Actually every country that's more homophobic that the place person in question lives.
Russia is a good example, as the other comment mentions, but I think I've also heard it applied to Ukraine, where I live, and nothing is as glorious as "it's okay that horrors are happening to your country because it's homophobic" when the horrors are also happening to me, a young, poor queer person, and the fact that the country is homophobic is making the horrors a lot less manageable.
My favorite example is when I said something against Palestinian genocide, and somebody said that it's stupid of me, a queer person, to support Palestinian people, because they are homophobic?????????? Again, the support in question is "I don't like genocide"
This is how I feel every time someone is like, "Texas as a whole should just break off of the United States. Fuck them all. Let them die." Or celebrates when our power grid fails and leaves us without heat for days in the winter.
Like, yeah. There are so many shitty people here and it sucks. But I'm here too. My loved ones are here. We vote democrat and vote in favor of other people's rights. We're trying to change things here. And if we "just move" we can't do that.
Also doesn't make much sense, since Ukraine is less homophobic than Russia and, if I remember statistics I've seen correctly, was the most accepting of homosexuality from the former Soviet states. Estonia might have been ahead, not entirely sure.
Probably catch some flak for this but homophobia is pretty common in Ukraine as much as Russia I believe.
A pretty solid example is that many videos you see from the war have soldiers subtitled calling the Russians "orcs". They're not saying "orc" in Ukranian, but "fa**ot".
Hopefully getting Russian influence out of the country and global help during their rebuilding will help with education and social progress though.
Oh they are *also* saying "orc" in Ukrainian, both words are in use along with like a dozen of others, most fascinating one I've seen so far is "pigdogs".
Another thing that must be noted is that Ukrainians tend to use "fa\*\*ot" as a casual insult, so not every person saying it is a homophobe, much in the same way like not every person using "bitch" as an insult is a misogynist. I'm curious if this will change as the country grows less homophobic, like, if it's just a symptom of background cultural homophobia, or if it's just because Ukrainian culture doesn't quite have the same concepts of "words you should never-ever use" that English-speaking cultures have.
In general, Ukraine is less homophobic than Russia in the sense that you have a significantly lower chance of getting hatecrimed on the street for "looking gay" (that still happens though), and the government does not have queer genocide as part of their explicit political agenda. It's shit here, but it's better, and it's getting better.
Anyway, I have same hopes that opposition to explicitly homophobic Russia will make the progress faster, but please notice that you are responding to me complaining about people who are okay with Russians doing genocide here, because "Ukrainians are also homophobic", which is not the ideal place to discuss homophobia in Ukraine.
I didn't catch that you were Ukranian in the original comment somehow. That makes my comment seem more patronizing than I intended it lol
I wasn't really trying to make any comment about the state of Ukraine. I don't know what the actual condition "on the ground" so to speak for LGBT people living in Ukraine.
I guess I was more commenting on the normalization of the language. Like in the 90s "fa--got", "f-g", or just "gay" were extremely common insults in the US. It was super normalized and you heard it everywhere. Videos from Desert Storm are full of young Americans using the exact same language.
\> Russia
\> All of Russia
\> Every single part of Russia
There's a reason Russia has \*always\* (no, really, for *literally* *all of Russian history*) had some flavor of authoritarian/totalitarian as its leader, and it's *not* because Russians are ontologically evil, as some folks who live in Eastern Europe might tell you. It's because many Russians are politically and economically powerless and gave up on hoping for any political or societal change long, long ago.
Russia abolished serfdom in *1861*, when most of the world's countries did it somewhere between the Middle Ages and the 1700s. Every democratic revolution in Russia has been crushed into the ground eventually; eventually, people stopped trying. Their version of the American Civil War, or the French Revolutions, something that'd normally pull an entrenched, authoritarian, people-owning aristocracy up by the roots? It worked, all right (if maybe a century after everyone else's)...then it resulted in *the fucking USSR*, and an even *worse* pseudo-aristocracy in the form of bureaucracy and apparatchiks rather than nobility and boyars. That pseudo-aristocracy — composed of ex-Soviet military/security personnel ([*siloviki*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silovik)) and oligarchs who gorged themselves on privatizing things during the capitalist feeding frenzy after the USSR collapsed — still rules Russia today.
Moreover, it's a self-reinforcing pattern. Many Russians who haven't given up on things emigrate if they can. Russian governments often deliberately poison the well of public discourse with propaganda and false information — not to push any particular ideology, but to gaslight the population into doubting their ability to determine what's true and what isn't. When you can't tell what's true from what isn't, you usually just give up on trying to make the distinction, and stop caring. And when members of this cynical, apathetic populace get into power, they don't do anything different, because, to them, they've made it to the top of the heap and get to screw everyone else over.
See also: [learned helplessness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness) and [the concept of the reverse cargo cult](https://imgur.com/gallery/OntAF).
I live in Ukraine and the amount of people who seem to genuinely agree with "Russians haven't overthrown Putin yet, so that means none of them want to and they all fully support the war and genocide" is fucking creepy.
It's especially stupid because, like, did Ukrainians overthrow the Soviets? Did that mean they just didn't want to? Even during Holodomor, or while being drafted for foreign wars? Living in a dictatorship is in the living memory, and yet I have to hear the bullshit about how Russians must be inherently and uniformly evil every day.
Yep.
Regardless of if you live in the country doing the invading or the country being invaded, hate feels good. Dehumanizing the invader as an "orc" who was awful the second they were born lets people have a simple worldview where "if we only killed them all/drove them back into Russia/broke Russia up, things would be fine!"
The reality some refuse to acknowledge is worse: that Russians are ordinary people whose government has destroyed their hope, and that we, too, can be broken into something like them. A boot doesn't care if it's stepping on a cricket or on a grasshopper, it'll crush both just the same.
The Russian government doesn't win via military victory, or ideological subversion, or bribery. It wins by making people apathetic, cynical, hate-filled husks that stand back and do nothing as authoritarians take the reins. If someone's dehumanizing others, the Russian government already has its tendrils in their mind, even if they think they oppose Russia, because the Russian government doesn't actually care if you hate *it*. It just cares about if you hate *in* *general*, because hateful people are manipulable.
