Horror
Before what’s below, I need to say something about the horror unfolding around us in El Paso and Dayton, and too too many other cities of late, though I honestly don’t much know what to say, except that it’s a national shame of the highest order that we have come on some fundamental level to accept living like this.
The gravity of these events and our larger cultural moment leave me struggling to figure out how to put this: I am worrying a bit about how widespread the use of “white supremacy” has become when used to talk about obviously racist mass shootings. Because I’m convinced that the mainstream white-supremacist Right is starting to find an out in the term. Something as horrible as El Paso is so beyond white supremacism that Ted effing Cruz and whatsername the orange one’s daughter can use those very words in tweets and yet distance themselves from their larger import. So when we talk about voter suppression, about redlining, about the million microaggressions that people of color face every day, they will have created ground on which to say “ONLY THAT qualifies as white supremacist, you are trivializing the concept by using it to refer to (X thing I regularly do but know I shouldn’t).”
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