2024 Archives

If America is ever to become a pluralistic, multiracial democratic republic we must come to terms with racism and white privilege… Some white people really don't want to hear that if they'd been born Black their lives would have almost certainly been much harder. It shatters their ability to cling to the number one most important aspect/benefit of white privilege. It confronts them with the end of innocence. This is particularly difficult for America's elite media. The very idea of calling out, for example, Trump supporters for their racism is "beyond the pale." And I mean that nearly literally. A "palus," the "pale" referenced in that old phrase, was a sharpened stake sticking out from a fence designed to keep people within a certain area: it was the 13th century version of barbed or razor wire. They were called "paling fences." The British used them back then to keep Irish people from leaving their Gaza-like confinement areas in eastern parts of Ireland, the area that, for the British, was "beyond the pales." America's news media is as wary of calling Republicans racists as the Irish were of getting themselves impaled (also where that word came from) on the British fences. Think about it: when was the last time you heard or read Trump, or his cult followers, being explicitly identified as "racist" by any of our major media outlets. And yet they are racists.