectives had begun in other cities. Even the suburbs are having BLM rallies.
But then...
Part Four: Liberalism ruins everything
I do have a lot of friends that are liberals, especially on social media. Know that I do like all of you. I, like many on the hard left, was a liberal just five years ago. This isn't a personal attack. But right now there are lives on the line, so if you want things to be better, you need to take an honest look at strategy.
Before we go even further here, I need every one of you to watch this video from HBomberguy. Go watch the whole thing. Just do it already.
If you're a liberal and didn't bother to watch the video from HBomberguy, things look pretty good right now in the advertising world, don't they? A whole bunch of corporations came out and screamed BLACK LIVES MATTER! Progress! Yay!
Well, if you watched the video (and you really should), you'd know that all of these companies and their supposed anti-racist rhetoric has been market researched and quantified. It was made to be as non-threatening as possible. And despite all of that, the racists were still mad about it. And if you watched the video, you'd know that the racist anger generated isn't just some side effect of being a "good, tolerant corporation", but that racist anger had already been built in as part of the marketing strategy. All of these "woke brands" are stoking racial anger to sell their product.
If this had just been the market declaring bigots to be irrelevant, I'd say it's a good sign of progress. But the bigots are far from irrelevant in this marketing strategy. They're necessary. And it's necessary for them to be really loud. That's bad.
That's why I don't really care about the whole Aunt Jemima thing. Yes, it's good that a popular brand is losing a stereotypical image. But it not only doesn't create real change, it makes real change even harder. When we're fighting over Aunt Jemima that's time we're not spending fighting for bail reform, ending the drug war, ending qualified immunity, or many other things that would create better conditions in the criminal justice system.
But can't we fight over systemic changes and symbolic changes at the same time?
No, we really can't.
How much have you heard said about changing systemic issues the past few weeks? Did you see a lot of talk about that, or was it mostly about statues and advertising?
We need to stop spending energy fighting about cosmetic issues, especially ones where racism is part of a marketing strategy.
Part Five: The Goddamn Vampire Castle
I first heard of the phrase "vampire castle" when I went down a BreadTube rabbit hole and found a video from a woman calling herself Angie Speaks. I liked the video, so I subscribed to her channel and decided to search for the article they were referencing.
Exiting the Vampire Castle is an article made by Mark Fisher in 2013. The article discusses a lot of criticisms Mark had of the left and the just barely formed new civil rights movement. He talks about a lot of things that liberals are doing wrong. Unfortunately he was short on solutions on how to do things differently, so a lot of it comes off as cringy.
Still he did some very fair criticisms of liberalism. The main theme of all of the criticisms is that the movement was more concerned with creating divisiveness than creating solidarity. The biggest criticism that Mark had was that liberals do not give a class analysis when speaking about oppression. To quote:
We need to be discussing not just race, gender, and sexual oppression; we need to be talking about class oppression as well. And not just class oppression separately, but how it's tied into other forms of oppression as well. The class struggle may not be the same as the race struggle, but it is intertwined. Many of the systems that were created to oppress minorities also hurt the white working class. If you're white and working class, you probably know a white person that got caught up in the drug war. You know that a decade after being released from prison they're still working at McDonalds because nobody else hires felons where you live. We know what it's like to struggle financially, and have some rich White asshole tell us it's our fault for struggling. Even if we didn't face violence from the police, we sure as fuck have lived in fear of them. We all worry about getting pulled over and getting a ticket we can't afford. We know they're not ticketing rich people. They target us, because our towns need revenue and the local board doesn't have the guts to raise property taxes because that'll piss off all the landlords and wealthy folks in McMansions. We in the white working class know that the system is shit. The systemic changes that would help the Black poor and working class will help the white poor and working class as well.
The systemic changes are also largely popular. If you look up various issues that have changes in the criminal justice system, income inequality, stronger worker rights, and pretty much any other issue that would fundamentally reduce harm to the black and white working class, they're very popular. But I won't poll all of them (I was going to, but the list of issues is too damn exhaustive). I'll point out one poll that surprised me:
Fifty four percent of Americans approved of the police station in Minneapolis being set on fire.
Just think about how wild that is for a moment. A majority of Americans saw a police station set on fire as a result of an extra-judicial murder, and were good with it! The majority screamed out, "WE DON'T NEED NO WATER LET THAT MOTHERFUCKER BURN!" The white working class knows that the system is shit. You're not getting a majority of Americans to support a police station being set on fire without a whole lot of the white working class being on board with it.
