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    Absent HumanityMichael Harriot
    3/13/17 3:57pm

    There is no single part of this article that I can quote or even focus my thoughts on. It’s all so true, painfully so, that it chokes me up. It’s a shame no one tries (or cares) to understand this feeling that comes with being black. It reminds me of the comments from your article Welcome to the America Black People Have Always Lived In; you emphasized that we’ve been in the shoes of every American, but people read you as downplaying the experiences of others rather than empathizing with them. It’s the same way some non-black minorities call us whiny for fighting for what’s right; people are always too wrapped up in themselves to see the bigger picture of interwoven -isms and phobias that target us all. There is no turning back from this when it’s rubbed in our faces every day.

    You brought the pain in this article, like always.

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      Cardi B's Other ShoeAbsent Humanity
      3/13/17 4:06pm
      It’s the same way some non-black minorities call us whiny for fighting for what’s right


      While gladly reaping the benefits of our fight and looking down on us while they do it...

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      Rooo sez BISH PLZCardi B's Other Shoe
      3/13/17 4:58pm

      That’s more colorism. Carlos Curbelo, a Cuban-American Republican, got hit hard with that yesterday

      And then again today, when none other than David Duke set him straight on exactly which side his bread was buttered on

      (I have to include the whole article; for some reason I can’t post the Tweet (but I’m okay with that, y/k?) : https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/03/13/rep-steve-king-says-his-somebody-elses-babies-tweet-isnt-about-race-except-with-king-its-almost-always-about-race/)

      which is what any progressive of color would have told pretty much any “ladder-pulling” POC running after the Rethuglicans and hoping to be let into their sandbox pretty much any time during this ongoing travesty.

      I’ve been reading today about the elephant in the leftist populist room — it was something, ironically, I tried to write about back in college and was told by a white (blonde) professor in the same department as the author of this article that the “study of racism and racist attitudes wasn’t suitable for an independent study in politics”.

      ‘k.

      (Maybe I was ahead of my time in framing the query - OTOH, I’d like to think that if I’d been able to complete the paper, we’d already have some sort of methodology in place for dealing with this trash — at least a model, a template — and we wouldn’t be here in the first place. Which was maybe her objective; she looked kind of like a TrumpWife, as I think back. *shuder*)

      I’d like to think you all know I do my best not to be defeatist. But we have to figure out a strategy to deal with the ladder-pullers (my new term for those who come to the country or “move on up” Jefferson-style and then “pull the ladder up behind them, mostly of color — and yes, that includes the ‘Charlamagne’-esque “white women only” men of color, yes, I’m looking at you) and the elephant-in-the-room deniers (mostly white) if we’re going to progress as a country and not basically subside into economic ruin, where no one gets anything except the 1%, and art is dead, and learning is dead.

      People around the world know the racism here in the U.S. is worse than anywhere else — and when your competition is Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen, that Dutch lunatic Orange Occupant lookalike whose name I can’t remember (or perhaps have blocked out), and the South Africa Trevor Noah left behind, that’s ... saying something.

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    EvenBaggierTrousers7Michael Harriot
    3/13/17 4:05pm

    Last week, after President Don “Puffy” Comb-Over claimed on Twitter that his predecessor had wiretapped his phones,

    But wait, there’s good news, everyone! Trump really didn’t mean what he absolutely fucking said! Today’s headlines:

    Conway walks back Trump Tower surveillance remarks

    Spicer: Trump didn’t mean wiretapping when he tweeted about wiretapping

    They’re trying to walk it back which is “great”, by which I mean...

    FUCK THESE ASSHOLES! FUCK THESE FUCKING ASSHOLES!

    But seriously, fuck them...

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      Desperate for a Shag GilesEvenBaggierTrousers7
      3/13/17 4:20pm

      Methinks someone realized that this is a can of worms he doesn’t want to open.

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      EvenBaggierTrousers7Desperate for a Shag Giles
      3/13/17 4:22pm

      I hope that can of worms never closes and Obama is just biding his time, waiting a few months, years, lulling him into false sense of security before springing a billion dollar lawsuit against him.

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    chuckfarmerMichael Harriot
    3/13/17 5:21pm

    Twenty-seven years ago, when Donald Trump was riding high, some filmmakers started to make a documentary film about him. Twenty-five years ago, when Trump was on the ropes, they finished “Trump: What’s the Deal?”

    Donald Trump went after those who financed the film. He threatened to sue. Made personal attacks. No broadcaster or distributor would touch the film.

    This thing is a brilliant dissection of the real Trump and his shady and unethical dealings from his early days in real estate and marketing through his first bankruptcy and divorce. The man hasn’t changed a bit and the fantastic reporting and interviews paint a picture of a con man and narcissist that is both funny and shocking in that he’s been able to keep the charade up for so many years now.

    You will see Trump working with the mob in Atlantic City, intimidating tenants, hiring illegal immigrant labor, verbally assaulting his family and underlings, trying to move a Florida airport because jets flew directly over his home... the list goes on and on.

