Trump’s proven track record
Trump doesn’t want any more of that god damn anti-racism training around here, understood?
Donald Trump has directed the Office of Management and Budget to crack down on federal agencies’ antiracism training sessions, calling them “divisive, anti-American propaganda”.
You know, racism is kind of divisive too.
To be fair, I’m not sure I trust the people who do mass trainings of this kind to do it well, having sat through some silly bullshit even just working for the Seattle Parks Department, but on the other hand I trust Donald Trump a whole lot less than that.
The OMB director, Russell Vought, in a letter Friday to executive branch agencies, directed them to identify spending related to any training on “critical race theory”, “white privilege” or any other material that teaches or suggests that the United States or any race or ethnicity is “inherently racist or evil”.
Because there is no white privilege? Come on now.
Vought’s memo cites “press reports” as contributing to Trump’s decision, apparently referring to segments on Fox News and other outlets that have stoked conservative outrage about the federal training.
We definitely want Fox News telling us how to do things. That will work out very well.
“The President has a proven track record of standing for those whose voice has long been ignored and who have failed to benefit from all our country has to offer, and he intends to continue to support all Americans, regardless of race, religion, or creed,” he added.
No, he does not. Not even slightly. He has the opposite of that. He has a proven track record of stamping on those whose voices have long been ignored. He’s an evil malevolent psychopath, so shut up.
Given that the United Stateswas built on a foundation of disposession and murder of its original inhabitants, and the enslavement of Africans stolen from their own continent, the simple enumeration of these basic facts is bound to paint the US in a bad light, just like quoting Donald Trump verbatim paints him in a bad light. Canada’s history is only slightly less bad, but I think we have done a slightly better job of acknowledging it. I think that the descendants of those who were disposessed, murdered and enslaved should be granted the return of a huge portion of the wealth created on this continent as a direct result of the brutalization, impoverishment and genocide of their ancestors.
YNnB:
Except, where does that begin, and where does it end? The first Amerindians migrated across the Bering Strait as the last (Pleistocene) glaciation was ending. Successive immigrants pushed the earlier ones continuously south, from the North American continent to the southern. When they reached Terra del Fuego, at the southern tip of South America, they could go no further.
So who owes what to whom? Unfortunately, there is no big book up there in the sky in which is written “the Amerindians own America, the Madagascans Madagascar, the Maoris own New Zealand, the Arabians own Arabia”, and so on. Otherwise, I would personally be able to make a real estate claim on a hunk of Norway, where one of my great grandmothers came from, plus a fair bit of Scotland Ireland and England, which the rest of them for one reason or another, chose to leave; one or two of them in convict chains.
History unfortunately only recognises one land title: ‘if you can’t defend it, you don’t own it.’
Sad, but true.
And BTW if you are talking about Australia, the first in were the Tasmanians; Oz was once packed out with them. Then came the Murrayans, ethnically distinct again. Then came the Carpentarians, taller and more ‘gracile’, who pushed both of the others further south. Then the Bass Strait rose at the end of the glaciation, cutting off the Tasmanians in Tasmania. Last in were the Europeans, who exterminated the Tasmanians pretty well completely, and also the ‘full-blood’ Murrayan population, leaving only part-Murrayans-part-something-else. (I once met a part Murrayan-part Chinese man in Sydney.)
Then came the Europeans post 1788. The only ‘full-blood’ Australian Aborigines left are in those parts of the tropics not considered ‘fit country for a white man’.
Can’t be having the feds taught that black and brown people are not inferior to whites, can we? Makes it far harder to treat them like shit, y’see. I believe a certain Austrian-born dictator used similar tactics to begin his own campaign against the Jews.
In fact, having been through trainings of this sort every year, I am sure that I trust them to do it poorly, and for the most part, they only breed resentment in the racist shits who make up a portion of my (and probably everyone’s) workplace.
To me the answer is not to get rid of them, but to find a way to do it well. The irony is, one of the reasons it is so poorly done in my workplace is to avoid offending those same race shits that are offended because we are doing it at all. Perhaps the answer is to quit hiring racist shits, which is difficult when they make up a significant portion of every hiring committee (in fact, I suspect being an intolerant bastard is one of the requirements; the only member of the science department who has ever been on a hiring committee is the one white male in our department, who is at least somewhat racist and sexist, and was on three hiring committees by the time he had been there three months, while yours truly has never been on a hiring committee in fifteen years, and was told I was not qualified to be on the hiring committee of someone teaching the exact same classes I teach and who had fewer hours of education in the very topic I was said to be not qualified in.)