This week, and probably for the last week (I hope, for now), the Texas Progressives weekly roundup is again being split into two parts in this corner.
This is the racial matters, police brutality, Lost Cause and more half.
Let's start with
a long read about Martin Luther King "vs" Malcolm X — and James Baldwin. Baldwin saw more militant younger blacks deserting King for not doing more, and even halfway liberal whites saying we've done enough, as early as 1961. Three months after King was killed, Baldwin's words to a white Esquire interview about rioting, that
"It is not for us to cool it."
Still ring true.
It's also possible, per the piece, that King was put off by Baldwin's being gay. Within black evangelical churches today, there's still a lot of repressing on this issue. Anyway, the excerpt is from a new book about Baldwin, coming out this month.
The desire by some liberals, white or otherwise, and some leftists, also white or otherwise, to perform "cancel culture" on identity politics — liberals normally because "we're moving beyond that," or "we're post-racial," or "we don't want to lose too much of white America," and leftists normally because "all issues of race (gender / sexual orientation etc.) ultimately reduce to class" — is just wrong.
America has always had identity politics. It's just an issue of who's identifying themselves and how, who is wanting to move on, who actually has moved on and pulled the ladders up (Irish-Americans vs blacks, anybody?) and who's in full-on active opposition.
With those longer introductions, let's jump in.
BIG stuff from the media punditry world. Long-time conservative columnist Mona Charen says that George Floyd's killing
has convinced her that that Black Lives Matter complaints are highly justified. (Now, if only long-term Zionist Charen would say the same about Palestinian lives.)
Juneteenth,
Mexican village style.
Protests in support of George Floyd, against Confederate monuments and more, are hitting more small towns. So are counterprotestors, with
two arrested in Pilot Point (site of a 1922 lynching), or threats, in Lockhart (
spurred by a rant by a deputy constable from a neighboring county).
The Texas Rangers baseball team is being urged to rename itself. Why? The racism and general brutality of the Texas Rangers police force in much to most of its history.
Here's my review of "Cult of Glory," the great new book about that history.
More and more UT students want the university to dump "The Eyes of Texas" as the school song.
Here's why. And, ol ball coach Tom Herman is down with Longhorn football players being part of the protest.
Reminding readers that American Indians have an even higher per-capita death by cop rate than blacks, some librulz (and of course all the wingnuts) wonder why statues of President Grant have gotten toppled.
American Indians know why.
At the Observer,
DaLyah Jones talks about Black Lives Matter and protests in Deep East Texas. (I personally define Tyler as the "gateway" to the region, near the northwest corner. It runs basically from near Tyler to the Louisiana line, with Shreveport kind of an extension. I-20 is pretty much the northern edge; places like Jefferson might be in East Texas, but not Deep East Texas. U.S. 59 is the heartland of the region, followed by U.S. 96.)
Grits for Breakfast imagines a "George Floyd Act" for Texas.
Within all of this, just as violence and destructiveness at protests do no good, neither do Social Justice Warriors wanting to claim that every suicide by a black man "must be" a lynching. Occam's Razor plus national suicide statistics
refute such claims.
Algorithms are often loaded with bias. Here's
a curated reading list.
The
Texas Signal enjoys the spectacle of Ted Cruz whining about
Sesame Street.
