Wednesday, December 28, 2016

2016: The Year in White Privilege

Given that white nationalists are empowered by Trump's election to the White House, a recap of enraging events that showed that this sector just couldn't handle one term of a black man in the Oval Office, let alone two.

Spring

  • Harper published an admission by a Nixon aide that the "war on drugs" was, in fact, racially motivated
  • Speaking of drugs, black people are being shut out from selling legal marijuana in Colorado due to drug war era laws
  • There was a lot of outrage from white America over Harambe the Gorilla in Cincinnati at the end of 2015 but practically none a few months later when an alligator killed a two year old at a Disney resort
  • The Stanford rapist aka Brock Turner's laughable sentence. His dad yapping about Turner's "20 minutes of action" was beyond reprehensible. There's also the possibility that Judge Aaron Persky may have cited "political correctness" in sentencing Turner to six months

Summer

  • Gabby Douglas got blasted for not placing her hand over her hart when the national anthem was played for the women's gymnastics team while two men's shot putters who also failed to place their hands over their hearts after one of them won received no reaction from the same people who ripped the gymnast 
  • The idiotic blogger who denounced swimmer Simone Manuel for making truthful comments
  • Ryan Lochte essentially got rewarded for his bad behavior by getting that Dancing with the Stars slot
  • This sicko in Iowa


Fall

  • The whole DAPL-Standing Rock drama 
  • Members of the tribe were treated harshly on the same day an Oregon court acquitted members of a militia who illegally occupied land further west
The only good thing that happened was the fact that the Supreme Court didn't allow a mediocre student to dismantle affirmative action in late June.

ADDED 1/7/17: Let's not also forget the heroin epidemic. When it hit black neighborhoods in the '70s, the response was "lock 'em up"but now, when white neighborhoods suffered the same fate in recent years, everybody talked about treatment and needle exchanges.

Stunted City Redux

Well, it looks like this prediction from almost seven years ago is coming to pass--albeit slowly: Durham and Winston-Salem traded the #4 an...