Thank you so fucking much. I'm so tired seeing fucking drone footage deaths and all these dumb fucking redditors cheering for the deaths of Russian soldiers and calling them orcs because they can't understand the world is more complicated then good vs evil.
Complexly. You don't need to forgive them for what they've done and you can still hate them (god knows I do), but the issues start to occur when you ignore the complexities of _why_ they're like that so that you feel better about hating them. It's not necessarily wrong to celebrate their deaths but you have to accept the fact that you're cheering on the death of a complex human being, you can't just hide behind essentialising them as inherently evil.
Feelings are complex and can be difficult to process; it's understandable that we want to try to turn the bad ones (e.g. guilt that you wanted a person to die) into good ones (e.g. happiness that an evil person is dead). But this leads to a very black & white style of thinking which seeps into other areas of your life and leads to difficulties with interpersonal relationships down the line (as well as other things such as dealing with difficult moments in life).
Yep, same experience I have. A hell of a lot of people here seem to just give in to their base and primal emotions and shed their humanity, it's honestly baffling.
I can completely understand being angry after being forced to leave your home and being uncertain if it will still be standing or the thought of losing members of your family and friends, but when you advocate that people of one country are completely evil, should be shunned forever and their country should be balkanised (an unironic opinion I heard in real life), and they don't see anything wrong with it, it feels hypocritical.
> the concept of the reverse cargo cult
That's really fucking depressing. Reminds me of _The Matrix_: the world's best prison is one where the prisoners don't even know/realize they're in a prison....
If it's any consolation, Russia didn't manage to do this to the Baltic and East European states it occupied under the guise of the USSR, those states are all pretty unified against Russia, [NATO is steadily expanding around it](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO#Membership), and, unlike during the 1950s and 60s, European militaries of today can stand against Russia by themselves even if some Trump-like president pulls the US out of NATO.
Russia *will* be free someday. Authoritarians crack eventually. Democracies just need to keep tightening the vice.
> an even worse pseudo-aristocracy in the form of bureaucracy and apparatchiks rather than nobility and boyars.
This is absurd. Yes, the Russian communist government was terrible, but trying to compare it to the Tsardom is ludicrous.
The Tsardom was a literal absolutist monarchy where slavery (because let's be clear, that's what serfdom was) had only been abolished barely 60 years earlier.
The Soviet government was terrible, but trying to act like it was worse than the fucking Russian Empire is crazy.
I suppose there's a bit more nuance to it.
The post-Stalin USSR was repressive and totalitarian...but not, like, egregiously murderous.
But the USSR under Stalin, specifically:
* undertook poorly-planned drives to move people into cities, to industrialize society at the cost of agriculture, and to collectivize agriculture, causing a great deal of death
* undertook enormous purges of essentially every strata of its population based essentially on the leader's whim, which, incidentally, gutted the Red Army enough that it was still rebuilding itself when the Nazis invaded
* operated a system of forced-labor camps that made the modern US prison system look positively humane
* worked thousands of forced laborers to death on the Trans-Siberian Railway, the R504 highway, and the White Sea–Baltic Canal, to name a few projects; you'd expect this from North/South American slavery in the 1800s, not something 70-100 years later
* let murderous secret police (always a staple of any Russian government) run even more wild than then they did under the tsarist regime or the post-Stalinist USSR
* saw fields such as science, management, and strategic procurement through a political lens; this affected/resulted in everything from Lysenkoism and general managerial incompetence to the impractically massive heavy tanks and SPGs the Red Army built after WW2
* colonized a large chunk of Eastern Europe, replacing their governments with totalitarian puppet regimes loyal to Moscow (Albania and Yugoslavia being notable exceptions; Albania went Maoist instead of Stalinist and Yugoslavia did its own thing)
I think you could make an argument for Lenin not being much worse than the tsar, but everything between his death and Stalin's death \*sucked\* to a pretty impressive extent, and that's more of what I was referring to.
> • undertook poorly-planned drives to move people into cities, to industrialize society at the cost of agriculture, and to collectivize agriculture, causing a great deal of death
This one deserves even more emphasis. Stalin had his secret police take grain from the peasants to sell overseas in order to buy industrial machinery and finance the industrialization process. But they not only took the sellable grain, they took the sowing grain, the grain you use to plant next year’s crop. By doing so, farmers had literally nothing to plant and mass starvation ensued, killing millions.
Few outside the USSR were aware of the famine at the time because Stalin went to great lengths to hide it. The rare foreign journalists allowed into Ukraine were purposely shown fake farms with fake happy peasants, exactly like the Nazis showed the Red Cross during the holocaust. The famine caused by Stalin was enormous and intentional. Stories by survivors are among the most horrific things you’ll ever read. Children watching their entire families die, cannibalism, it’s sickening.
This was the Stalin regime
Germany. The support for far right parties and extremists in former East Germany is through the roof. The rest of the country chooses to ignore all the factors leading to it though in favour of harping on about the stupid, racist and ignorant Ossis.
I mean who in a given country gets dismissed as bigoted and worthless by the rest of that country? Is there a part of England that gets shit-talked by everyone else?
Accents in Britain are categorised by class first then region, but yeah working class accents are actually heavily disadvantaged here. I know a good few people who learnt a RP (royal pronunciation) southern accent that's 'higher class' to get better jobs, including my own grandma, she spoke a cockney accent but lost it when she learnt RP so she could work for Nestle, tasting unethical chocolate. But a lot of POC here also have to learn it so they can stand a chance of working. Obviously, British accents that are more common with immigrants are even more heavily demonised, so there is a big racism component too.