But if all you talk about is class, aren't you ignoring problems caused by racism, sexism, and other systems of oppression?
Well, I wasn't saying that we should only talk about class oppression. There are issues of oppression that are unique to people that aren't cis-gender straight white dudes. Those do need to be discussed, and thankfully, they are being discussed. But we also need a class analysis of those systems of oppression as well. Not just because it's the right thing to do, strategically advantageous, and brings the majority on our side. We need to do it because the right is talking about class oppression.
Many of us have seen this meme, or one like it:
When we talk about systems of oppression that don't involve class, the right will immediately turn it into a class issue. Straight white cis working class men might not understand what it's like to be oppressed for our gender, race, or sexual identity, but we sure as fuck know what class oppression feels like. And so the right capitalizes on liberals not discussing the issue of class. The right uses class to suppress talk about other forms of oppression. Along with memes like the one above, they'll use Asians as the model minority, saying that because Asians have a higher median income than whites, it's proof that racism doesn't exist.
The right has no problem with using the issue of class oppression to divide the working class. We need to use it to bring us together.
Well you're just a cishet white dude. Who gave you the right to speak about this?!
You're right. I'm a straight cishet white guy. I'm so white that the reflection of the sun off my body has been known to blind people. So hey, let's hear from some black folks.
I think Ice-T knows more about racism than I do. Let's see what he has to say:
Ever hear of a guy named Fred Hampton? He founded the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party back in the 60s. Here's one of his most famous speeches:
We're going to beat racism with solidarity. He said it and he practiced it. The Illinois BPP made alliances with white working class people by going into bars that had the Confederate Flag on the wall and southern whites who were big fans of the stars and bars. They formed an alliance. A very anti-racist, anti-capitalist alliance that scared the shit out of the government so bad that they killed Mr. Hampton. They even co-opted the confederate flag and altered it with an anti-racist message:
They didn't waste time arguing about flags, statues, or cosmetic issues. They fought for real change together.
One of the major examples of divisiveness mentioned in the Vampire Castle article is the use of social media, especially Twitter, to tear people apart for their transgressions. Someone on Twitter finds that someone said or did something cringe, word gets out, and all of left Twitter spends their days dunking on them. There's pages on Facebook dedicated to getting racist assholes fired from their jobs.
Are you saying these people shouldn't be punished for saying racist things on social media?
No, I'm not saying that. At least not in all cases. There are some people on Facebook that say some of truly vile shit, and I don't mind dunking on them and/or making sure they face real world consequences for their actions. Yet, there's also people that just say ignorant shit not out of malice, but because they're just ignorant. They don't know any better. We know these people exist. If you're white, you know damn well there's been shit you've said that you look back on and just think, "Yikes. That was really shitty of me." You didn't know it was shitty at the time. And you certainly don't want to be dunked on by thousands of Twitter handles because you said something that you know now was pretty shitty. You definitely don't want to lose your job over it. For those people that say something out of lack of education and not malice, we should probably try to teach them instead of trying to destroy them.
Ironically, the author of the Vampire Castle article was harassed on Twitter until he deleted his account when he published this article.
We need to talk to people in the real world, instead of just fighting people on social media. On social media, people are predictable and basic. In the real world, most people are complex and don't fall perfectly into the left or right on politics.
I've posted about one of my coworkers before. An old guy that definitely puts the "ok, boomer" in "baby boomer". He loves Trump. Has said some very cringe shit about minorities. If I hadn't preemptively blocked him along with all my coworkers on social media when I started the job, I imagine I'd have torn him a new asshole on a Facebook comment section somewhere. But when you talk about the plight of the working class and the need for labor unions, the man turns into Mother Jones real quick. If we ever decided to unionize our department, I know he'd be leading the way. We'd be on a picket line together.
Another guy I work with is a Black man that supports Trump and refuses to eat anything except organic foods. My favorite co-worker is a Black woman who is liberal in her politics and wonders why I don't care for Joe Biden. People are complex. Including minorities. White leftists and liberals need to do more than just read books about racism. We need to be talking to people in the real world. Especially people that don't look like us. I'll let Angie Speaks sum it up:
This may be the last blog post I write. I know that for all the work I put into this post, I'm probably going to reach twenty people at best, so I'm probably just screaming into the void. Nobody writes blogs anymore in 2020. But I felt like screaming, anyway.
