Posts Tagged ‘white supremacism’

Chicago’s mayor Brandon Johnson asks, “Who expected me to defeat white supremacy in one year?”

Posted: April 7, 2024 by John Ruberry in business, crime, elections, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
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Brandon Johnson

By John Ruberry

Chicago has a nasty mess on its hands with Brandon Johnson as mayor.

Crime rates remain high compared to the pre-pandemic year of 2019.

It’s common for big city mayors to claim that crime is declining, but they usually look back only a year for comparison numbers and then declare, “You see!” However, in March, the murder total in Chicago exceeded the killings in March of last year–by 28 percent. 

Johnson suffered a major political loss last month. His Bring Chicago Home referendum, which would have raised the real estate on high-end property transactions, was defeated. Funds from that tax hike would have been used to battle homelessness, although Johnson and other key supporters of BCH provided no details on how that money would be spent.  Supporters of BCH, utilizing a class warfare tactics, dubbed it a “mansion tax.”

When commenting on the defeat of Bring Chicago Home, Johnson all but blamed supporters of former president Donald Trump. But in the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden won all 50 Chicago wards, with Trump collecting a meager 15 percent of the vote in Chicago. Sorry, Jussie Smollett, but Chicago is not MAGA Country.

Last week, to mark the anniversary of his narrow victory over moderate Democrat Paul Vallas, Johnson, a progressive Democrat who is a former Chicago Teachers Union organizer, granted two exclusive interviews, both with leftist news sources, Block Club Chicago and the Triibe. 

As for the former, Johnson queried reporter Quinn Myers, “Name one thing that I said I was gonna do that I haven’t done. You won’t be able to.”

Well, here is one item: Johnson made a campaign promise to hire 200 police detectives. The current municipal budget calls for adding only 100. 

Johnson sees himself as a “movement politician,” and this political species tends to be fond of using hyperbole. Not surprisingly, the mayor used a troubling verb, “assassinate,” when he discussed his movement in the Block Club interview.

“That’s why they worked hard to disrupt it and destroy it, and have gone as far to assassinate it,” Johnson told Myers. “And so whether it’s literally or figuratively, the work to assassinate character or to assassinate our movement, we’re not going to allow that type of fear to disrupt what ultimately the people of Chicago wanted. And that’s why they voted for me.” 

That’s not correct. There are many opinions on why Johnson won. For certain, his former employer and his chief financial backer, the far-left Chicago Teachers Union, outhustled the old-school campaign of Vallas. In my opinion, Chicagoans just wanted a less acidic version of his unpopular predecessor, Lori Lightfoot. So, voters chose the Lightfoot-esque candidate–but without the venomous fangs.

Let’s move on to the second interview, with the Triibe, which was conducted by Tonia Hill.

Wikipedia describes the Triibe as “an African-American online news and digital media company based in Chicago, Illinois.” Until last week I hadn’t heard of it.

Johnson let loose a missile with Hill. “Who expected me to defeat white supremacy in one year?” the mayor said. “There were individuals who did not know the full value of what I brought to the mayor’s office, and there were forces working to disrupt that.”

Whooah.

Johnson wasn’t elected to defeat white supremacy. Voters chose him to run America’s third-largest city, and his primary duty as mayor is to protect its residents–not to peddle far-left talking points.

This is not the first time Johnson has used the racism canard as mayor. He has not handled the migrant crisis well. In response to well-earned criticism of his response to the arrival of arrivals in Chicago, Johnson counter attacked. “Everyone knows that the right-wing extremism in this country has targeted democratically-run cities,” the mayor said. “It is abysmal, and it is an affront for everything that is good about this country for the extremism in this country to use people as political tools to settle political scores for something that happened over 400 years ago.”

Johnson concluded that Republicans are “still mad that a black man is free in this country.”

No, they are not.

The media in Chicago leans left as it does just about every place else in America. But Johnson expects hero worship from reporters, not objective criticism. Consequently, Johnson’s relationship with Chicago’s mainstream media has been rocky, because newspaper and television reporters have been mildly critical of him.

They need to be tougher. A good place for journalists to start is to ask Johnson what he meant when he said, “Who expected me to defeat white supremacy in one year?” In short journos–do your job.

Business leaders, and by the way, not all of them are white, dislike “us versus them” rhetoric. Because they are the “them,” the perceived enemy. But these “enemies” are the job providers. Corporate Chicago largely opposed Bring Home Chicago. After its defeat, Johnson called the opponents of the referendum “wicked.”

