Your Economy OT - Conspiracy, Politics, Religion, Terrorism, War

[Ayock]

New York Times Commenter Beautifully Exposes America's Racist Mainstream Right
THU JUN 18, 2015 AT 04:41 PM PDT
byScandalous OneFollow


There is so much going on in my head right now about the latest mass shooting act of terrorism in America, the racist elements behind it, and how it's affecting my psychology as a black American. In trying to make sense of what happened, I stumbled upon this comment in a New York Times article about the event. I think this commenter really puts the nail on the head on why this cycle of hate, violence, and racism continues in America.

The comment was made by an anonymous NYT reader from Pennsylvania under the username: Gfagan. It was picked by the Times as one of their top comments and recommended more than 4000 times by other users. This is what Gfagan had to say:

I am Irish. For many years in my native land the Rev. Ian Paisley spouted bigoted hatred about Catholics in Northern Ireland, but then claimed innocence when some militant sectarian group massacred Catholics. Speech was not murder, he said. He would never condone killing, he said. Then he went right back to feeding the attitudes that spawned the killing. Few were fooled.

We should not be fooled in America today.

In this country the "mainstream" right-wing has made an industry of demonizing African-Americans as "thugs" and criminals - just look at the divergence in tone between the recent coverage of Ferguson or Baltimore and the (mostly white) biker massacre in Waco, TX. For decades, white America has been told that black Americans are lazy leeches, dependent on hand-outs funded by your hard-earned taxes to bankroll their immoral lifestyles.

The first black president was greeted by the right not only with diehard obstructionism but a chorus of color-coded abuse ("lazy," "food-stamp president" etc) and questions about his very American-ness: he was "not one of us," a foreigner adhering to a foreign religion who has no right to be president.

The siren song of racial hate relentlessly put out by the "mainstream" right finds echo in the gunshots that rang out in Charleston.

Rightists will, of course, deny the connection, the way Paisley did. But we are not fooled.