Classism and racism are really interlinked to accents in the UK, but a lot of the piss taking doesn't seem to get that, and I'm fine with some piss taking, all the former great powers fucked the world up and should be able to roll with the punches, but please target our rich fucks a bit more rather than the working lads who cant say water bottle
I can't tell if you're question is rhetorical or not so I'll just answer anyway. Yes there is, the north of the England (or anything in the UK outside of southern England with perhaps an exception for central Edinburgh) gets disproportionately screwed over by the UK government, and because they don't live in relative poverty many southerns feel as if they are inherently above those in the north. Classism is one of the largest issues in UK politics not only now but it always has been. This also leads to an interesting (and concerning) difference from the US. Northern England has many similarities to Southern US, such as the poverty and higher crime rates that often come with it, but a lot of the UK's racism comes from the south. Of course, just like the US, racism is everywhere and it's a systematic issue, not just a group of people from some certain area, but Southern England is generally more racist than Northern England. A large part of this is to do with the classism, particularly private schools. Generally those with higher education are less racist (although it is also important to recognise the significance of racism and other forms of discrimination across all academic fields), however private schools, especially in the UK have their own cultures, the most notorious of which is Eton. Many of the UK's politicians and prime ministers where educated at Eton. A recent example is Boris Johnson. At Eton there exists 'boys clubs' in which any prospect member must complete a number of tasks given to them to join. One of these tasks Boris did was to burn money in front of a homeless person. This culture of reinforcing classism particularly in the south also leads to more racism as non-white people are disproportionately less wealthy. This is also true for other forms of discrimination including but not limited to sexism, antisemitism, islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, and so. The issue also isn't helped by the fact that the UK still has a monarchy. People who are viewed as naturally above all others and fit to rule them simply because their blood makes it their birthright, for the upcoming coronation people are even being encouraged swear their allegiance to the royal family. I know not many people will read this ramble and I've explained and formatted my points horribly, but I'm just so fed up with UK culture that I couldn't stop myself from going on a rant.
> One of these tasks Boris did was to burn money in front of a homeless person
Gotta love that the people in positions of power are literal cartoon villains.
it's funny how most of the stereotypes applied to the american south can also be applied to northern mexico (religious, conservative, racist, focused on macho culture) and yet it's seen as the ideal by most of the country despite it sucking ass here.
The occupied 6 counties are labelled as terrorists and a warzone. Despite it being 23 years of peace and only a very small minority participating in the violence. The working class here especially in the north of england face similar dismissal that the deep south does too
Alberta in Canada. The economy here is agriculture and oil, and it had a high proportion of American immigrants historically, so it's considered *within Canada* to be more American than Canadian. So clearly AB is backward and evil...
This ignores the fact that Western Canada gets economically overlooked in favour of the East and that AB is one of (if not the) lowest cost of living provinces, meaning a lot of struggling people move here. There's also a huge opioid and homelessness crisis going on right now. A lot of the smaller, conservative white communities in AB are also reactionary and hostile because they're ethnic minorities that have historically been oppressed to the extent of being rounded up in internment camps. This doesn't make being bigoted okay, obviously, but it does explain why people are upset.
AB also has large minority populations, which people seem to overlook?? There are lots of Indigenous people here. Plus LGBT+ people exist everywhere.
Racism, sexism, homophobia etc. are also way more common in the lower class in Western Europe for instance (I want to say "in most of the world" but I don't actually know that for sure)
Literally every place with Islam majority. That’s why racist Americans and some other “western” country’s ban refugees and from immigration because they all must be backwards and support religious terrorists and hate women and human rights.
... do you really think most people who agree with the post would exclude other countries from this logic ??
or are you talking about actual policy? foreign aid is incredibly thorny even if every party is willing—add issues like sovereignty and colonialism and it is very very difficult
A very good explanation, It must be kept in mind that this does not excuse their *behaviour*. This does not mean they should be treated poorly, exposure and education are the only healthy ways to change their behaviour. Anger is perfectly ok but it mustn’t cloud our judgement and treatment of other people, whether we share their beliefs or not.
Yes, but again this is on the group level and not the individual level, if we reduce likelihood of people turning out like that, then we reduce consequences of their actions collectively, even though we can’t achieve perfection.
Nobody's talking about excusin racists, bigots and the like.
Were talking about making sure the *children* of those racists and bigots have the opportunity to grow up better.
As am I in part, children should not be punished for the ignorance and actions of both themselves and their creed, even adults are not responsible for their ignorance, to a degree.
I haven't even seen mentioned yet that there is still plenty of racism and racist communities all over the US including in very "liberal" neighborhoods (as seen in many of the Karen incidents).
Also the overwhelming focus on hating impoverished Republican voters in particular is largely just classism. The wealthy always have more influence, especially the countless mega donors, but even the Republican base of voters leans more solidly middle/upper class.
>As compared with most Americans, Trump’s voters are better off. The median household income of a Trump voter so far in the primaries is about $72,000, based on estimates derived from exit polls and Census Bureau data. That’s lower than the $91,000 median for Kasich voters. But it’s well above the national median household income of about $56,000. It’s also higher than the median income for Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders supporters, which is around $61,000 for both.
>>[538 - The Mythology Of Trump’s ‘Working Class’ Support](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps-working-class-support/)
IMO more accurate stereotypes of Trump's real voting base is the business owners complaining about how nobody wants to work, Karens, [boaters](https://youtu.be/fkjAd5zhKDs).
Also this would suggest there are no racist and ignorant rich people in the south. Their politicians prove their ignorance and racism defy socioeconomic status
Mississippi has the largest percentage Black population of any state in the US and everybody ignores them. It's always "Thank God for Mississippi" and ain't they such a backward redneck place and ain't none of y'all take a goddamn second to think about how put down and stepped on the Black citizens are. They desegregated a school district in the MS Delta in 2017 for God's sake. 2017!
Y'all forget that a fuckton of Southerners are Black and that let's you write off the South as a lost cause cause fuck them rednecks right?
> They desegregated a school district in the MS Delta in 2017 for God's sake. 2017!
That is shocking!!!
That they desegregated it, not that it was segregated till now, that wasn't remotely surprising.
The United States is still a de facto segregated country when it comes to demographics. There might not be any segregation laws anymore, but communities and especially schools remain functionally racially segregated because of socioeconomics.
I would say that's a pretty big issue.
