White supremacy

A lot of people will object to the title of this post. I will be told to take the post down. I will be told to modify the title or to change what I say in the post. Nope. Ta-Nehisi Coates is correct, and his presentation is brilliant. Watch the following interview (in two parts) and read his book We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy. Chris Hayes is correct to point out that the historical source of Coates title is critically important and deeply disturbing (this is something we've talked about here in the recent past). He is incorrect, as Coates points out near the end of…

The policy of the Republican Trump White House is that if a reporter or commenter says something that the White House strongly disagrees with, the reporter or commenter should be fired. It remains to be seen how the Trump White House will enforce this newly articulated policy. The policy was provided as a response to a question about an African American reporter identifying Trump and the White House as being aligned with white supremacy, which is a widely held and well documented truth. Cindy Boren at the Washington Post has more here.

One mean spirited decision intended to end the effort to end slavery led to one million dead and the end of slavery anyway. I spent some time this weekend comparing prosecutors and other legal eagles, who were all hoping to get the job of Attorney General. They were Candidates General, I guess. Trump was mentioned, and somewhere along the line, Dred Scott was mentioned as well. I turned to a highly placed official sort of dude and said, "Did you know that Dred Scott lived in Minnesota?" He did not know that. So I asked a couple of other people if they knew, and they did not. Finally I…

The truth about the Statue of Liberty and that poem and everything. The Statue of Liberty has been a symbol of American openness to immigration since it was built. However, modern White Supremacists want us to believe it was something else. I found one example of that on the Internet, writtne by Hunter Wallace with the tags “Identity” and “The Jewish Question,” and titled “David Brooks: The Great War for National Identity”: …millions of Jews came to the United States during the Great Wave. Much of the early 20th century is the story of how these Jews rose from working class occupations into…

In The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction, Charles Lane describes the events -- several years of events including the Civil War and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, though only briefly -- that led up to the Colfax Massacre. What happened was incredibly complex and only a very detailed description can do justice. But, I'll try to summarize it his way: A war was fought over slavery, and slave holders lost. A conflict then ensued between the new, victorious, anti-slavery government and the racist pigs of the Confederacy, who…