Like a good Fascist

I will say one thing about Trump, he has kept his campaign promises. But that's only a virtue if the pledge you make isn't wicked.

Nothing that's happening with the separation of children from parents surprises me in the least. During the campaign, Trump was adamant on detaining immigrants at the border, with expelling illegals and refusing "frivolous" asylum requests.

I heard him say he would do it humanely. Nobody asked him how his policy could be performed benevolently. A reporter taking him seriously might have asked if he planned to put more money into building more detention centers, more vehicles, more supplies and hiring (qualified) guards? Or was he going to wait until Walmart closes a few stores? (Trump really should go easier on Amazon.) All of this might cost more than his wall. He should have been pressed on this during the election campaign.

Instead, as we're seeing, Trump would rather eat corn nuts for every meal every day of his remaining life than send one more buck toward making detention and processing somehow humane. He despises Hispanics so much that details aren't worth his effort, and definitely aren't worth any money, as hurricane Maria showed.

So, Trump will alter his plans under pressure. The government might allow parents to stay with their children, and that would be somewhat more humane at the beginning.

But it won't stay so that humane. What Trump will be refugee camps and ghettos, depending on whether it's an urban or rural environment. My bet is on the camps. How badly will they deteriorate? It could become a major atrocity because he has shown an uninterest in details that require it. He approaches his work as an authoritarian, and he presumes anything he trusts to be there will there.

He stepped up arrests at the border, for that he needs more police, then more trucks to transport immigrants, then detentionaries to keep them warehoused. These will require guards, then energy for heat in the winter. (I'm supposing AC would be a luxury.) Then food and water. Update: Since he has already separated 20,000 children from families, it has multiplied the number of facilities by at least two. Children are going to require care, somebody's going to have to change the diapers. Trump doesn't even think about all this, but to perform the stepped-up seizure and imprisonment without committing an atrocity, he needs far more resources than he started out with. He needs infrastructure he doesn't have.

Instead of assuming all Hispanic immigrants to be potential criminals, it would be far easier to arrest only the ones that ARE criminals. It would certainly be easier to house and feed only those that break real laws, the way the Founders meant it.

I say "real" laws because there is nothing in the Constitution that allows the federal government to regulate immigration. Though, to be clear, it does put the fed in charge of naturalizing immigrants. However, not until a hundred years after Independence were the first immigration laws passed. The only way the laws have stood up since is that immigration courts are not real courts. They're like hearing rooms of the executive branch. The "judges" are really civil servants working for the president, not judges appointed for life. So, if an immigrant wanted to challenge immigration laws, it would be in immigration court. The case would not be a judicial; the appeal would go to the AG, not to a real judge. If a non-immigrant wanted to challenge them, then the "real" court would say they have no standing to make the challenge. They're not a party with interest in the outcome. So, the immigration system has stood balanced on loopholes.

I expect my government to arrest criminals. I don't expect it to make America whiter. Purification of the American pedigree is not its cause. Such a thing has never existed. For Trump supporters, lashing out at other races is not only foolish and futile, but it makes everybody more miserable, including the Trumpers. They aim for a purer race, and the only thing they'll learn is it will solve nothing and make life a lot worse as it fails.

Unfortunately, I expect conditions for the growing number of detained immigrants to continue to worsen. As heinous as it is, the breaking of families is not what underlies this problem. If Trump stops breaking families, we'll get refugee camps and ghettos, and conditions in them will deteriorate because Trump and his henchmen in Congress will never provide funds to make the places inhabitable.

No, Trump's immigration policy is the real problem, and racism is the wickedness at its root. The camps and the detention centers are symptoms, the growing sores on the land.

Why Does Racism Persist?

I'm not a sociologist or psychologist, but I'd like someone in those disciplines to look into an observation that I've made. I'm beginning to think the policing of Black neighborhoods fuels White racism against Blacks. It skews White perceptions of Black violence, and even generates felonies out of minor incidences, which are cited by Whites as evidence that Blacks are a violent menace.  

I believe the policing practices must be changed, and not only because of the egregious loss of life and abnegation of civil rights for Blacks. I think the way Black neighborhoods are policed not only oppresses and creates danger for them, but that it drives a cycle of racism.