Chicago needs as many businesses as it can get. Downtown Chicago’s office vacancy rate is a record 25.1 percent. The downtown retail vacancy rate is 30 percent. Both are records. Downtown is the financial engine that powers Chicago. Kill it, and the city dies. The Detroit dystopia is not a farfetched future for Chicago.

While they had obvious weaknesses in their combined 30 years as mayor, Lightfoot’s predecessors, Richard M. Daley and Rahm Emanuel, were tremendous salespeople for Chicago. Lightfoot, and even more so Johnson, not so much.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Godwin’s Law needs a revision or a successor

Posted: February 12, 2023 by John Ruberry in culture, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics, Uncomfortable Truths
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By John Ruberry

It’s time to revise or perhaps expand on Godwin’s Law. Named for attorney Mike Godwin, which, according to Dictionary.com, “Godwin’s law is the proposition that the longer an internet argument goes on, the higher the probability becomes that something or someone will be compared to Adolf Hitler.” 

Here’s the new law, you can call it Godwin’s Law II, Ruberry’s Law, or just a simple observation: The longer any American political discussion continues, it’s very likely that something or someone will be called a white supremacist. 

Yes, that includes some things. When Pete Buttigieg was calling for massive infrastructure spending last year, he mentioned previous road and bridge projects and “the racism that went into those design choices.” To be fair, there is a grain of truth or two to what Buttigieg said. Nearly 100 years ago, master builder and notorious racist, Robert Moses, purposely designed Long Island’s Southern State Parkway, which was built to expand access to Jones Beach State Park, another Moses project, with overpasses that were quite low, so buses, presumably filled with minorities, couldn’t be driven to Jones Beach. 

On the other hand, it has long accepted as local gospel that the 14-lane Dan Ryan Expressway, built like a trench, was geographically placed to separate South Side Chicago’s white and growing black populations. Chicago’s NPR station dismissed that tale as an urban legend ten years ago. Long before the Dan Ryan’s completion in 1962, African Americans had migrated in large numbers to the “white” side of the expressway. 

Let’s move on to an interesting young man, Vince Dao. He’s a conservative who late last year participated in the Asian Americans Debate Model Minority & Asian Hate panel organized by Vice. Dao spoke with a level of common sense, so much so that most of the other participants, including a Bangladeshi American man and a Korean American woman with purple hair, appeared to be suffering coronary attacks as they had never been confronted with a logical discussion in their lives. 

If you only have a few minutes, the core part of this debate begins at the nine-minute mark.

“If America is to hold together, assimilation [is]–not just good or bad–[but] necessary,” Dao stated. “I don’t think it’s going to be possible for America to survive as a stable functioning society if people don’t, to some degree, say, ‘Well here’s what we’re going to commonly agree upon.'”

“But who gets to choose it?” another panelist asked. Dao responded, “The majority culture I suppose.” When pressed on what was that majority culture, Dao elaborated it would those who happen to be in power. “And who’s ‘people with power?’ White people?,” the purple-haired woman bellowed out while rolling her eyes, adding derisively for emphasis, “I’m going to say it… white people!”

Not surprisingly, purple-haired woman brings up “white supremacy,” proving the infallibility of Godwin’s Law II or whatever you think it should be called. Later in the exchange she asks Dao, “Do you ever say ‘all lives matter?'” His response, was, “Of course.” Another woman, sarcastically responding as if Dao was on trial for murder and he admitted in testimony that he committed the deed, answered back, “There it is! All lives matter!”

Yes, some leftists believe if you say, “All lives matter,” it is racist.

The sheep in George Orwell’s Animal Farm would be proud of Dao’s detractors. 

When Republican Larry Elder, a black man, ran for governor of California two years ago, a Los Angeles Times columnist warned that Elder offered a “white supremacist worldview” and that he was a “very real threat to communities of color.” Last month, the brutal beating death of Tyre Nichols at the hands of Memphis police officers–the first five cops charged with his murder are black–was presented by some media wags as an example of white supremacy. Oh, the chief of police in Memphis is an African American woman.

The general theme of the white supremacy trope is that America is rigged–and our nation’s ruling class is in place–forever. 

No, it isn’t.

