I mean, you can understand why black people have and have had historically a very unique position in this country as a kind of uniquely ostracized population, right? That’s not a 1 to 1 comparison we’d make in like, any other circumstance, I dunno why we’d start now. Effectively, what I’m saying is something that goes back quite a ways, you could come up with a lot of historical examples of this, it’s not new. Italian immigrants after ww2, eastern european immigrants, irish immigrants, even jewish immigrants to a certain extent, they were all able to be subsumed by the larger umbrella of whiteness precisely as they voted in accordance with more conservative interests which explicitly do not like them. The same thing that would have happened in this election with latinos, except we’ve run up on the rails of that process because things are materially different. What I’m saying is that it doesn’t really make sense to get mad at that voterbase for voting in that particular way.
The broader point I’m making is that there’s a difference between thinking about these things critically, and getting mad at the wind, and I see a lot of people getting mad at the wind. Except, unlike getting mad at the wind, their anger is actually harmful, actually creates a constant feedback loop in how it’s directed. Some people get mad at a dog for biting them. Certainly, it makes sense to get mad in general, since you’ve been bit, that’s painful, and the dog is the most directly at fault object for that. Some people get mad at the owner, since they can’t control their dog, you know, maybe that’s a step removed, maybe that’s even actually effective at preventing future bites, I dunno. Some people just start to move towards the medicine cabinet as soon as possible, so they can clean their bite. I would rather be the third person, in that example.
I mean, you can understand why black people have and have had historically a very unique position in this country as a kind of uniquely ostracized population, right? That’s not a 1 to 1 comparison we’d make in like, any other circumstance, I dunno why we’d start now. Effectively, what I’m saying is something that goes back quite a ways, you could come up with a lot of historical examples of this, it’s not new. Italian immigrants after ww2, eastern european immigrants, irish immigrants, even jewish immigrants to a certain extent, they were all able to be subsumed by the larger umbrella of whiteness precisely as they voted in accordance with more conservative interests which explicitly do not like them. The same thing that would have happened in this election with latinos, except we’ve run up on the rails of that process because things are materially different. What I’m saying is that it doesn’t really make sense to get mad at that voterbase for voting in that particular way.
The broader point I’m making is that there’s a difference between thinking about these things critically, and getting mad at the wind, and I see a lot of people getting mad at the wind. Except, unlike getting mad at the wind, their anger is actually harmful, actually creates a constant feedback loop in how it’s directed. Some people get mad at a dog for biting them. Certainly, it makes sense to get mad in general, since you’ve been bit, that’s painful, and the dog is the most directly at fault object for that. Some people get mad at the owner, since they can’t control their dog, you know, maybe that’s a step removed, maybe that’s even actually effective at preventing future bites, I dunno. Some people just start to move towards the medicine cabinet as soon as possible, so they can clean their bite. I would rather be the third person, in that example.