The Covid epidemic showed us the failure of capitalism and the scope of class oppression. The murder of George Floyd gave Black Lives Matter renewed life. We have the opportunity to create a better world if we don't fuck it up. Please avoid fucking it up. Don't waste time on cosmetic issues that don't bring real change. Fight for real change.
The first days showed what a sham capitalism is to the world. One of the first articles I saw on the subject listed all of the ways that our capitalist world just turned benevolent in the interest of public safety before saying that all of these malevolent forces that have just been suspended didn't need to be there in the first place. To quote:
In every single one of these cases, it’s not just that most of these practices are accepted as “standard.” It’s that they are a way to punish people, to make lives more difficult, or to make sure that money keeps flowing upward. Up until now, activists and customers have been meant to believe that the powers that be could never change these policies—it would be too expensive, or too unwieldy, or would simply upset the way things are done. But now, faced suddenly with an environment in which we’re all supposed to at least appear to be focused on the common good, the rule-makers have decided it’s OK to suspend them.
We saw a lot of working class solidarity in those beginning days. At least if you were seeing the things that most news wasn't reporting on, at least not often. Rent strikes were starting. Amazon warehouse workers were walking out. Leftist podcasts and pages were talking about gardening tips and building prepper pantries. We weren't about to wait on the state to help us. We had to look out for each other.
For a leftist watching this, it was looking like a bright future might emerge when the dust settled on Covid.
Part Two: The Capitalists Strike Back
Then, seemingly out of nowhere:
For those that follow social media enough, you know that a Facebook group doesn't get 300k followers in a couple of days unless there's a combination of a lot of bots and a lot of money involved. While I'm not sure how many members of MAEQ were bots, I was right about a lot of money being involved.
The entire effort to politicize the quarantine has a whole bunch of big money backing it. A bunch of big money that just so happened to show up when local neighborhoods were developing a sense of solidarity. Where we were learning how to look out for each other and develop mutual aid.
If you're like me, you're with the majority of people that were watching this all unfold. The majority of Americans watched in horror while a small group of Americans were screaming for the economy to be reopened.
Renegade Cut, a YouTuber who uses pop culture to discuss politics, made a video called Misinformation for Fun and Profit that discussed what was going on. While it is easy to make fun of the people and call them "covidiots" (and holy shit, I do a lot), they're really just on the receiving end of a decades long misinformation campaign whose intention is to destroy solidarity among the working class and to manipulate the media. There were over 150 worker walkouts and rent strikes taking place during the height of the quarantine. The media was fixated on the quarantine protesters. The big money backing the protests were also the people that built the Tea Party a decade prior. Their goal is to keep just enough of the working class misinformed so that it will prevent worker solidarity. So while the more sensible of us are pulling our hair out wondering why people would be so goddamn dumb as to protest a fucking quarantine and cause us to be in this mess for even longer, the reality is that the protesters are victims of propaganda.
Admittedly, I should feel bad for making fun of the protesters knowing this. I should feel bad. I don't. Because there's something that feels so satisfying that knowing that these assholes spent years calling us "snowflakes" and telling us that we're soft. We, the "soft, easily offended, #triggered" millennials took quarantine on the chin and hunkered down. We sucked it up, drove on, and even learned how to make bread and shit. These right-wing covidiots couldn't handle things being abnormal for a few weeks before they snapped. They literally begged the government to pretend that things were normal in the middle of a goddamn plague because they couldn't handle shit being abnormal for a few weeks. Fucking soft motherfuckers.
And so it went for a few weeks. Soft ass motherfuckers that were brainwashed by propaganda would protest the quarantine, the rest of us would laugh at them. Until...
Part Three: A New Protest
I'll admit, when I first heard about George Floyd's murder by the Minneapolis police , I was both still so rocked by quarantine and so jaded from all the unjustified deaths of black men by the police before him, that I didn't think anything was going to come from this. I thought it was bad, but hell, we're in a quarantine. WTF are we going to do about any of this right now?
And then:
Holy shit, they set a police station on fire!
Just looking at that image causes my brain to play Sublime's "April 29, 1992" in my head. LET IT BURN, WANNA LET IT BURN, WANNA LET IT BURN, WANNA, WANNA LET IT BUR-URN!
The energy was different over this. Different than it was over Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, or the many other black folks killed by cops or wannabe cops. The protests spilled over into the suburbs. My own, majority white, boring ass Southeast Michigan suburb had two protests over this.