The skewed arrests from the extreme policing create the perception that Black neighborhoods are out of control "war zones." This has an immediate effect on police that makes them crack down harder and be more aggressive. This in turn puts the Black citizens there on edge and raises the general tension level. Meanwhile, the White police--who after all--have friends and family, communicate the danger to the rest of the White community. This in turn feeds the White people's perceptions of Black violence and fuels more racism. This is reinforced by the media, who sell a perception of crime. They take police accounts of incidents exactly as the police feed it to them. As the policing, and the racist feedback fuels White racism, the following generations of police are taken from the very communities conditioned to be racist.

IMHO, the over-policing is a self-fulfilling prophecy; the police being there cracking down on crime actually make things more unsafe, and it skews the officers' own attitudes toward the people policed. 

Americans, especially White Americans, are fixated on police. Much of our news is about crime. In Pop Culture, so much of our films, TV Shows and fiction literature are about police. While it's true that some of these give a negative picture of some police, the very fact that so many of our dramas are drawn from law enforcement says something about the importance we give it. This also feeds back the message that a career in law enforcement will make a person important.

Many police at least lean conservative. Among the White police, they're drawn from the very population of segregated suburban people most affected by stories of policing Black neighborhoods. Police candidates tend to be people who see disrespect of authority as being a main problem, and not coincidentally, they themselves want to be the authority that's obeyed.

Now, think about this: in St. Charles County, a White person can go weeks without seeing one Black person. What somebody's friend or relative in law enforcement says has both authority and persistence in the rumor mill. It's precisely the stories the officers tell when they come home that condition the neighborhoods toward racism. It also matters how, in their private lives, the officers refer to the people they're policing. If they call them n*gg*rs you can bet that gets passed on. The next generation of law enforcement is informed and conditioned by these authority figures.   
The results are, in almost any discussion group over the current racial conflicts, you'll have a White commentator say, "Why doesn't the media report on Black on White crime?" (Because over 80 percent of violent crime against Whites is perpetrated by other Whites); Or "Why don't they demonstrate against Black on Black crime?" (Because they'd be petitioning for the criminal element to become democratically responsive, which is a joke, when our police are supposed to be.) They make other, more shamelessly ignorant and racist remarks. They are totally misinformed, most likely by law enforcement people talking about their work.

In the last four months, we've seen the country drawn apart due to egregious murders by White police officers of Black males. The flagship example, Darren Wilson's shooting of Michael Brown, is illustrative. It's perfectly plain that if Darren Wilson had to defend himself at the scene, he was no longer defending himself when he took the last three shots, the fatal ones, especially when the distance from Wilson's SUV is considered (148 feet, as they measure it out in this video). Most Whites do not even ask that question, do not care to hear it.

The difference of opinion between Blacks and Whites about this incident comes down to this: Whites give Darren Wilson the right to take three extra shots under the auspices of self-defense even if they're informed that he "technically" did it because he was pissed off. They do it specifically to give other police the discretion, courtesy and BOD to control the "Black Menace."  

This is true in all recent examples of police shooting unarmed, sometimes totally innocent Black males. The no indictment vote against the officers who used a lethal choke-hold against Eric Garner was egregious given that the video plainly showed Garner was at most an anticipated danger, not a real one. Like Ferguson, it was a case of police taking a misdemeanor and turning it into a fatality. But even when taken to that extreme, Whites consider that police having such extreme discretion when dealing with Blacks to be reasonable given the importance and danger. Therefore, they call it self-defense even when it plainly wasn't.

Police having broad powers to defend themselves is ironic considering law enforcement is statistically not one of the most dangerous jobs. Also, it's apparently getting safer. Statistically, there are fewer deaths and injuries for police officers than there have been since the eighties. One could never draw that conclusion from what officers say about their work in Black neighborhoods and how they must have what amounts to the power of summary execution just to stay safe.




