Skip to main content

Spare Me

Sometimes you find something so incredibly stupid and so utterly irresponsible on social media that you have to address it. Last weekend was the Peoples' Summit in Chicago, where a coalition of Sanders supporters and left-wing activists flocked to a three-day event to discuss about where the movement, which started back in 2016 behind then-candidate Bernie Sanders, would and should go in the Trump era, including whether the Democratic Party can be (or should be) saved, or if the time has come to abandon the party and start a new People's party instead. Enter The Young Turks correspondent Nomiki Konst and her thoughts on why the Democratic establishment should accept and embrace independents who don't lean either with the R's or D's in primary battles.


*Rolls eyes HARD for several minutes*

Yeah, you read that correctly: not allowing independent/progressive voters to cast a ballot in closed primaries is akin to voter suppression and racism. Allow me to retort:

During the Jim Crow Era, Southern states pulled every trick in the book to try and disenfranchise black voters: literacy and civic tests tests were enforced, knowing that blacks who couldn't read or write wouldn't pass (If you were an illiterate white man? Just say your grandpappy was a Confederate in the Civil War, and you're good to go!). A poll tax was enforced, just to make sure if a nigger could read, said nigger couldn't pay the hefty fine to participate in the democratic process, depending on which state in the South you were in (Again, if you were a poor white, just prove your family tree was able to vote before the start of the war, and you're golden!). The ratio of owning land to the size of the property you had, having pertenant information on you when you showed up to the polling station, character and moral fiber tests were enforced if a black man could read, as well as had the money to pay the tax were also established in order to assure that voting was as white as possible. And, hey: if all those tactics didn't work, then there's nothing a little forceful intimidation couldn't fix!


During the Civil Rights Era, African-American protested, struggled to change hearts and minds, bled and died so that I didn't have to worry about being singled out because of my skin color at the ballot box. Still today, minority voters - AA's, Latinos, the LBGTQ community, and women of color, face voter suppression tactics in places like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, Arizona, and in the deep-Southern states by Republican-led state legislatures and Governors who enact laws which make it more difficult for us to vote......but a well-off white woman thinks that progressives who are too indifferent to identify themselves as a Democrat for five minutes are being victimized by the Powers-That-Be. 


Ms. Konst could have made the argument that closed primaries stifles turnout and sends a message that independents aren't that important to Democratic or Republican politics, and thus, don't give us better candidates, and I would find some agreement in that argument - We, as Democrats must do a better job of reaching out to voters who have felt alienated by the process and presenting candidates which speak to a broad range of individuals, but that's not what she said, and that wasn't the argument she was trying to make. Konst basically argued that white progressives like her are just as much victims as minority voters who face actual voter suppression.


Excuse me while I speak as bluntly as possible: 


Take your persecution complex and shove it straight up your privileged white ass!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Mr. Brown Verses Bland, Weepy Teen Melodrama

Todd in the Shadows once said that he defined the worst hit song of the calendar year as a song being the absence of good. At the time, I didn't really understood what he meant when he chose "Tonight Tonight", by Hot Chelle Rae in 2011 and "Roar", by Katy Perry in 2013. Last night, I finally understood what he meant. Because, I, too, have seen a movie that's the absence of good. Todd meant that a song could make you angry, the beat could drive you insane, the lyrics could be insulting and simply lazy, but, in his eyes, those two aforementioned songs had nothing  going for them. Nothing lyrically, nothing catchy, nothing offensive, nothing that could make you feel insulted, angry or simply seeing red, because there's literally nothing  about it that can make you feel anything. That movie belongs to Bland, Weepy Teen Melodrama , the  latest attempt to suck money out of teen girls ....I mean, young adult novel by Second Rate Nicholas Sparks that became ...

What We Talk About When We Talk About Great Movies: The 10 Best Films of 2014 - Part II

And here's (finally) part two of my list of the best from last year, along with the full list at the bottom. 5. The Wind Rises  - The worst thing I can honestly say about this gorgeous animated feature is that, at 126 minutes, it wasn't long enough. I could get lost in Hayao Miyazaki's final effort for hours and not get bored. The writer-director-animator is a master of whisking us away to new worlds of his own creation, but how fitting that his last masterwork is where we're rooted into the past as Miyazaki tells the story of real-life Jiro Horikoshi as he lives out his dreams of building airplanes, despite them being used for the Imperial Army back in World War II. Every last frame of this film - from Jiro's dreams with fellow designer Giovanni Caproni and his brief romance with Nahoko, to showing the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1932 and his journey to Nazi Germany several years later - is painstakingly beautiful and artfully crafted to within an inch of his...

I'm Dreaming of a White Oscars

What does Stephen Hawking, the godfather of computer science, a hotel manager breaking out from prison during the first World War, a young boy and his family growing up through 12 years and the battle of wills between a aspiring musician and his near-abusive professor have in common? On the surface, these are different films ranging in different subjects. But when you look at the people who stared, wrote and directed these various movies, A few patterns begin to emerge: 1. The cast is predominately white. 2. The story mostly centers on a male protagonist. 3. The filmmakers behind the project are white and male. And all of those films I've mentioned:  The Theory of Everything , The Imitation Game , The Grand Budapest Hotel , Boyhood  and Whiplash  - have all been nominated for Best Picture for this year's 87th annual Academy Awards. Before I go any further, I just want to say that this is not an attack on the films themselves. Most of the films mentioned I really...