I keep thinking about this racism thing. The other day, i wrote a blog post about the racist jt ready and how he was invited to speak for a big crowd at some anti-immigrant rally. But a couple things are bothering me. One is that i can't get over how there's this denial of racism coming from racists that say white supremacist things. I've discussed this in prior posts- maybe it's just semantics, or maybe "racism" is being re-defined so that people can avoid being associated with the taboo subject.
The other thing that i've been thinking about it is that racism (in this context) is so much more than white people saying bad things about immigrants, wanting them out of the country, or going to rallies supporting repression against immigrants.
There's this whole system that allows for all these injustices to occur disproportionately affecting people of color, such as criminalizing people and throwing them in jail, lack of workers' rights, environmental racism, sexual assault, police brutality, erasure of people's history and culture, poor health care, etc, etc, etc. The existence of this is racist, and the denial of this is racist, and it's been happening since before the civil rights movement, and continues today.
In addition, i've discussed the attitudes of white people to feel entitled to certain things that they don't want other to be entitled to, and see things in a biased way so as to rationalize their sense of injustice and their tendency to scapegoat the wrong people.
These things are not to be overlooked when discussing racism. J.T. Ready is just some a-hole. Yeah, it is significant that he was invited to speak for a group of people who claim not to be racist. It exposes their hypocrisy. It exposes their racism. It helps to delegitimize them. But it doesn't matter everyone except for the neo-nazi-lovers reject stereotypes of undocumented immigrants, or whatever. As long as all this other shit is going on, it doesn't really matter.
So the fight isn't just about the minutemen or neo-nazis or neo-nazi-lovers, nor is it just about legislation and politicians, it's about this whole system that effects all sorts of people, including white people- because we can never be free until everyone is free, right?
