(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Stay Woke: A People's Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-10-07 The various accounts of wokeness we have looked at so far are radically incomplete. This one plainly calls the spade used to bury black hopes and dreams a damned shovel. In 2019, at the height of pre-insurrection Trumpism, it reviewed how bad things have been for centuries, the depths of Trumpism, and the organizing that was getting ready to make such astonishing progress since then. But it misses many chances. For example, its account of Dog Whistle politics is good about the fact that Nixonian War on Drugs was all lies, but completely omits his Southern Strategy and the Reaganite Starve the Beast program. Indeed, it makes no mention at all of tax cuts. It does devote an entire chapter to the words used to obfuscate and inflame passions rather than communicate, like “colorblindness” and “post-racial”. Although the main focus is systemic anti-Black racism, the book discusses how that has expanded to misogyny, nativism, anti-LGBTQ bigotry, and Islamophobia, and has been fed by classism that goes back into prehistory. Every once in a while, this book presents something stark and mind-bending. Police who beat Rodney King celebrating their Not Guilty verdict I can’t read the extra comment on the lower right. Can anyone help? Daily Beast: 40 Percent of Whites Don't Have Black Friends Lynchings used to occur at intervals of four days, on average. Police shootings, serving the same function of terrorizing Black communities, now occur at intervals of two or three days. School desegregation peaked in 1988, and has been in retreat ever since. Redlining of Black neighborhoods was mandated in the 1930s by the Federal government, and continued as official policy for more than eighty years. In the collapse of the housing bubble, White families lost about 28% of their wealth, but for Blacks it was 47%. The vastly greater spending per person on prisons rather than schools Average White wealth in the US, including homeownership, is $117, 740, The average for Blacks is $7,113. Graph: The Wealth Gap Between Blacks and Whites Has Tripled Since 1984. Here’s Why. The biggest omission is religion in almost any form other than MLK’s preaching and Bishop Barber’s revival of the Poor People’s Campaign to get Blacks, Whites, and others working together on their common problems. Thus it excludes blasphemous Southern Baptist Curse of Ham theology in support of enslavement, and then Jim Crow. It excludes White Evangelical bigotry in all of its forms, and the capture of the Republican Party by Evangelical Christian Nationalist White Supremacism, on top of neo-Confederate and neo-Nazi ideologies. Its only mention of the Confederacy is in the context of Confederate statue removal. Never mind. You can read about all of that elsewhere. Nobody can tell the whole story. The real center of the book is Chapter 5, It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way, explaining progress and further organizing up to 2019 that has born such amazing fruit in Bidenomics and other such policies, including determined assaults on every aspect of systemic racism and bigotry against anybody and everybody. Lessons: Here’s what [BLM and its allies] want You can be a leader! Inequity is a (local) policy choice That goes for every kind of inequity in births, health, education, jobs, crime and punishment, environmental racism and all the rest, many described here and more that have come up since. My main local issue is electric vehicles in every branch of local government, and solar panels on every roof and parking lot. I talk with my friends of various religions, ethnicities, and nationalities in the local Democratic Party organization, to our various politicians of either party, and to everyone driving any sort of government vehicle, such as police cars, fire engines, ambulances, and school buses. I also have a friend who works in the funeral business, and loves to tell me about new electric hearses. Nationally and globally, I of course write here at Daily Kos on a variety of issues, I collect pins on many issues at Pinterest, and I work with the Indivisible Truth Brigade on a variety of social media. Only do what only you can do. Edsger Dijkstra Maybe you’re the only one who can listen to your cranky uncle, and occasionally ask, “ How would that work?” This has been proven effective at changing some fraction of minds, though by no means all. YMMV. Imagine what can happen if a whole lot of us get together on all of the different aspects of education, for example. We can counter book bannings. We can work on getting every student a computer, solar power, high-speed broadband, Free Software and textbooks, and access to each other everywhere in the country and the world. Think what that would do to counter lingering school segregation. Or think about state-level action on voting rights, gerrymanders, Medicaid expansion, abortion rights, and so many more issues. Pick what works for you. If you can’t contribute money, what about time? What about information? What about just going to meet people you don’t know somewhere, and starting out by listening to them about what they need first and most? That’s the spirit of Staying Woke, and making All Black Lives Matter, along with Native American and immigrant and LGBTQ and indeed All Lives. No Whitesplaining or Mansplaining or Woker-Than-Thou-Itis. 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