Once again, the future was looking bright if you were an anarchist. A section of Seattle had been claimed by leftists and turned into the Capital Hill Autonomist Zone. There were rumors that anarchist collectives had begun in other cities. Even the suburbs are having BLM rallies.
But then...
Part Four: Liberalism ruins everything
I do have a lot of friends that are liberals, especially on social media. Know that I do like all of you. I, like many on the hard left, was a liberal just five years ago. This isn't a personal attack. But right now there are lives on the line, so if you want things to be better, you need to take an honest look at strategy.
Before we go even further here, I need every one of you to watch this video from HBomberguy. Go watch the whole thing. Just do it already.
If you're a liberal and didn't bother to watch the video from HBomberguy, things look pretty good right now in the advertising world, don't they? A whole bunch of corporations came out and screamed BLACK LIVES MATTER! Progress! Yay!
Well, if you watched the video (and you really should), you'd know that all of these companies and their supposed anti-racist rhetoric has been market researched and quantified. It was made to be as non-threatening as possible. And despite all of that, the racists were still mad about it. And if you watched the video, you'd know that the racist anger generated isn't just some side effect of being a "good, tolerant corporation", but that racist anger had already been built in as part of the marketing strategy. All of these "woke brands" are stoking racial anger to sell their product.
If this had just been the market declaring bigots to be irrelevant, I'd say it's a good sign of progress. But the bigots are far from irrelevant in this marketing strategy. They're necessary. And it's necessary for them to be really loud. That's bad.
That's why I don't really care about the whole Aunt Jemima thing. Yes, it's good that a popular brand is losing a stereotypical image. But it not only doesn't create real change, it makes real change even harder. When we're fighting over Aunt Jemima that's time we're not spending fighting for bail reform, ending the drug war, ending qualified immunity, or many other things that would create better conditions in the criminal justice system.
But can't we fight over systemic changes and symbolic changes at the same time?
No, we really can't.
How much have you heard said about changing systemic issues the past few weeks? Did you see a lot of talk about that, or was it mostly about statues and advertising?
We need to stop spending energy fighting about cosmetic issues, especially ones where racism is part of a marketing strategy.
Part Five: The Goddamn Vampire Castle
I first heard of the phrase "vampire castle" when I went down a BreadTube rabbit hole and found a video from a woman calling herself Angie Speaks. I liked the video, so I subscribed to her channel and decided to search for the article they were referencing.
Exiting the Vampire Castle is an article made by Mark Fisher in 2013. The article discusses a lot of criticisms Mark had of the left and the just barely formed new civil rights movement. He talks about a lot of things that liberals are doing wrong. Unfortunately he was short on solutions on how to do things differently, so a lot of it comes off as cringy.
Still he did some very fair criticisms of liberalism. The main theme of all of the criticisms is that the movement was more concerned with creating divisiveness than creating solidarity. The biggest criticism that Mark had was that liberals do not give a class analysis when speaking about oppression. To quote:
I’ve noticed a fascinating magical inversion projection-disavowal mechanism whereby the sheer mention of class is now automatically treated as if that means one is trying to downgrade the importance of race and gender. In fact, the exact opposite is the case, as the Vampires’ Castle uses an ultimately liberal understanding of race and gender to obfuscate class. In all of the absurd and traumatic twitterstorms about privilege earlier this year it was noticeable that the discussion of class privilege was entirely absent. The task, as ever, remains the articulation of class, gender and race – but the founding move of the Vampires’ Castle is the dis-articulation of class from other categories.
We need to be discussing not just race, gender, and sexual oppression; we need to be talking about class oppression as well. And not just class oppression separately, but how it's tied into other forms of oppression as well. The class struggle may not be the same as the race struggle, but it is intertwined. Many of the systems that were created to oppress minorities also hurt the white working class. If you're white and working class, you probably know a white person that got caught up in the drug war. You know that a decade after being released from prison they're still working at McDonalds because nobody else hires felons where you live. We know what it's like to struggle financially, and have some rich White asshole tell us it's our fault for struggling. Even if we didn't face violence from the police, we sure as fuck have lived in fear of them. We all worry about getting pulled over and getting a ticket we can't afford. We know they're not ticketing rich people. They target us, because our towns need revenue and the local board doesn't have the guts to raise property taxes because that'll piss off all the landlords and wealthy folks in McMansions. We in the white working class know that the system is shit. The systemic changes that would help the Black poor and working class will help the white poor and working class as well.