Let’s talk about William Augustine Washington. He was the last great-great-great-great-great-grandson of Augustine Washington, a slave-owner like his famous son, our first president. 

While generations of the Washington family enjoyed great financial success, William Augustine Washington, who died in Bradley, Illinois in 1994, was a humble tool-and-die maker. That’s something to ponder as Presidents’ Day is next week.

At my age I can say I know, met, and interacted with thousands of people, many of them fascinating individuals. Until recently I worked with a man, a modest yet erudite clerk, who was a descendant of George Washington’s successor as president, John Adams.

When I toiled in the hospitality industry, one of the salespeople I worked alongside had a distinguished ancestor of her own, Arthur Middleton, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Years earlier she parlayed her lineage, and, ahem, white privilege, to land a highly paid job. Well, not really–on the financial end. She wore a hoop skirt while portraying an ordinary citizen at Colonial Williamsburg. 

As for my white family, the richest member of my extended relations was a great uncle–who fathered one child, a son. The son died broke.

America is not “rigged,” but that is not to say racism doesn’t exist. It certainly does. 

But America’s freedom to succeed comes with a curse, the possibility of failure, even if you are white.

And for some sheep, America is about, and only about, white supremacy. Which is why, because of those sheep, if you wait long enough, every political argument will devolve into that topic. 

Yes, we have a new law of political discussion.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Whiteness and You … and Me, Too

Posted: August 13, 2019 by julietteochieng in oddities
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Cite: New York Times

by baldilocks

I’m going to try to read this whole thing without stabbing my eyes out.

A taste:

The most important and consequential thing that sociologists have discovered about whiteness—having white skin and/or being identified as white—is that it is perceived as the normal or default race in the U.S. Though the nation is racially diverse and most are aware of that, anyone who is not white is specially coded through language in a way that marks their race or ethnicity, while white people are not treated this way. “European American” or “Caucasian American” are not common phrases, but African American, Asian American, Indian American, Mexican American, etc., are. It’s also common practice among white people to only specifically state the race of a person they came into contact with if that person is not white. Sociologists recognize that the way we speak about people signals that white people are “normal” Americans, while everyone else is a different kind of American that requires additional explanation.

For anyone who is not white, that additional language and what it signifies is often forced upon and expected of them, whereas for white people, because we are seen as the norm, ethnicity is optional. It is something that we can access if we want to, and use as social or cultural capital. But, it is not required of a white American, for example, to embrace and identify with her British, Irish, Scottish, French, and Canadian heritage. It is rare that she will be asked to explain where she or her parents are from in that special way that really means, “What are you?” Her whiteness casts her as normal, as expected, and as inherently American.

We see the “normal” nature of whiteness in film and television too, in which most main characters are white, and in the case where a show or film prominently features actors of color, it is considered a “Black” or “Hispanic” cultural product. Film and television that primarily features white people is “normal” film and television that is thought to appeal to the mainstream; those that feature actors of color in lead roles and casts composed predominantly of people of color are considered niche works that exist outside of that mainstream. The race of the cast members marks the work as “different.” (TV show creators Shonda Rhimes, Jenji Kohan, Mindy Kaling, and Aziz Ansari are contributing to a shift in the racial television landscape, but their shows are exceptions, not the norm.)

Fact is, I agree with this. But is it really that big of a deal?

And what I hate about the dust-up and uproar about “white supremacy” and “white privilege” is that the dust ups and uproars reek of the very things they hate.

If you, citizen of good faith, think that each individual is equal in the sight of God, then that’s great. The overreaction, however, to anything remotely critical or other-ing of any black person is problematic and is, frankly fake. It’s a cover for the true feelings of those who wage war against White “Supremacy/Privilege”: that whites are superior to non-whites and especially to blacks. To them, the only way to counteract it is to, basically, lay down and die. Or, at the very least, to refrain from reproducing.

(Psst! Here’s something else: the overreaction to actual white supremacism smells bad, too.)

How else do I know that the war is fake? The overreaction happens only when black liberals/leftists/Democrats are criticized. But let someone call, say, me, a “sell-out n-word” and none of the Warriors Against Whiteness could give a rat’s. I see you, Anti-Whiteness Warriors!

Ah, well. Let’s read. Let me know if there’s a surprise ending.

Juliette Akinyi Ochieng has been blogging since 2003 as baldilocks. Her older blog is here.  She published her first novel, Tale of the Tigers: Love is Not a Game in 2012.

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