I think what it comes down to is white America needs to stop being so racist. They need to stop with the knee jerk defense of the establishment without stopping to put themselves in someone else’s shoes. Imagine being a black person and hearing that an unarmed teen was followed around a neighborhood by an armed man and that when he was killed by that man, the teen was described on TV as a thug because he wore a hoodie and had smoked marijuana as a kid. Imagine seeing a white president say there were fine people among those who marched with the Klan.
Just stop. Just stop with the immediate condemnation. Just stop and ask yourself, how would I feel? How would it feel to be a person of color and go to a school named after a confederate general, one whose only claim to historic significance is taking part in an armed rebellion to preserve slavery? Would you feel fully valued?
Imagine you’re a person of color and for the first time in history, the president looks more like you than he does like Leslie Nielson and then imagine that a campaign sprung up arguing (based on no evidence whatsoever) that the president wasn’t a real American and wasn’t legitimate. If you were black, wouldn’t you find that offensive and deeply troubling?
Step 1, stop being racist. Everything after step 1 is easy compared to that.
For the record, I’m white. But your post makes it clear Hurricane, we’re not going to heal the wounds. It’s not possible at this point. We are going to continue to pursue self segregation from one another when possible and where there are friction points, we will continue with our low level civil war, a congressman shot here, a car driven into a crowd there and we will lurch from red state president to blue state president.
There’s a worrying amount of inequality in the US so I think fixing issues needs to start with sorting that out.
Thus:
Raise the minimum wage to something liveable
Universal Healthcare
Adequate access to affordable housing
Once people aren’t working for $2 an hour and suffering from untreated mental or physical disorders because they can’t afford to go to the doctor, you’re going to see some improvements, I think…
It’ll be possible once people become grown enough to accept that not everyone thinks, feels, or shares the same basic morals as everyone else. And that doesn’t make them evil.
Might take a lot of pain. The religious wars were painful. At some point people learned tolerance though.
I absolutely agree with this, which is why I don’t see us ever healing our wounds. These three action items would require the raising of taxes on the wealthy and they would be fought tooth and nail. Every time there has been an attempt to implement any of these types of changes, suddenly the dialogue shifts to which bathroom transgender people use, or gay marriage. Billionaires will keep finding friction points to exploit to keep from paying more taxes.
It’s taken 100 years, but I think at some point America needs to come to the realisation that it’s just too damn big to be one country, and devolve into amore sensible arrangement.
While I love alternative history a lot, I don’t think America is unique in being a huge country - China, India, Canada, Russia and Australia are all single countries with enormous landmasses too.
In which case, I think the challenge is “How is the narrative kept on-topic?” ie, when someone starts up with the “Transgender people might see YOU WHILE YOU’RE USING THE TOILET!” thing, how can people say “Yeah, that’s irrelevant, especially since the actual issue is why it’s legal to pay people so little an hour’s work won’t buy them lunch at a fast-food restaurant.”
Every single improvement in America in the quality of life for black people and opportunities to improve their own lives for black people has been because white people have improved the way they interact with black people. Every single one. Black people were intimately involved in these efforts (abolition, desegregation, Civil Rights, etc.), but it was always ultimately because white people changed the way they behaved and treated black people, whether due to changing attitudes or changing laws.
I see no reason to believe that future improvements in the ways black people are treated and interacted with will come from anything else.
I didn’t say it was unique. Some of the others may also benefit from being devolved (although I’d argue that Russia, Canada and Australia are different from America in having a lot more emptiness in that large mass with fewer big cities in the middle like the US has).
I think that the culture wars have made this kind of communication impossible. There is a huge network that gears up when these wedge issues are rolled out, most importantly the Christian right. Preachers start delivering sermons that harp on the issue and pretty soon anyone trying to point out the absurdity of the argument is labeled anti-Christian.
And this includes all the ones who think they’re not racist. That’s the lion’s share of the problem. The ones who are openly racist are much more easily marginalized if the vast “but-I’m-not-racist” majority would get woke.
Yeah, it’s a daunting, if not impossible task. And let’s not even get in to climate change denial which is tied up in the racism and general anti-intellectualism . There is a segment of society that is not so much uneducated as actively de-educated. We didn’t get in to this mess overnight and we’ve probably run out of time to get out of it. But the good news is 15 minutes or less can save you a bunch of money on your car insurance.
I’d forgotten about the religious aspect of things, but that can certainly make things difficult, especially when conservative churches start weighing in.
Every time I’ve visited the US and told an American we have universal healthcare, the reaction has always been “Wow, that’s awesome! Can I move there?” or “I wish we did too” - yet a large number of the news reports and social commentary I see would suggest just hinting maybe Canada, the UK and Australia are onto something there is, at best, one of the lighter treasons for an American.
More fundamentally, America needs to divorce itself from survival of the fittest attitudes toward capitalism and work toward a society that embraces socioeconomic mobility. It can be argued that racism, American racism in particular, needed racism to support its colonial capitalism, which was a capitalism of predation and opportunism for some at the expense of others. If we would rethink our notion of billionaires as job creators who deserve to be worshiped and that anyone who takes public assistance is a mooch, and if we embraced things like healthcare for all and fairer wages, and most of all supporting education and training that’s affordable for all, I think we’d go a long way toward reducing racism.
Definitely. The idea that the super-wealthy create lots of jobs is ludicrous; eventually there’s a point where they’re just putting money from tax savings/concessions/etc in their bank accounts and not using it to hire more people, open more factories etc.
The idea there’s something wrong with social security, universal healthcare and education needs to be addressed too - I honestly believe if you get people’s basic needs looked after, they’ll be less likely to go looking for another group (different ethnicities/sexual orientations) to blame for their problems.
Treason For red state Americans. The culture wars really geared up in the nineties when serial adulterer Newt Gingrich realized he could use Clinton’s adultery as a wedge in American politics. Ginning up hate for blue state America became an industry. Sometime in the 2000s, blue state America realized that we hated them back and that we’ve been carrying most of red state America as red states tend to take more in federal tax dollars than they pay all the while bitching about “big government.” Look at who they put in the White House and tell me how you reason with that.
Like I’ve said, I don’t think we do heal the wounds. Climate control, racial equality and a women’s rights are not issues where we can simply agree to disagree. The fact that the people paying the bills are repeatedly called traitors and libtards doesn’t exactly make me want to find common ground.
