But, even though I currently am not getting a lot of visitors to this blog (I’m getting some and will soon get more), here are my thoughts about the issues thrown up by the protests.
Many people (like Trump) don’t understand this, but this is not about George Floyd. This is about hundreds of years of black lives being valued less than white lives in this country, including an apparent surge in the murders of unarmed Black people by police in the last several years, as well as some modern-day lynchings that more or less don’t involve the police. I was told at a BLM protest march around 2015 that in a 365-day period ending shortly before that day about 200 black people, armed or unarmed, had been killed by American police. I’m sure some of them were armed, but A) I’m very open-minded about allegations that cops plant guns and B) around that time there were SEVERAL highly publicized cases where undeniably unarmed Black people were killed by police. Police are practically never convicted, or even prosecuted (and rarely fired) for such deaths. Although there isn’t solidly comprehensive information about how often unarmed black people are killed by police here like there’s information about the security forces killing Catholic civilians in Northern Ireland’s Troubles, one reason I believe it’s a widespread and serious problem is that both the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League, two organizations that generally get along with police, have expressed support for BLM. That’s here and here. They are making these statements because even though they are sort of pro-cop, they are even more anti-racist and anti-injustice and anti-inequality. And that’s the agenda they see in BLM. (And in the case of the ADL, their support for BLM is also despite the fact that BLM has expressed criticism of Israel)
Trump claims to be sensitive to the death of Floyd, but he clearly isn’t beyond the death of that one individual. He isn’t sensitive to what Floyd’s death symbolizes. His National Security Advisor has said “No, I don't think there's systemic racism. I think 99.9% of our law enforcement officers are great Americans.” Based on multiple facts, a lot more than .1% of police are racist. That’s based on simple common sense, but also the following:
1) What I wrote about the SPLC and the ADL and BLM.
2) In 1992, when the controversy over the Body Count (Ice-T’s heavy metal band) song Cop Killer broke, the (then- 35,000 member) National Black Police Association kind of backed Ice-T. According to an article in the Orlando Sentinel:
The 35,000-member National Black Police Association says it won't join the boycott. Police should try to get at the root of black discontent and try to change it, said Ronald Hampton, the group's executive director.
"Where were these police groups when the police beat up Rodney King?" Hampton asked. "Why were they not appalled by the actions of their brothers? It rings of hypocrisy.”
3) From what I’ve heard, some massive majority of cops are registered to vote GOP and for the following reasons I believe that is a racist party.
A) Not only do they get no more than about 10% of the Black vote, and only around 25% of the Latino vote (and that would be lower if (more or less) white Latinos were excluded from the calculations), they also get no more than around 25% of the Asian-American vote. That last fact is crucial. Even though Asian-Americans as a group do at least as well financially as white people do as a group, and even though there is the history of FDR and Internment, Asian-Americanss look at the GOP and see it as even less attractive than the Dems.
B) There ’s also the fact that in the 1960s and 1970s Segregationist Democrats migrated to the GOP because the Dems became a civil rights party. In 2005 the GOP ADMITTED (and in all fairness apologized for) using the “Southern Strategy” of 1968 where they appealed to segregationist southerners in order to elect Nixon.
C) As I’ll explain further down, Trump is a racist.
There’s also the fact that, according to HuffPost, the Trump Justice Department ignored police brutality:
“Since President Donald Trump took office, his appointees at the Justice Department have all but eliminated the federal government’s police reform work. The Civil Rights Division’s police practices group has shrunk by half, and it hasn’t opened any major pattern-or-practice investigations that could rein in police departments that regularly violate constitutional rights.”
(Also, see this).
(There’s a lot of things I will gloss over because there’s so much attention on them anyway, like Trump’s use of the phrase “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” or what happened to facilitate his photo-op with the Bible)
Trump is a racist. Here’s some of the most solid evidence:
1) A few years ago was the first time Trump called Antifa a terrorist organization. It was after Antifa members had done what they’re defined by, and that’s not actually or allegedly rioting. They were fighting people clearly identifiable as fascists, and no, I don’t believe that cops are clearly identifiable as fascists. They were fighting FASCISTS.