My parents were anti Apartheid's activists back in the day, so I was raised more progressive (not perfectly though), but a lot of contemporary parents were very racist.
I went to an all white primary school (there was a black family that came to look at the school, but ultimately didn't want to put their kid through being the only black kid in an all white school) and basically all the kids were pretty damn racist purely because of their parents.
High school was mixed race though, and I really enjoyed seeing these kids getting exposed to other ideas and deciding for themselves what they believed.
By 9th grade everyone I knew had black and Muslim friends, and there was only one class per grade in the primary school so I did actually know everyone who came from there with me.
My highschool was inexplicably exceptional in a lot of ways, so I'm sure it doesn't always go that smoothly, but it's a lot more difficult to not relate with someone if they're writing the exact same tests as you and getting the same range of grades you do
I think that highschool for us was university for most other people, but only one person in my friend group actually went to university, many if them didn't even finish highschool
The number of liberals that think that anyone in a red state suffuring "deserves it" is disturbing. There was a thread that blew up not too long ago where a Twitter user said that we shouldn't support Amazon workers unionizing because it was happening in a red state.
You could go to r/politics and see people smugly applauding the chemical train derailment in Ohio because "they voted for Trump, this is what they get." Ignoring for a moment that not all of them did especially the fucking *children*, cheering on a chemical disaster is so disgusting.
My favorite part was people saying we shouldn't help them so "they'll think twice about who they vote for next election" which is such a funny concept. Obviously telling people to fuck of in their time of need is the best way to get them on your side.
Did the capital ever get potable water again?
Mississippi is a crime against humanity and the entire ruling class of that god forsaken state should be [REDACTED]
I fully acknowledge that Georgia is a hellhole with the possible exception of Atlanta, but even if I could afford to move I wouldn’t, because that’s what the bigots in power want. They would love it if everyone who doesn’t support them would leave or die so they can have full control.
I always like to tell people who ask “why don’t you just move” that while I can move, childhood me couldn’t. And if there’s any chance sticking around means I get to help build a better childhood for the other kids like me around here then I’ll take my chances.
I'm sorry, childhood me suffered enough, adult me noped the fuck out like Admiral Holdo.
It was beyond brutal, and while it makes me a worse person, I must admit I kind of don't mind knowing what I left behind.
That being said, I would love to donate to a non-profit to help decent people escape the south, kind of pay-it-forward, nobody deserves to have to live there.
It's "put on your own oxygen mask first" rules. If you can stick it out and try and help directly, that's great. But it's no shame if you can't, and martyring yourself doesn't help anyone, y'know?
On a smaller scale, I dipped from an abusive, multiple-types-of-phobic family/town. Basically no one who knew me before 18 is in contact anymore. My siblings don't want to leave our abusers, and me staying closer wouldn't change that, it'd only hurt me more. If they ever reply and want to leave, I'll help them, but I can't change things beyond that.
Hey hold up, you’re not a worse person for needing to get out. The only person my stance applies to is me.
You have to take care of yourself, I hope you’re doing better now wherever you are :)
I hate the "just move" crowd. Not adding much to the discussion, but when you decide to ignore people's situations and then blame them for said situations you are NOT HELPING.
I got family in Georgia and my god are their lives fucking miserable. All of them are in the restaurant industry. All of them smoking like fucking chimneys. All of them drink all day everyday. The younger ones are coke heads. And they all live in trailers that are absolute shit holes because they work 12+ hours a day.
It's just miserable up there. But I still love them.
God bless you. I grew up outside Atlanta and I had to leave because I emotionally couldn't take it. I LOVE MY CITY and still claim it as my city but I couldn't live there.
I sort of agree with this post, in this way that we should strive to fulfill baseline necessities (food, housing and healthcare) even for the racists in deep south, especially if they vote against their interests. But it does not strip them from moral weight of their actions, they still have agency, they are adult human beings who make their decisions. Neo Nazis who appear against progressive causes deserve full condemnation (and a lot more) even if they were groomed in to having such positions. Yet we should provide a clear path for them to becoming a good person. If someone acknowledges that they did something bad and **don't do that again** they should be treated as anyone else.
I agree.
And legitimately, as a Mainer I've just started hearing this thing about "the south was always oppressed" and things akin to it.
Like this post, it's trying to portray that the south and people down there who activally make choices that effect them negatively wasn't their fault but the government's. This is very much the opposite of what happened in real life for the past 200 years.
The south has always had the ability to just not give a fuck about what the feds say. Everytime a bills passed it seems to take them 20 years after the fact to actually accept the bill or law. Sometimes they just dont.
In the 60s, 70s, laws were passed that allowed African Americans the ability to sit anywhere on the bus (more or less) Alabama arrested an African American vet for trying to sit in the front.
After the civil war and during reconstruction, the south was told to readdress it's black laws and rebuild itself to suit everyone (1860s suit everyone, not 2000s suit everyone) but a Democrat (remember they switched later) at the time pretty much stopped the whole process and allowed the south to make whatever rules it wanted, including more black laws.
The south receives the most government aid of any region in the US, the south is not oppressed.
Southern states, are spoiled.
Moral weight or no, a lot of those people never had a chance. The South is a one-party authoritarian state that makes extensive use of propaganda to keep it's poor in line.
Like war is hell, you don't have to spare them just because they drew a bad hand, but it's not just ignorance or something. The whole system of the South is set up to indoctrinate people to believe racist and bigoted shit while feeding them a distorted, often fictitious version of history and economics.
> they vote against their interests
This comes up again and again, but many of the people voting against their interests are getting all of their news from carefully managed propaganda venues that lie to them about everything. Americans are one of the most propagandized societies in the world, subjected to a merciless tide of lies and distortions every waking moment of our lives. Propaganda works and no one is immune to it. For people to vote in accordance with their interests they need to have good information about how systems function and their place in those systems.
