LFG
It would be great if we didn't have to go through another round of "We All Look Alike" again in the wake of a national tragedy -- I think it was Politico who ran the headline "Capitol Police Hero Harry Dunn runs for Congress" while simultaneously broadcasting a picture of Congressional Gold Medalist for Heroism on January 6th Officer Eugene Goodman instead ๐
The “Unspoken”
Role of Race in the January 6th Riot – NPR
from the transcript
JEFFERSON: January 6 was a racial backlash.
DIRKS: More precisely, he says, it's part of an ongoing white backlash against the very perception of racial progress.
JEFFERSON: Some white people are really concerned about a loss of power and status in American society.
DIRKS: At the heart of January 6, Jefferson says, is a story about power - white power.
JEFFERSON: It's not about power that's maintained by burning crosses. It's about the power that's maintained about telling some stories and not some others in schools. It's about the power to elect people who you think will do your bidding.
DIRKS: That's the racist conspiracy theory that Black and brown people are replacing white people as part of a nefarious Democratic plan to take power and steal elections, a theory peddled by people like Tucker Carlson. And it's believed not just by many of the people who stormed the Capitol but by the vast majority of Republicans. Here's political scientist Hakeem Jefferson again.
JEFFERSON: What's dangerous is when a group like this begins to adopt the mindset, or the rhetoric, of an oppressed minority.
DIRKS: Dangerous because, Jefferson says, when members of a group that still holds very real privilege, like white people, imagine themselves on the margins, that's when violent white nationalism takes hold. The narrative the January 6 committee has presented for the most part has been told in the voices of Republicans and former Trump loyalists. There was one notable exception - Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SHAYE MOSS: I've always been told by my grandmother how important it is to vote and how people before me, a lot of people, older people in my family did not have that right.
DIRKS: Moss and her mom are both poll workers who Trump attacked by name, leading to death threats and racist attacks. Political scientist Akeem Jefferson says what these two women represent is not a political party or person in power but the right of average people to vote, a right that for many was only achieved within recent memory.
JEFFERSON: So many Black people and Black women in particular work on these front lines of democracy.
DIRKS: Jefferson says our fragile and incomplete multiracial democracy is in peril. It's not just January 6. It's also a slow-moving threat from the right, the Supreme Court, gerrymandering, voter suppression laws like some of the ones now on the books in Georgia overseen by Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. He was lauded at the hearings for standing up for democracy and against Trump. But back home, the laws he's championed have made it harder for people of color to vote.
JEFFERSON: January 6 was a racial project, but the everyday undoings and attacks on American democracy are also a part of a racial project. So yeah, it's the elephant in the room, but it's the whole damn room. This is all about race, all the time.
DIRKS: It continues a larger, longer battle that has never really ended over whose votes get counted and whose votes get to count.
Professor Sherrilyn Ifill (Vernon Jordan Civil Rights Professor & Head of the 14th Amendment Center for Law & Democracy at Howard University Law School) on the 14th Amendment
"White men get the benefit
of the doubt -- the presumption that they are 'most qualified'. A Black woman
must bear the presumption that she is not ... this is about a society
unprepared to see a Black woman at the citadel of American academic power"
- Professor Nikole-Hannah Jones, Pulitzer & Peabody winner and Knight Chair
of Journalism & Democracy at Howard University
Golden Globes are actually tomorrow night already
and they are not unaware that they need to rehabilitate their image
(Barbie is
most nominated film with 9 – 2nd most-nominated in GG history IINM)
Emma Stone getting Best Actress lead buzz for Poor Things even ahead of Barbie’s Margot Robbie
And all I
can say is that American Fiction better sweep next year
JFree Wright talks about his Oscar-buzzed performance
Cast - including Tracee Ellis Ross, Sterling K Brown, and Erika Alexander – talking about busting stereotypes
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