2) On a similar note, when an anti-fascist was killed in 2017 in Charlottesville by a fascist, Trump said there were “fine” people on both sides.
3) There’s his attitude to the exonerated victims of a racial miscarriage of justice.
4) When asked about David Duke endorsing him, his response in an interview was:
Well, just so you understand, I don’t know anything about David Duke. OK? I don't know anything about what you’re even talking about with white supremacy or white supremacists. So, I don't know. I don’t know, did he endorse me or what’s going on, because, you know, I know nothing about David Duke. I know nothing about white supremacists. And so you're asking me a question that I'm supposed to be talking about people that I know nothing about.
5) There’s his opinion that Lincoln screwed up dealing with what led to the Civil War. Trump thinks that if the then-late former President Andrew Jackson had been President in 1861 the Civil War would have been avoided. Since Jackson was a slave owner and an opponent of abolitionism, that would have involved, at best, a compromise friendly to the South that would have barely affected the life-span and geographic scope of slavery or the treatment of slaves. There’s information about that here and here.
6) His Veterans Affairs Secretary is a neo-confederate.
(As far as those last two, I should explain two facts about the Confederacy. First, they considered ending slavery so they could get military support from Europe and win the war, but decided not to- slavery was more important to them than independence. Also, when Black Union soldiers were captured, they were simply executed instead of taken to POW camps. The Confederacy was about slavery and racism)
I recently had a bit of a breakthrough on what needs to be done to make significant progress on ridding this country of racism. In addition to everything else people are doing, we need more unions. That’s based on the following:
1. Union households are more likely to vote Democratic than non-union households, and many of the organizers and staff in the labor movement are people of color and most of the whites are anti-racist and most union supporters are people of color or anti-racist whites.
2. In 2000 in a discussion on the email list of the Young Democratic Socialists (now YDSA) a member who was organizing workers in Indiana said that his competition was the Klan (UPDATE 1/26/22 That is, competition for the hearts and minds of the workers).
3. Eammon McCann is a socialist and anti-Unionist activist in Northern Ireland. He was one of the main leaders of the N. Ireland Civil Rights Movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s (he was one of the speakers at the rally/march that was attacked by the British Army on Bloody Sunday in Derry in 1972, and he was an organizer of the second Civil Rights march, the one in Derry in Oct. of 1968). He has held several different senior and very senior positions in the Northern Irish TRADE-union movement in the last 40 years. In 2016 he was elected to the Northern Ireland Assembly and in 2017 he would have been but they reduced the number of seats returned from each constituency form 6 to 5 so he was basically runner-up. As far as I can tell, in the last 40 years at any given time two mainstream or professional news publications have been publishing his columns. He is an expert on sectarianism in N. Ireland. In a column written in the 1980s or 1990s and included in the 1998 anthology of his columns “McCann: War and Peace in Northern Ireland” he wrote:
The trade union movement is better placed than any other to purge the politics of this island of sectarianism. No other institution brings Catholic and Protestant workers together on a regular basis in pursuit of a common purpose which is antipathetic to sectarianism
(Mark Langhammer, who was the leader of the Northern Ireland part of the Irish Labour Party for several years around 2010, told me in 2005 that he agrees with McCann)
I think you could easily say the same thing about racism in this country.
Unfortunately, in recent decades, as the labor movement has become more and more anti-racist, it has gotten smaller and smaller, thanks to the GOP, corporations, and moderate Democrats.
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In conclusion, although I’m concerned the protests will result in the spread of COVID-19 and I have been unable to take part in them, I am glad that the protests are happening. They seem likely to be successful in multiple ways and have exposed more than usual the fact that our society is racist and that Trump is a racist.
A new mural in Belfast, N. Ireland.
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