Thread by @EdStern

Well that escalated steadily for four years.

OK, this has blown up. I hope nothing else does.

Before I hand the mic to people who have actual wisdom to impart, let me say this. Obviously, this sorry idiocy didn't begin four years ago, or forty, or even four hundred.

All those "it couldn't happen here", "let's hear from both sides" or "this isn't who we are" takes are, at best, ahistorical bullshit. This is precisely what the USA (a nation I love, but am not of) is and has been, for most of its history.

Go read @thenewjimcrow, go read @sarahkendzior, go read Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Case for Reparations theatlantic.com/magazine/archi… which barely TOUCHES on slavery.

Go read about Redlining en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining,
Reconstruction en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstru…
Dred Scott v. Sandford en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dred_Scot…

I'm a wishy washy centrist Brit. I didn't know ANY of this stuff ten years ago. I'd read Coates and see him refer to the orchestration of White Flight by white banks or the deliberation creation of the African-American Ghetto and think "well, hmm, maybe. Sounds a stretch."

And then you read about white real estate agents paying African-American women to wheel prams around white areas to panic white owners into fleeing for the suburbs, and then installing African-American tenants on bullshit mortgages they could never pay off.

And how much work, how much deliberate effort went into the preventing the creation of an African-American middle class. Good enough to pay taxes, good enough to be drafted, fight and die in wars, not quite equal access to life, liberty or happiness.

But I hadn't seen a movie about it, so it all felt less real than the movies and TV shows I had seen. Those were fictions, and deliberately or otherwise they served a purpose.

Anyway, why are you still reading me? Go listen to people who have lived this.
America, I have high hopes for you. We all do.

And now, because I, like the rest of reality, am such a badly written parody, I’m off to play Pandemic fucking Legacy with Heroic Wife.

Peace, and to better days.

Apologies to anyone justifiably offended by me making light of a truly fucking terrible thing in TwitterMeme-ese.
It was a dumb internet joke that anyone could have thought of then chosen not to make, and I didn't.

Also, apologies to anyone who just followed me on here in the expectation of original wit or insight. Normal service is 98% standard British centrist Remoaner woke-Partridge piffle, with intermittent work stuff and Other People's Puns. Don't feel bad for unfollowing pronto.

Well THAT escalated qui...