This country does not *have* to be this broken. But it will remain so as long as it continues to self soothe with white supremacist mythology instead of reckoning with truth.
Frederick Douglass, in 1852:
"To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me...?” theundefeated.com/features/what-…
So yes, @JoeBiden, this thread, from an American who hasn't gotten a wink of sleep tonight, is for you.
The health of a society can be measured by the condition of those who hold the least amount of power within it.
The thing that told me, more than any of her speeches, that @HillaryClinton understands this, is her experience working for the Children's Defense Fund and the lasting lessons she took from it.
Now, does that mean she is perfect, or that she hasn't made objectionable decisions?
No. Of course not.
But we never really did have a meaningful discussion of how someone with that sort of formative experience might lead, and how different it is from 1-45.
And yes, part of that is because of a snide undercurrent of sexism that pervades the political media in ways they don't even realize about themselves
I mean, honey, the top dog at CBS News/60 Minutes for decades, was conducting serial abuse—in the workplace!— that was rooted in misogyny bbc.co.uk/news/amp/world…
To think that that part of Fager was somehow cleanly divided from his role as a newsman is absolutely ludicrous.
And he's simply an example. There was a whole list of Shitty Media Men, remember?
What are the outward ramifications when antipathy to women is simply normalized?
When it's baked into our day-to-day lives in ways we don't bother to examine and called normal?
That antipathy becomes institutionalized, and it shows up in who and what we take seriously, and what we do not.
And we know this country REALLY doesn't taken Black women or our lives seriously.
This is a place that gave a home to a Central Park monument to a man who tortured Black women he owned, without anesthesia, and called it gynecology theatlantic.com/health/archive…
This is very much the country that stole so much from Lucy, Anarcha, and Betsey, plus many more black women *whose names we don't even know*, and did so over and over and over.
And if there is any chance for it to be anything better, it needs to truly understand what that means.
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The Capitol Police had more ire and force for Cynthia McKinney, a whole then-SITTING CONGRESSWOMAN that they did for armed terrorists sfgate.com/politics/amp/M…
Leadership basically made Rep. McKinney apologize for that cop's racism!
It was so gross.
All 44 did was (correctly!) say a cop acted stupidly for arresting an old black man who uses a cane entering his own house and he had to have that idiotic beer summit
There are so many dumb things about this, but one I'm going to pull out is Mackey's complete disregard the effects housing segregation and environmental racism have on life expectancy and health
There are a lot of mediocre Netflix shows that could be better with more discipline and script notes that pay attention to what doesn't make sense.
And too many of its shows simply gobble up hours without justifying their length.
Tight, well-written, smart half-hour episodes will always be preferable to me over hourlong ones that just twiddle their thumbs and burn up production money without really doing much else, like advancing plot or deepening characters