history that your teacher never taught - leave or die.

It is America’s family secret.

Beginning in 1864 and continuing for approximately 60 years, whites across the United States conducted a series of racial expulsions. They drove thousands of blacks from their homes to make communities lily-white.

In at least a dozen of the most extreme cases, blacks were purged from entire counties that remain almost exclusively white, according to the most recent census.

The expulsions were violent and swift, and they stretched beyond the South. But they remain largely unacknowledged in standard histories of America. While it is impossible to say exactly how many expulsions took place, computer analysis and years of research conducted by the Washington Bureau of Cox Newspapers, which owns the American-Statesman, reveal that they occurred on a scale that has never been fully documented or understood.

Leave Or Die: America’s Hidden History of Racial Expulsions

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Tagged as: texas,racism,bigotry,history December 16, 2008 @ 09:11 am

an ongoing convo within me: free speech or stfu, you bastard

update: ultimately, who cares?  my thoughts on the subject don’t amount to a hill of beans.

this may be a rather rambling entry, as it’s an issue i’m working through…

first note: my only real concern is that which is considered “hate speech”

british philosopher john milton argued:

• “that a nation’s unity is created through blending individual differences rather than imposing homogeneity from above;
• that the ability to explore the fullest range of ideas on a given issue was essential to any learning process and truth cannot be arrived upon unless all points of view are first considered;
• and that by considering free thought, censorship acts to the detriment of material progress.”

milton seems to believe that if the facts are put out there, truth will win out; however no one person is able to act as a censor for all people.

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Tagged as: politics,me,culture,racism,bigotry October 19, 2008 @ 11:47 am

what “they” don’t get…

there has been much discussion of the tone the mccain-palin rallies are taking.  they have become increasingly hate-filled and strident.  the response of the mccain-palin campaign and their supporters has been to say, “liberals say mean things too!!!”  and they are right.  they do.  there are whackos on the left, the right, and ~gasp~ in the middle.  these people are the “extremists”.  they act as individuals, condoned by neither party.

until recently.

for months, there have been repeated attacks calling obama a “terrorist”, a “muslim”, an “arab”, the “anti-christ”, a “non-citizen”, who “hates america” and wants to “kill live babies”.  by and large, those attacks have come from individuals, not the hillary campaign, not republican nominee campaigns.

then, enter the mccain-palin campaigns.  it is now the CAMPAIGN, which is driving this escalation in hateful rhetoric. 

What makes them different, and what has pumped up the Weimar-like rage at McCain-Palin rallies, is the violent escalation in rhetoric, especially (though not exclusively) by Palin. Obama “launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist.” He is “palling around with terrorists” (note the plural noun). Obama is “not a man who sees America the way you and I see America.” Wielding a wildly out-of-context Obama quote, Palin slurs him as an enemy of American troops.

By the time McCain asks the crowd “Who is the real Barack Obama?” it’s no surprise that someone cries out “Terrorist!” The rhetorical conflation of Obama with terrorism is complete. It is stoked further by the repeated invocation of Obama’s middle name by surrogates introducing McCain and Palin at these rallies. This sleight of hand at once synchronizes with the poisonous Obama-is-a-Muslim e-mail blasts and shifts the brand of terrorism from Ayers’ Vietnam-era variety to the radical Islamic threats of today.  read more...

while mccain comes out and asks that everyone be respectful, etc, his partner (palin) is once again drawing the line in teh sand - good guys vs bad guys.  good guys?  republicans.  bad guys?  THEM.  those who “hate america”... which she has already pointed out includes william ayers and barack obama.

this escalation has me worried.  if it continues, something serious may happen.

john lewis, georgia congressman and civil rights movement leader, agrees:

As one who was a victim of violence and hate during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, I am deeply disturbed by the negative tone of the McCain-Palin campaign. What I am seeing today reminds me too much of another destructive period in American history. 

Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are sowing the seeds of hatred and division, and there is no need for this hostility in our political discourse.

During another period, in the not too distant past, there was a governor of the state of Alabama named George Wallace who also became a presidential candidate. George Wallace never threw a bomb. He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who only desired to exercise their constitutional rights. Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed one Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama.

As public figures with the power to influence and persuade, Sen. McCain and Governor Palin are playing with fire, and if they are not careful, that fire will consume us all. They are playing a very dangerous game that disregards the value of the political process and cheapens our entire democracy. We can do better. The American people deserve better.

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Tagged as: politics,racism,elections2008,bigotry,mccain October 13, 2008 @ 06:20 pm

palin continues campaign of hate

omg.  she just doesn’t stop.

“Help me, Ohio, to help put John McCain in the White House,” she said. “He understands. He understands you. We understand how important it is that this team be elected. For one thing, we know who the bad guys are, OK?”

That statement elicited scattered shouts of “Obama!” throughout the crowd.

“We know that in the war, it’s terrorists, terrorists who hate America and her allies and would seek to destroy us, and the bad guys are those who would support and sympathize with the terrorists,” she said. “They do not like America because of what we stand for. Liberty. Freedom. Equal rights. Those who sympathize and support those terrorists who would seek to destroy all that it is that we value, those are the bad guys, OK?”

from: Palin draws a line between ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’

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Tagged as: politics,racism,elections2008,bigotry,mccain October 13, 2008 @ 01:18 am

study finds blacks are “violent”, “lazy” and “irresponsible”...if you’re white.

an article recently from the associated press stated that,

Deep-seated racial misgivings could cost Barack Obama the White House if the election is close, according to an AP-Yahoo News poll that found one-third of white Democrats harbor negative views toward blacks — many calling them “lazy,” “violent” or responsible for their own troubles.

The poll, conducted with Stanford University, suggests that the percentage of voters who may turn away from Obama because of his race could easily be larger than the final difference between the candidates in 2004 — about 2.5 percentage points.

further findings from the study:

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Tagged as: politics,culture,news,racism,elections2008,bigotry,immigration,obama September 29, 2008 @ 05:24 am