DENYING RACISM IS RACISM

Since the awful shooting in SC, something beyond astonishing has been happening among the conservative mouths talking about it. A lot of them have gone out of their way, bent over backwards, to deny what it was, an act of heinous, racist terrorism.

From Rick Santorum, Fox News, and others' ludicrous attempt to situate the attack as part of the false "persecuted American Christians" narrative, to Jeb Bush saying, "I don’t know what was on the mind or the heart of the man who committed these atrocious crimes," to Rick Perry calling it an "accident" and focusing on mental health, to the Wall Street Journal's claim that racism no longer exists, and on and on and on, we are seeing a deluge of conservatives falling over themselves to deny what is totally and completely obvious. A horrific white supremacist piece of shit, a neo-Confederate far right reactionary conservative, committed a racist, absolute atrocity.

I mean, it's SO obvious that all these conservative rhetorical distracters appear to be totally insane. It looks, at a casual glance, like something very weird, indeed, is going on. That so many prominent conservatives would so quickly take to the airwaves to proclaim unflinchingly that up is down, left is right, white is black, would appear to need an explanation.

Except that this isn't weird at all, and it doesn't need an explanation. We know EXACTLY what's going on.

This is business as usual for conservatives. This is how they think. This is coming from the same impulse that makes Trayvon Martin a thug. This is the same impulse that makes conservatives condemn rioting while supporting the kind of policing that kills unarmed black people--and inspires rioting. This is the same impulse that blames black people for the poverty in which they live. And on and on and on.

From Hullabaloo:

All these acts of terrorism against black churches are coincidental. The mass incarceration of black people is coincidental, The killing of unarmed black teenagers is coincidental. There is no racism. It just so happens that black people are born criminals, act suspiciously and are, for some reason, often the targets of crazy people who aren't motivated by the racism they see around them in the form of symbols like the confederate flag or the vile racist rhetoric that comes from right wing extremists in every form of media.

More here.

They're so used to doing this shit, denying racism while trashing black people and supporting racist institutional behavior, that they've lost the ability to see how the anti-racist majority in this country will react to their bullshit. Sure, they do everything they can to confuse the discussion, change subjects, use "witnesses" who are obviously lying, raise their voices, pound on their chests, and that often works pretty well. But they can't confuse the massacre in Charleston with anything, no matter how hard they try. They can't deny the horrible awful racism this time. But still they try. So their racism is laid bare for all to see.

Denying racism IS racism. We will never move forward as a nation with this right-wing albatross around our necks. Time to end this bullshit forever.

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