I saw #BlackKkKlansman this weekend, and just WOW. It was brilliant and right on time for our current dark moment in American history. Especially in light of the fact that White dudes are out here burning Nikes in protest of Black lives mattering. Past is prologue.
I won’t spoil the plot for y’all but suffice it to say that the whole movie is an indictment of “Make America Great Again” and the inherent White male supremacy of Republican politics. It’s no mystery how we ended up here or why shit hasn’t changed in 150+ years.
There were moments when the whole audience audibly gasped at how David Duke’s rhetoric from the past foreshadowed Donald Trump’s ascendency to the presidency. There’s no mistaking the role White supremacy’s played in radicalizing generations of White Americans.
As I’ve repeatedly stated #onhere, I think what most American political observers continually fail to recognize about the GOP is how it mainstreamed KKK ideology for public consumption by way of the Southern Strategy. They’re hiding a pig under infinite layers of lipstick.
Folk like to think that just because they don’t wear white sheets and hoods or burn crosses on the weekend they aren’t White supremacists, but voting GOP is how they manifest their hateful, bigoted beliefs in the modern day. We only aid and abet them by pretending otherwise.
Spike Lee wouldn’t even have to so thoroughly explain this to America in 2018 if folk had just listened to Lee Atwater spilling the GOP’s racist beans in 1981. Oh but fragility, guilt and denial...
You cannot walk out of #BlackKkKlansman without a clear understanding of how the KKK enmeshed itself with the Republican Party in order to enshrine its belief system into law. You cannot miss how Trump is both a beneficiary and benefactor of White male supremacy.
You cannot watch these White dudes burn their Nikes without remembering them lighting tikki torches in Charlottesville or burning crosses all over the South during the civil rights movement. White male supremacists light shit on fire when they feel inadequate and insecure.
They’re burning symbols of equality in retaliation for their Confederate symbols being torn down; they think diversity is genocide and equality is oppression. They’re marching in defense of subjugation by police brutality and apartheid. They ARE the KKK, hoods not required.
They may be saying they’re protesting Nike and Colin for “veterans and the flag”, but what they’re really incensed about is the declaration that Black Lives Matter and the modern day civil rights movement against White supremacist police violence.
Same shit, different day.
Russia aside, millions of actual White Americans voted for Trump in protest of President Obama & the multicultural America that elected him. They voted in protest of demographic change and the expansion of equal civil rights. This whole disaster is in protest of forward progress.
The GOP’s messaging is racist because its base is racist. This shouldn’t be a difficult concept to grasp, but mainstream White culture is uniquely adept at obfuscating the issue to the benefit of the status quo. They pretend that virulent White Nationalism is patriotism.
They also pretend that unyielding allegiance to demonstrably racist killer cops is patriotism, because nothing says American law and order like a good ole fashioned slave patrol and lynching posse.
Bottom line is people still need to wake the fuck up. History repeats because hatred and ignorance are generationally inherited and transmitted. Trump is a symptom of a systemic disease that’s afflicted America since 1492.
The disease is so insidious that some White folk who call themselves liberal and progressive still think it’s cute to fraternize with Nazis like Steve Bannon for the sake of “access” to White supremacy.
I could go on and on about this, but I already have and there are receipts. Republicans are still riding the red wave of racist White rage and resentment because it’s a strategy that works on the White American voting majority without fail.
Finally, if you haven’t yet seen #BlackKkKlansman, I HIGHLY recommend that you do. In 2 hours you’ll learn what the American MSM has willfully chosen to keep in the darkness for the last 50 years.
Go forth and be educated. 🔥
Don’t just take my word for it, hear it straight from the horse’s ass:
The thing that’s always struck me about this (not only as a Black woman but also as a psychiatrist IRL who’s literally tasked with helping people cope with stress, illness and the ups & downs of life) is the Black woman savior complex of it all. It’s subconscious but ubiquitous.
As with many things in America, I also think it’s yet another sociological phenomenon brought to us by slavery. A lot of White family systems fell apart (continue to) without the presence of a Mammy or some form of matriarchal Black help in the home. jstor.org/stable/2714687
Except for all intents/purposes, VA *was* TX not too long ago. The 2021 Gubernatorial election set back over a decade of hard-won progress by VA Democrats. It can happen in ANY historically or recently “blue” state at the drop of a dime, if enough White voters DEFECT/vote GOP. 🥴
The other thing to remember is #WeTriedToTellThem ALL of this shit was gonna happen (all over again) but HELL NO. This is yet another consequence of MAGAts who have both a death wish and outsized influence on every single public/private system in 🇺🇸 running the asylum. 🤡👹👺🦊
Adding this here b/c it’s really important that we also recognize how the toxic/violent masculinization of GOP women voters also extends to #MAGAWoman elected officials. They’ve created an army of Ashli Babbitts who aid/abet the radicalization of their menfolk & themselves. 👹🤡
By now we’ve seen too many GOP/GOP adjacent mothers/wives/girlfriends either completely “overlook” the extremism in their midst or actively enable and facilitate the obstinance/defiance and evasion of consequences that leads to White, right wing domestic terrorism. #VanillaISIS
The thing that really chaps my hide about it is I’ve heard Republicans vilify Black family values & label us criminals/social deviants my whole life, yet here they are breeding & grooming the most PROLIFIC White domestic terrorists America’s ever seen and the NARRATIVE is SILENT.