Yet, there've been millions of recent examples on social media of Whites absolving police officers for using deadly force when the danger was questionable and definitely not dire. Even when the police officers' stories are demonstrated false by video, even when nine other witnesses contradict the officer's testimony. Yet, in almost any discussion group over the current racial matters, you'll have a White commentator say, "Why doesn't the media report on Black on White crime?" (Because over 80 percent of violent crime against Whites is perpetrated by other Whites); Or "Why don't they demonstrate against Black on Black crime?" (Because they'd be petitioning for the criminal element to become democratically responsive, when our police are supposed to be.) They'd make other, more shamelessly racist remarks.

I never thought we'd still be struggling with racism in the twenty-first century. Maybe the focus should have always been on policing rather than enforced segregation. Discrimination will always be with us, but racism doesn't have to be.

Eugenics and the Myth of Racial Superiority

Internet commentary has certainly demolished some myths. One of them is that we're in a post-racial society, or anything like one. You can cite the millions of openly bigoted comments, especially those made after Barrack Obama's election in 2008. Besides the ARWP's, there's a whole host of commentators and trolls that don't even try to hedge or redefine their racism anymore.

This does have the pretense of being scientific, but there's no credibility to it. First of all, six cubic inches is huge. Asians would need a second head for that. Even if the poster used the wrong units, the average brain volume (according to Wikipedia, for a quick answer) is 1260 cubic centimeters. Six cubic  centimeters would be within the margin of error of that figure. In other words, insignificant.

Second, everything one talks about with genetics--with all of science really-- is a matter of probabilities. At best, discrimination judges someone not where their abilities fall, but where they're guessed likely fall.

Third, intelligence is not a well-defined term.

However, eugenics itself is flawed to its very core. It's not actually "Survival of the fittest." Evolution doesn't select for the best traits. It selects for ones that are best for survival and reproduction in the organism's environment. This seldom matches what a human being would consider an improvement. Such as, when human beings learned to cook, we began to get crooked teeth, because the genetics for well-meshed teeth were no longer needed, and the resource expenditure to make teeth straight and keep jaws strong was unnecessary. This is not something that eugenicists would consider superior. 

Therefore, a eugenic dictator is likely to choose "superior" traits that suck in the environment that his subjects actually have to live in--since life is inherently unpredictable. So, eugenics would reduce survival and reproductive success. 

I'm not sure if anybody else has this reaction, but whenever I hear of the eugenicists of the late 19th and and early 20th century (and during that time, almost every well-educated Caucasian who came of age then was a eugenicist) I'm struck by how naive they were. The whole reason the ideology was evil was that it would cause a lot of suffering, and for nothing, because it wouldn't work. Anybody who understands Darwinism now knows that. It's better to let the environment tell our genes what it wants. That's what genes exist for.

So, any claim of racial status based on so-called science is fraudulent. At best, it's a biology dropout who would make the claim. 

Like Criminals Respect their Communities' Wishes?

A New Orlean's protest against Black on Black violence, January 11, 2007. There have at least nine other major protests in that city since 2006, and hundreds in most major US cities.

I'm picking this up from my last entry, where I defined the term ARWP, short for Ambiguously Racist White People. I'll alternately call them sometimes ARs for Ambiguous Racists, or ARRs for Ambiguously Racist Reactionaries. 

An Acronym for Posts to Follow

Ferguson protest in Clayton (the seat of St. Louis county).

(Disclaimer: I'm White and male. I'm committed to ending both racism and sexism and exposing the myths and pretensions that keep the two socially potent.)

I needed a term for discriminating white people who maintain that their moderate racism isn't racist. The sort who are proud that their use of the n*gg*r to describe a low-life white person shows such racial enlightenment. They cite the lack of white hoods in their closets as conclusive proof that their refusal to think about hiring a Black person has nothing to do with race. The ones who won't let the color of a person's skin bother them, but clothes, language and names are all fair game; and the ones of Black people disgust them the most of all, merely by coincidence. The sort who always make damn sure they always have one or two Black friends so when they're accused of racism, they can always cite him, and (don't forget!) his family as some of his best friends.

For now I'll settle for Ambiguously Racist White People, or ARWP's. Or perhaps just ARs. I've been having run-ins with a lot of them recently on social media. The Riverfront Times Facebook Page. I needed to develop a term before I dove into it. I don't want to paint White people with too broad a brush, do I?
 

Racism in St Louis

Michael Brown, The outrage (Click on Picture for full article)