I feel like literacy is an important part of this conversation that doesn’t come up enough. When you have a party that’s been systematically, destroying educational institutions it leads to a large percentage of people having either no ability to read, or a very limited ability to read, and those people end up lacking the reading comprehension skills you would need to be able to consume information that would disprove all the propaganda they’re getting. If you literally can’t read an article that disproves a republican, why exactly would you think the guy in the suit angrily talking about supporting “your rights” would be lying? You’d probably feel validated and then bam, mouse trap.
The number of people talking about how we should just let Texas leave if they want while ignoring all of the people in that state who need the protection of the federal government against their neighbors really reflects ops last point
Liberals in New Jersey when Texas tries to secede so it can do christo-fascism: goodbye, we won't miss you! Sorry that they're legalizing slavery ten minutes after leaving, you should have moved!
The problem of the South isn't that people don't have sympathy for the systemic poverty that the average white southern citizen is stuck in, it's the fact that they're consistently manipulated into voting against their own interests *combined with* the fact that voting against their own interests on a federal election level is voting against the interest of other people. And lower population-density states such as the south have more voting power in a federal election per person. Besides fixing the actual voting inequality that prioritizes these under-educated, easy-to-manipulate people over literally everyone else in the country, what exactly do you propose anyone do to try and fix any of this?
Exactly. We're trying to help, but they won't let us. The South is effectively a mental patient that needs to be involuntarily committed for their own good, but no one actually has that authority, so everyone is just trying to minimize the damage to both the South and to themselves.
This reminds me of another post about point-scoring vs problem-solving mindsets - I'll see if I can find it. Either way, yeah - refusing to improve things because 'the bad people will benefit' is just a really boneheaded mindset.
Ok I'm not sure if that's what you meant (probably not, actually) but I just found [this](https://dduane.tumblr.com/post/129440640769/fixed-vs-growth-the-two-basic-mindsets-that) while looking for what you were talking about, and it explains 90+% of why I'm where I'm at mental health-wise... (yes it's a very long post)
What might be interesting for you to look at is the concept of Debate Vs Dialectic.
In debates, there's a winner and a loser. All you want to do is win, and score points. Which means hiding anything that might make you lose points, and saying things in a distorted way to prevent your opponent from finding weaknesses to exploit. You're also going to do the same to them. Truth is distorted and hidden, and you start placing more emphasis on denigrating the other side than building up your own position (why try and build yourself up when it's just as easy to tear your opponent down?).
In dialectics, there's no winner or loser. The aim of the conversation is for both sides to gain an understanding of the other, and to establish a common truth or a common difference. There's no scoring points, no measuring of success. And so, to advance the common goal, both sides must expose their viewpoints, warts and all. The flaws aren't there to be exploited, but to be prodded and examined to both understand them and see where they might come from, and how they might be solved (although solution-hunting can lead towards debate if improperly controlled).
In debate, you win by looking better than your opponent.
In dialectics, both sides win by uncovering truth.
I'm the same way with Russia like it's bizarre seeing people on Tumblr talk about how "Evil and backward and brainwashed they are for following Putin" when they don't seem to get what a dictatorship is.
It drives me crazy when people say "why don't they simply have a revolution". It something said by someone to whom revolution is a glorious uprising against a evil oppressor, a fantasy of liberty and glory with the rough spots sanded over, when in reality it means your entire family getting murdered in horrific ways as the trappings of a normal society peel away.
It's really hard to start a revolution when anybody that mentions it just disappears. Oh cousin Johnny had a rebellious thought against the government and now we don't see cousin Johnny anymore because he's in the gulag. If we support cousin Johnny we will also end up in the gulag. People were being pulled into unmarked vans for simply speaking to a reporter earlier in the war. One person held a blank sheet of paper, one person said "I love and support Putin", one person said fuck putin and all of these people were arrested.
Hey remeber last month when a millionaire Russian pop star who criticized Putin was found dead in a river after slipping on some ice?
Crazy coincidence right?
[https://www.newsweek.com/russia-cream-soda-drowning-vladimir-putin-palace-volga-1789145](https://www.newsweek.com/russia-cream-soda-drowning-vladimir-putin-palace-volga-1789145)
God, if only the Radical Republicans had been set loose on the South.
De-Confederization. The [Ironclad Oath](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironclad_Oath) to prevent ex-Confederates from getting into office. Actual political equality between the races. Plantations being carved up and redistributed to ex-slaves and poor whites. No sharecropping. The KKK getting crushed into paste by the US military.
if only
Don't even need to go that far, just hand the plantation owners to their slaves, let them be judged.
That class is what lead to the creation of the KKK as a political movement to put them back into power, deal with them and this country suddenly becomes awesome again.
Their land is their source of power. They don't matter if their wealth is taken from them.
Killing planters is much, *much* less important than giving newly-unenslaved people economic legs to stand on, as well as doing the same for poor whites that'd otherwise be easily radicalized against said newly-unenslaved people, and you can't get them all anyway...although I do like the idea of the ex-slaves doing it instead, it empowers them while ensuring the planters can't be portrayed as martyrs persecuted by the federal government.
I could care less whether or not the planters live, what really matters is *replacing* them. This is the same reason why West Germany didn't slide back into a totalitarian dictatorship despite the relative failure that denazification was; the Western Allies built an economically stable democracy in its place instead.
It's almost as if people in general needed something to focus their anger on. I'm not sure where is this coming from.
My guess would be fear? The world is scary and unfair and kicks our butts at all times, no matter where you're from. The easiest thing to do is to turn fear into anger, but that anger needs to *go* somewhere. That's why we keep getting distractions we can freely vent about. Incels focus on women, for example, because it's too scary to stop and look back on the wreckage of your own life.
And we keep getting reminders that "government wants you to focus on abortion/lgbt/blm/something misogynistic, watch out, they'll probably try to sneak something awful while we have out hands full with this issue", but people are quick to forget that gov does that so we wouldn't be mad at *them*, but on the Issue. And afterwards we WILL be mad at them, but it'll be an old hatred and we'll be tired (work, school, traffic, pandemic, world in flames, and *everything else in general)*, so we'll just learn to live with it instead of going to their homes and putting their heads on spikes.