    Perhaps most interesting for a 2016 viewer, the film shows Trump to be the opposite of a small-government conservative. He got his start with his father’s money and political connections, and he made money the same way his father did: on the backs of taxpayers. And it shows how, even in 1991, Trump hadn’t made as much money as he said he had. Ladies and gentlemen, meet the real Donald Trump. https://archive.org/details/TRUMPWHATSTHEDEAL

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      GirlwithNoName64chuckfarmer
      3/13/17 5:49pm

      Okay, but, duh. I saw that movie, it was called “The 2016 Elections.” This is not news, but he’s still rich and white, so to a large segment of the public all those facts are just “nothing to see here”-haterade from a bunch of poor people who wish they were rich and powerful and had a hot wife like him. Facts don’t matter whatsoever in the world we are living in.

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    10110101101Michael Harriot
    3/13/17 3:52pm

    of how offhand, unsubstantiated accusations against black people in America are so easily accepted, resulting in character assassination and sometimes death.

    Accusations like these:

    Illustration for article titled

    The orange swamp monster still maintains that they’re guilty, by the way. That is, even after they were exonerated by DNA evidence and a full confession by the real perpetrator.

    On a broader point, the Republicans do love their far-fetched fishing expeditions. They did manage to kill Hillary Clinton’s Presidency with nothing but insinuation and innuendo about Benghazi, an did come close to ending the Presidency of her husband over a blowjob.

    They’d love to get their hands on something, anything to smear Barack Obama, who - regardless of policy disagreements - was the most scandal-free and incorruptible President since Jimmy Carter. It must kill them that their own Presidents during the last half century - from Nixon to Trump - will go down in history as a bunch of liars, cheaters and traitors.

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    TrumpsTinyHandsMichael Harriot
    3/13/17 4:06pm

    This article is very, very good. I mean very, very bad. I mean true, but awful. Awfully true.

    On another note: “The Root” has been knocking it out of the park lately. You all are the bomb. Keep up the good work.

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    ktfright | Kinja Neighborhood Black GuyMichael Harriot
    3/13/17 4:37pm

    My 18-year-old cousin from Nigeria was pulled over for the third time this year, and though we live in Cali, Beach Cities area, My twin brother and I constantly tell him to just make it home safe. We’re both 26, and my mom always worries about us even when we go to social events because many black guys our age are gone now. Even my Latin American friends get hassled by police, so now we have, Bloods, Crips, and cops to worry about on a daily basis.

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      thesarahyorkktfright | Kinja Neighborhood Black Guy
      3/18/17 12:35pm

      Kid Fury said something on his podcast that stuck with me and I am absolutely certain it’s correct—the police are the most dangerous gang in America.

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    Hoyo AfrikaMichael Harriot
    3/13/17 3:53pm

    It’s also rooted in how Europeans used colour symbolism to assign particular characteristics that are inherent in the English (and other European) language(s). Much of it can be traced back to Rome, the wellspring of Euro-supremacy. Snowden, in his Romans and Blacks, writes:

    [I]ndeed the strong Christian linkage of blackness with sin favoured this association of Aethiopes (Ethiopians) with sexuality, inducing some people to see blacks as dark pleasure. Modern psychologists have noted that ‘the elements of mystery and forbiddenness are present in sex appeal’ and that ‘differences in colour and social status seem to be sexually exciting rather than repelling’; such differences invite ‘alternate ridicule and desire’, the former arising from an urge to represent an ‘inner temptation’, as ‘outer threat’. In early Christian society the ancient pagan notion of black hypersexuality became closely linked with that of the forbidden pleasures of sexual sinfulness, and this is apparent in several descriptions of black or ‘Egyptian’ tempters and temptresses, agents of the Devil often also represented as ‘foul’, ‘ill-smelling’, and ‘ugly’, that appear in Christian literature as well as in the contrasting imagery of the Aethiops sexual continence that in certain patristic texts seek to propagate with regard to evangelized and saintly blacks and their triumphs over the base demands of the flesh. Blackness, linked with sin, was ‘at once repulsive and alluring’ (Snowden 82).

    After discovering this tidbit of information, it became obvious why lynching parties would cut out the male victim’s penis.

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    FATE CreatorMichael Harriot
    3/13/17 4:54pm

    Because I’m working to become a Social Worker and one of the classes I’m taking currently is “Minority Perspectives” we watched the Documentary 13th, I also want to point out that Trump was the person who wanted the death penalty for five black kids who went to an adult jail instead of a juvenile detention center-and after about five years they determined that the kids were actually entirely innocent.

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      sTalkinggoat, first and last of his nameFATE Creator
      3/13/17 7:06pm

      The Central Park 5. He maintains to this day (or at least during the election when he was asked about it) that they’re guilty. Despite the conviction being overturned by DNA evidence and a confession from the real rapist/killer.

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    MonteRioMichael Harriot
    3/13/17 4:02pm

    I wonder if this is a case of two things being equally true, ie - racism and partisan politics. How many times did they investigate Hilary over Benghazi because they didn’t find what they were looking for but were *sure* was there? Mark Levin, the right wing talk show host whose fevered brain was the source of Obama wiretapping rumor, foams at the mouth over any Democrat, regardless of skin color.

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    Cali4lifeMichael Harriot
    3/13/17 7:00pm

    The main attribute of black men and women in america according to white america is: criminality. That’s how I read your excellent article. And even the president, if he is a black man, is subject to that racism. That all the white gov departments and “leaders” allowed this lie to propagate for a week with little to no defense, and certainly no specific defense of the man being accused, speaks to america now and forever. We all wear that attribute in our public lives and all it takes is one upset, annoyed, angry, happy, funny, joking, evil - whypipo to call their anti-black enforcement agency and we are *in the system fighting to get out.

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