From The American Conservative (both of them?):
There once was a general who fought a war to protect slavery. That’s not how he would have described it. He would have said he was fighting to protect his way of life from a foreign invader. Whatever construction he put on it, his so-called way of life rested on the sweat wrung from forced labor on plantations and gold earned from buying and selling black flesh.
That general was Samori Touré. The West African chieftain is honored today by black nationalists for resisting French imperialism in the Mandingo Wars of the late nineteenth century, but thousands of Africans were enslaved by Samori’s raiders in the course of building up his empire. After his final defeat in 1898, for more than a decade, columns of refugees tramped into French Guinea to return to their home villages as they escaped or were liberated from Banamba or Bamako or wherever Samori’s men had sold them.
Ta-Nehisi Coates named his son Samori, after the great resister. That means that Between the World and Me, the best-selling anti-racist tract of the current century, which takes the form of letters from Coates to his son, is addressed to someone named after a prolific enslaver of black Africans.
Unless the U.S. is packed with hidden Deplorables that poll-takers can’t find, at some point in 2021, the U.S. will be led by a president who identifies as “Black” (though we also have to accept the possibility that Kamala Harris changes her racial and/or gender ID between now and then).
Is it safe to say that the BLM protesters/rioters will go home for eight years, starting November 4? We didn’t have BLM riots during the Obama Administration, right? (“Obama Says Movements Like Black Lives Matter ‘Can’t Just Keep on Yelling’” (NYT, 2016) turned out to be prescient!)
Every day of the Obama administration was a day in which life for Black Americans became more challenging (see “Effects of Immigration on African-American Employment and Incarceration,” NBER 2007) Yet as long as there was a person in the White House who identified as “Black,” it apparently did not bother lower-income Black Americans that their jobs, apartments, and infrastructure were taken over by immigrants
Whether or not there are BLM “protesters” is among the least important things in the world. It’s made-for-TV. If they go away it’s because their ratings are down.
I don’t know much about poll methodologies. How do they account for the fact that there are many people who realize that supporting Trump in any kind of public way is a potential end to one’s career or even life? (No, not likely, but hardly worth the risk for a pollster’s sake.)
The Trumpslide cometh. There is no way Trump loses. They can’t cheat creepy joe over the line. Which is why they are wargaming secession for the blue coastal states. Welcome to New New England only the new New New England money is accepted here.
> Unless the U.S. is packed with hidden Deplorables that poll-takers can’t find
They’re worried about this. Last week on NPR I listened to people dissecting Trump’s strategery to bring the Stealth Deplorables out of the hidden crevices of the deep, dark Internet. Then he goes and talks up Qanon in his press conference, confirming their fears, so they’re talking about it even more!
Black Lives Matter is now an integral part of our government, our colleges and universities, our corporate HR departments, our local schools, and your psychologist’s office. The protests will continue at pressure points, where there appears to be any “resistance” or “backlash” but in most cases, BLM is simply going to be running the show in terms of social justice, impacting every aspect of your life, from now on.
I for one welcome our BLM overlords! I will be happy to serve as their liason with the patriarchy.
“Unless the U.S. is packed with hidden Deplorables that poll-takers can’t find” Phil, what a silly thing to say. Although sometimes you are sarcastic and we can’t tell. The deplorables were there in 2016 and they will be there this fall!