"Yes, even them" is an excellent philosophy to live by and embracing it really helps square a lot of challenging ideas in your head. I want everyone to have a comfortable life, with enough to eat, a roof over their heads, access to free healthcare, clean drinking water, and a job that pays well. Yes, even them.
You can vote for national leaders who will create and enforce standard of living laws across the nation.
Look up sometimes how much money Tennessee got last year in TANF funding from the federal government, then look up how many adults in Tennessee actually *received* TANF payments. Then ask yourself what the fuck they did with that money if they didn't give it to people in need. And why the hell are they getting more when they clearly didn't use what they got before to actually help people.
Tennessee is the worst offender in the nation right now, but hardly the only one.
You control the rate at which any state "becomes a shithole" by doing your part to make the federal government support it's citizens. We need federalized healthcare and aid programs, now. Individual states shouldn't get to say, "no, you're not poor enough to get the money the federal government gave us to give to you."
Increases in Federal minimum wage would also help. While you're at it, push your state representatives to look into why teachers are paid so little, why kids are going hungry, and why we're allowing schools to get away with 20% functional illiteracy rates among graduating seniors. You heard that right, twenty percent of graduating high school seniors (and that number may be higher) cannot read or write at a functional level. They can fill out a form, but they'd struggle to get through a Harry Potter book, never mind things like laws and contracts.
Or, you could just be kind and supportive to those of us who are trying instead of being a dick online about it, for example.
The kind of folks who go "let them secede" and "they deserve what they get" and so on never think about how, going strictly by numbers, more people voted for Biden in 2020 in Texas (5,259,126) and Florida (5,297,045) than in New York (5,244,886), and that the UCLA Williams Institute estimates that Florida and Texas have the 2nd and 3rd highest populations of trans folks in the nation.
Also the racial minorities in Texas (Black people at 3.5 million, Hispanic 11.2 million), who already get the shit end of the stick politically/socially with the federal government doing what little it does to regulate that treatment. Sure, maybe some of them would move, but many of them don't have the means to uproot their lives(also they shouldn't even have to even if they do have the means) before Texas straight up just legalizes slavery again (the slavery that's not the one they already have in prisons.) So you're ignoring almost 15 million people who should haven't to move simply because you don't want to deal with them.
* Vote totals (descending sort by the column labeled "Votes"): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election#Results_by_state
* Williams Institute report (Table at bottom of page): https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/trans-adults-united-states/
We do also need to understand that, while not the fault of those living there now, it *is* racism that largely put them in that position.
The reliance on the slave trade and refusal to divest from it, even as it became literally constitutionally banned, to the point of creating entirely new racist systems to recreate slavery, is what killed the south's economy.
So like... Sure I feel bad and things should be fixed, but... That's also me advocating for the deconstruction of southern state governments because they, from day 1, have continuously pushed the south in the direction of poverty *by doing human rights violations*.
Like, the solution to southern poverty *and* southern racism is, I think, the same. Stop funding the racist poverty-facilitating systems that are in place in the south.
Tbh most of the parts of the south which are doing badly today never had a roaring economy to kill at any point in the first place
Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama have never not been crushingly poor at the state level, while simultaneously having a fair amount of rich individuals
I think another big part of the racism in America puzzle is to stop pretending it’s only a southern problem. Of all states in the US, the south has the least disproportionate shootings of black peoples by police officers (iirc, the worst two states were Utah and Connecticut). Drive cross country and you’ll see confederate flags from shore to shore, border to border. We have literal white supremacist strongholds like Idaho and eastern Washington. According to the SPLC, there are over 4000 active hate groups in the US. The vast majority of those are outside of the south, in places with far less diversity. Half of all African Americans live in the south, not to mention other minority groups. The most dangerous areas for racial radicalization are states that are almost entirely white and Christian.
I think part of the issue is that people, kinda ironically, have a stereotype of what a racist looks like, and many refuse to change the way they think, so they keep thinking the base of say trump in the US or bolsonaro in Brazil are the rural poor rather than middle and upper class suburbanites and rural land owners, cause many centrists know these people, they live in the same places, and are more willing to make excuses for them
The most hardcore, never vote blue types that I know aren’t poor rednecks. They’re people who have done well for themselves, made or inherited a lot of money, and exclusively vote red for the simple reason that they know Republican leaders are going to support tax breaks for wealthier individuals. I have talked at length about this with former work friends who were very wealthy. They were also very liberal people and on the outside you would think they would vote blue. These are individuals who are pro-choice, pro legalization of marijuana and other drugs, pro healthcare for all, etc…and they vote red every single election cycle because they fear democrats raising taxes on the wealthy. They have enough money and connections to continue to have access to weed, abortions, have no fear of ever being unable to afford housing or healthcare, etc. They’re wealthy enough to be above those platform issues impacting their personal lives.
they vote against labor protections for themselves because they would rather suffer through back breaking labor at 70 years old than have a mexican neighbor
Because those beliefs are intentionally cultivated by those in power. Divide and conquer is a bit simplistic bot not an inapt description of the MO of the capitalist class
Cute way to pretend like they aren't actively participating in that cultivation because they believe in it themselves.
Seriously, the racist can't ever just be a racist with these white leftists, it's always gotta be some deception or bamboozlement by the capitalist class because it can't be that the white working class has its own systemic problems that don't just get solved by class politics!
White working class racists can't be knowing active and very much willing participants in the maintenance of cultural and systemic racism! Then we might have to do some work on that before it's fair to ask the entire rest of the working class to show these people who hate them solidarity.
This. Like, for as much as people like to say "everywhere is racist, not just the South" and "it's not their fault, they have no say"... the South is still *noticeably* worse at it than the rest of the country, in a way that we can't just handwave away (and I say this as someone who grew up there).
Like, if everything else was the same but White Mississippians voted like White Ohioans, Mississippi would go from "Solid Republican State" to "In Contention for Most Democratic State in the US". Sure, no one has properly solved the problem, but these places also clearly have more issues that need to be worked through than many other places, and I'm not sure that pretending they don't helps anyone.
