Thread by @JuliusGoat

The Accommodation Is The Supremacy

Republicans are killing their own constituents by the thousands, and their constituents love them for it. Wondering why?

Look to the swimming pools.

getrevue.co/profile/julius…

In the 1950s and 60s, municipalities started to integrate their public swimming pools, in part due to legal mandates, in part because of the fact that segregation is cruel and unjust, and people have always known that, no matter what people say now about “a different time.”

So, municipalities—whether voluntarily or not—made public spaces available to everybody. A simple thing. A good thing. The right thing.

What happened was this: white people violently rioted.

"On June 21, two hundred white residents surrounded the pool with “bats, clubs, bricks and knives” to menace the first thirty or so Black swimmers. Over the course of the day, a white mob that grew to five thousand attacked every Black person in sight."

marketplace.org/2021/02/15/pub…

What happened after that was this: municipalities closed the swimming pools.

It was a choice.

Cities could have left the pools open. But they didn’t, because the cities were oriented to accommodate the psychological and physical comfort of white people, even if what the white people wanted was morally indefensible, and clearly made things worse.

We could use a word for that phrase: “when cities accommodate one group over another, even if the preferred group’s preference is for harm.”

How about this word: supremacy.

I want you to pay attention to an important distinction; it’s one that’s usually purposefully missed.

The violent white people were supremacists, but the violence of the white people wasn’t the supremacy.

The decision of people with the power to accommodate them anyway—that was the supremacy.

The accommodation is the supremacy.

The accommodation is the supremacy.

So, because of the supremacy of white people, public swimming pools withered and closed—and not just pools. We could be talking about schools. We could be talking about many things. Because of the supremacy, they withered and closed.

I’m thinking about the swimming pools today because elected Republican officials are killing thousands of their own constituents, and doing so seems to be a prerequisite for these officials, if they want to retain the loyalty of the people they’re killing, and I'm curious why.

Dying from the virus has become optional. A large and vocal mostly white conservative minority is exercising that option.

And the question you might be asking is: why?

Why does this large and mostly white conservative minority want to spread a deadly virus? Why are they willing to sacrifice knowable reality and even their own lives and the lives of their loved ones in order to accomplish this?

My guess is, it’s the swimming pool.

But I think "why do conservatives want to spread Covid even though it collapses our shared society?" is the wrong question.

The right question is:

"What is it about the total collapse of our shared society that conservatives now want?"

I think the answer is the "shared" part.

It’s the same reason they no longer participate in our shared reality.

They don’t want to share.

I think they want the system to collapse.

Anyway, whatever their intention, it’s certainly what they’re doing.

They are supremacist.

Our political and social systems still accommodate their desires.

And so, to one extent or another, do most of us.

Which is the supremacy.

The remedy, in my opinion, is an uncomfortable one. To the extent that we do, we all have to stop participating in supremacy.

At all.
Anywhere.

Which means we’ll have to become people who refuse to accommodate it, and are willing to accept the discomfort that comes with it.

A large and vocal mostly white minority is willing to fight for their supremacy, and they’ll pay for it with their lives if they must. It’s why they get their way. It’s why we accommodate them.

They’ll cement over our shared society, if we let them—and we’re letting them. We’re accommodating them.

I’d say it’s time for us to take their supremacy and cement that over, instead.

You want a society of equality? Good. Me too.

We need to be willing to fight for it—and to pay the cost of the fight.

Or we’ll pay the steeper cost of accommodation.

/end