The systemic changes are also largely popular. If you look up various issues that have changes in the criminal justice system, income inequality, stronger worker rights, and pretty much any other issue that would fundamentally reduce harm to the black and white working class, they're very popular. But I won't poll all of them (I was going to, but the list of issues is too damn exhaustive). I'll point out one poll that surprised me:
Fifty four percent of Americans approved of the police station in Minneapolis being set on fire.
Just think about how wild that is for a moment. A majority of Americans saw a police station set on fire as a result of an extra-judicial murder, and were good with it! The majority screamed out, "WE DON'T NEED NO WATER LET THAT MOTHERFUCKER BURN!" The white working class knows that the system is shit. You're not getting a majority of Americans to support a police station being set on fire without a whole lot of the white working class being on board with it.
But if all you talk about is class, aren't you ignoring problems caused by racism, sexism, and other systems of oppression?
Well, I wasn't saying that we should only talk about class oppression. There are issues of oppression that are unique to people that aren't cis-gender straight white dudes. Those do need to be discussed, and thankfully, they are being discussed. But we also need a class analysis of those systems of oppression as well. Not just because it's the right thing to do, strategically advantageous, and brings the majority on our side. We need to do it because the right is talking about class oppression.
Many of us have seen this meme, or one like it:
The right has no problem with using the issue of class oppression to divide the working class. We need to use it to bring us together.
Well you're just a cishet white dude. Who gave you the right to speak about this?!
You're right. I'm a straight cishet white guy. I'm so white that the reflection of the sun off my body has been known to blind people. So hey, let's hear from some black folks.
I think Ice-T knows more about racism than I do. Let's see what he has to say:
Ever hear of a guy named Fred Hampton? He founded the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party back in the 60s. Here's one of his most famous speeches:
We're going to beat racism with solidarity. He said it and he practiced it. The Illinois BPP made alliances with white working class people by going into bars that had the Confederate Flag on the wall and southern whites who were big fans of the stars and bars. They formed an alliance. A very anti-racist, anti-capitalist alliance that scared the shit out of the government so bad that they killed Mr. Hampton. They even co-opted the confederate flag and altered it with an anti-racist message:
They didn't waste time arguing about flags, statues, or cosmetic issues. They fought for real change together.
 |
| The meme feels a lot less cringe when you know that story |
Are you saying these people shouldn't be punished for saying racist things on social media?
No, I'm not saying that. At least not in all cases. There are some people on Facebook that say some of truly vile shit, and I don't mind dunking on them and/or making sure they face real world consequences for their actions. Yet, there's also people that just say ignorant shit not out of malice, but because they're just ignorant. They don't know any better. We know these people exist. If you're white, you know damn well there's been shit you've said that you look back on and just think, "Yikes. That was really shitty of me." You didn't know it was shitty at the time. And you certainly don't want to be dunked on by thousands of Twitter handles because you said something that you know now was pretty shitty. You definitely don't want to lose your job over it. For those people that say something out of lack of education and not malice, we should probably try to teach them instead of trying to destroy them.
Ironically, the author of the Vampire Castle article was harassed on Twitter until he deleted his account when he published this article.
We need to talk to people in the real world, instead of just fighting people on social media. On social media, people are predictable and basic. In the real world, most people are complex and don't fall perfectly into the left or right on politics.
I've posted about one of my coworkers before. An old guy that definitely puts the "ok, boomer" in "baby boomer". He loves Trump. Has said some very cringe shit about minorities. If I hadn't preemptively blocked him along with all my coworkers on social media when I started the job, I imagine I'd have torn him a new asshole on a Facebook comment section somewhere. But when you talk about the plight of the working class and the need for labor unions, the man turns into Mother Jones real quick. If we ever decided to unionize our department, I know he'd be leading the way. We'd be on a picket line together.
Another guy I work with is a Black man that supports Trump and refuses to eat anything except organic foods. My favorite co-worker is a Black woman who is liberal in her politics and wonders why I don't care for Joe Biden. People are complex. Including minorities. White leftists and liberals need to do more than just read books about racism. We need to be talking to people in the real world. Especially people that don't look like us. I'll let Angie Speaks sum it up:
The Covid epidemic showed us the failure of capitalism and the scope of class oppression. The murder of George Floyd gave Black Lives Matter renewed life. We have the opportunity to create a better world if we don't fuck it up. Please avoid fucking it up. Don't waste time on cosmetic issues that don't bring real change. Fight for real change.
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