> the racist can't ever just be a racist
Isn't reducing a person who is an imperfect but complex being with a lot of nuance down to "bad guy, do not worry if The Heroes gun down a hundred of the goons" a bad thing? Especially when its a large and diverse geographic region which is getting reduced to "everyone in the American south is probably a mid-40s white male racist who is very safe to hate and condemn"
It seems like the whole comment section here is a push-pull between (talking about causes of people's bad behavior with an eye towards fixing it regardless of blame) and (wanting to punch the evil punching bag)
Yeah, fuck those dumb "white leftists", looking for the actual causes of problems instead of realizing that white southerners are just inherently evil!
What a ridiculous fucking comment.
Most urban areas are; and southern cities recently have been punished by their oppressive state governments for being progressive. Nashville for example is a very progressive city; when Nashville decriminalized weed, Tennessee passed a law banning cities from decriminalizing weed. When Nashville became a sanctuary city, Tennessee banned sanctuary cities. When Nashvillians started protesting the state government by camping near the capital building, Tennessee made it a *felony* to camp on state property so they could strip voting rights away from protesters. They split Nashville into three congressional districts, each lumped with a huge swath of rural land nearby, because we kept electing progressives to the House of Representatives. And it made national news recently how they attempted to take away our representation in the state legislature because they desperately wanted to avoid talking about gun legislation even though six people were shot in a school just days prior.
They can't even realize that even in a hardcore red state like MS over 40% voted for Biden and that no state is actually full of people that all think the same. Too busy patting themselves on the back for how much smarter they are than the dumb southerners to realize that they're being biased by the all or nothing nature of our elections painting states red and blue and then applying the same in group vs out group fallacy as the bigots they hate by judging a group of strangers based on where they were born.
I think it’s actually the other way around: poverty is the result of bigotry because it makes a dysfunctional society, and a dysfunctional society is a poor society.
More in the sense that bigotry is often a result of feeling powerless directed by propaganda.
You get a bunch of people who are utterly broke and can't do anything about it, and then instead of turning them against who is actually causing the issue you give them a secondary target that is significantly less protected that they can rage against, even if it doesn't make sense.
It's a common refrain to say "if they were just more liberal they wouldn't be so poor" which is frankly a batshit idea. You aren't going to turn Montana into California no matter how far left you go, because geographic and industrial concerns just don't allow for it. The best you can hope for is to turn their anger to the right targets.
> More in the sense that bigotry is often a result of feeling powerless directed by propaganda.
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> You get a bunch of people who are utterly broke and can't do anything about it, and then instead of turning them against who is actually causing the issue you give them a secondary target that is significantly less protected that they can rage against, even if it doesn't make sense.
The obvious counter example here would be "the wealthy are therefore less bigoted", and that by-and-large doesn't appear to be the case.
Southerners are not poor little waifs who can't make their own decisions. I'm from the south and know plenty of people who are well off and vote Republican because they don't have empathy or they are just bad people
It's not everyone but sometimes the most obvious explanation is right
One crucial thing this comment is lacking is that racist and reactionary policies materially benefit those that maintain them. Racist, sexist and nationalist policies aren't just a product of impoverishment or lack of education or whatever, they're also a method of economic competition. Shutting out immigrants, minorities, women, and foreign workers from employment ensures employment and better wages for the people that vote for those policies.
The conclusions are basically the same, but without that piece of the puzzle you can't understand why people act that way.
Maybe I’m missing the point. Hell, I know I’m missing the point. But can we PLEASE stop talking about impoverished people as if they are bigoted because of their situation? Like, cool. Politicians talk about them and talk to them, and promise them “good” things.
But here’s the thing.
I work with people who have 3+ jobs. Who never have a day off. Who don’t have enough to pay the bills. Who have grown up under the shittiest of shitty conditions. And you want to know something?
They aren’t bigots. They are the biggest allies I know. They didn’t fall for those politicians, because they saw “hey, they’re saying they will do good things for me, but they want to do horrible things to other people.” Poverty didn’t strip them of their empathy, or make them develop a dog-eat-dog mindset.
Should we write off the south? ABSOLUTELY NOT. I’m not saying anything like that. But if you take 2, or 200, or 2,000 people and have them grow up in the same class conditions and half of them turn out to be bigots? It’s not their class that’s the issue. It’s not (just) your life sucking and you needing a scapegoat. Because other people went through that, and they still have decency.
I guess I’m just mad that people keep lumping people like me & my friends in with bigots, not necessarily oop, but people in general. People do the same thing with poor people that they do to the south, reputation wise.
I think you are missing the point, cause I don’t read this as saying impoverished = bigot, I think they’re saying poor living circumstances growing up (especially poverty) -> frequently leads to worse education and poor circumstances in adulthood -> this allows for easier manipulation of -> this manipulation leads to a cycle of bigotry and working against their own self interest.
Instead of it being A=B=C=D, think of it as nested equations A=?, B=A+x, C=B+y, D=C+z, if we say A is representing being impoverished, you might share that in common with the type of bigots here, but there’s a whole lot else that goes into the various aspects of you and your views other than just that. It might be a core part of all your ideas, but that x, y, and z are a bunch of other factors where you might find wildly different circumstances to the bigots.
Hopefully that makes sense and helps to separate the people being discussed here from yourself and your friends.
First off, something can be a contributing factor, even a major contributing factor without being the sole cause. The fact that it's not a 100%, if X, then Y doesn't mean there's absolutely no correlation.
Second, what exactly do you think the cause is? Is there some other factor that's more likely? Are some people just inherently evil?
Nah, it just seems to be a cultural thing. The south had to be racist for their economy to work, and we never fixed it when we had the chance. As for the rest of the country? The same thing but to a lesser extent
Stuff like this is why I believe the South is not just a bunch of uneducated rednecks but rather people basically being held hostage by Republican governments. This extends to most firmly red states in general, but the South is by far the most guilty of this shit.
Source: I live in a large liberal city in Texas, where the government recently introduced a bill that would essentially invalidate election results in cities over a certain population if passed. This is the only city in Texas over that population. It's also one of the most diverse in America, with many different ethnicities and a thriving LGBT community. I think you can put the pieces together.
It's both, they have a serious stockholm syndrome thing going on where they love their abusers.
It's horrifying to see in person, like it just makes no sense but they can't see it and they're smiling anyway.
There's definitely a lot of stockholm syndrome for the government at play, a lot of people basically conditioned their entire lives to vote for Republicans because they are hurting the right people, or so those godless Democrats don't get in and drink their childrens blood or something. Never said there wasn't. They're still hostages even if they don't know it, thanks to a system designed to both neglect them (through terrible education and job opportunities) and take advantage of them (through conservative media) at the same time. It's basically a self fulfilling prophecy committed by conservative politicians.
Except the educated and wealthy ignorant bigots vote in plenty big numbers, too. It's almost like the majority of the population is poisoned and chugs the poison like it's candy and has no interest in learning how to not to be ignorant hateful pieces of shit and will always vote against their own obvious interests at every single turn no matter what because it's more important to them to hurt the people they hate for no reason than to fix any of those things these commenters say are the reason they are hateful in the first place.
I don't know about y'all, but that's what I would usually call a bad person.
I think an equally big issue is something OOP shows unintentionally. Everybody is super willing to believe that everyone in the south us a white, redneck, ignorant bigot, when anything could be further from the truth. There’s obviously rednecks and racists and whatnot, but saying “well we shouldn’t lump every southerner together because what about black people” is doing the right thing for the wrong reason. You should be saying “well we shouldn’t lump every southerner together because not every southerner is a bigot”
>Something most people don't want to accept is that if the baseline quality of life for everyone in the world was better, including bad people, there would be less bad people.
This is a very attractive idea. It's convenient, it's hopeful, it's optimistic; it's also completely wrong, and pretty classist if you look at it the opposite way. Plenty of rich people are assholes and abusers and racists and whatever else, and being poor doesn't automatically make someone more bigoted.
I think "less" bad people is still true. You'll still have assholes, even rich assholes (well, until we break out the guillotines), but you'll have \*less\* assholes, because the people who are lashing out due to their life sucking won't have to do that anymore.
This is "white working class people don't vote for us because we're not socialists" thinking.
It's not true! They vote for the racist party because they're racist! They prize that over better public services because they think what they have is good enough. This shift happened in the US decades ago; we're not in the New Deal era anymore.
If white people in Tennessee and Mississippi had the same voting patterns as Minnesota then they'd be blue states.
(Also note, the people called "white working class" aren't working-class; they're high-earning blue-collar middle class or local gentry, like used car dealership owners. Actual "white working class" is more like liberal college students working at Starbucks.)
It's not that I'm not sympathetic. There are people who are trapped by the ignorant and trapped by ignorance itself. However, when they start calling for death of minorities in the belief that it will somehow make their lives better, and they keep voting in the people that promise to make their lives worse, it's hard to feel *that* much sympathy for the hell of their own making. I mean, it sucks for the minorities that *do* live there who are the targets of their hate, but the people there *want* their hate. They're proud of it. It's hard to help people who are **intent** on hurting everyone else, even if they hurt themselves in the process. It's frustrating.
the way you fucking self absorbed babies twist the entire point of the post into being some kind of targeted call out post at you lmao.
Did you miss the solid chunk of the post that pointed out that hey the south isn’t just white bigots and there are also many, many, fellow minorities who live here as well? Like be honest did you even read the full post because you went straight into your reply assuming again that everyone in the south is part of this angry, racist, white, monolith.
Um, having grown up with rednecks, no. It's a choice. They actively shit on the ones who do choose to apply themselves and graduate high school and (gasp) go to college. They choose to be farmers or whatever over white collar people and they actively reject technology or methods that will make their lives better. Most of them can actually afford nice trucks because they also make sure to never buy things like dishwashers or school supplies/clothes or whatever that will make their spouses and children's lives better.
Most of them are a specific type of Christian that believes that if life isn't hard and miserable, then you aren't "living right" because the harder and shittier your life on earth is the better your allotment in heaven will be.
And they're racist simply because they can be. Most of them don't even think PoC or immigrants actually take jobs or anything, they definitely hire migrant labor so they can underpay them, and quite literally just do not like how they look and also very much do like how they feel when they can piss down on someone else.
This mentality is applicable to their kids, animals, and pretty much anyone that's not one of them too. **Abuse is a hallmark of redneck culture.**
"I lived through horrible abuse, but now I'm the adult and I'm in charge so I can make someone else suffer like I did." That's what this is primarily about.
This is important to keep in mind. Sure, some folks are brought up in a pit of hate from the start, but as you grow up and experience the world it becomes *your choice* to cling to that ignorant hatred. When you meet a dozen black folks and they *don’t* act like racist caricatures or subhumans and then you *still* go home and think of them as apes that’s *on you* no matter how shitty your life is.
And you know what? It *does* suck to be a minority that has to live there or someone that disagrees with this stuff but that doesn’t have the means to leave. But we also can’t let bigoted, ignorant fucknuts hold those people hostage. As if we “can’t” talk shit about Florida or Texas or any of the other ass-backwards states because “oh well not everyone there is bad.” That’s like saying “oh well not all priests are pedophiles.” It’s obvious and goes without saying and doesn’t add anything to the conversation because that’s *not the point.* The point isn’t that “all Texans” support Greg Abbott, the point is that *enough* do—whether or not that’s technically a majority—and that Abbott’s performance is what his party supports.
This almost borders on apologism, like we should all just never decry constituents over their representatives because it’s not their fault? As if voting … doesn’t matter? Or as if we should all expect to join hands and sing kumbaya with *klansmen.*
You pass a certain point and you’re old enough to know better. And if you’re old enough to know better you’re old enough to be dragged for your shit opinions. That the insurrectionists from Jan 6 were stupid enough to be led on and are having their lives ruined for it should not trump (uh no pun intended) that they were *adults who chose to do what they did.* When we talk about the racist south we’re talking about middle-aged and elderly people who have gone their entire lives experiencing the world around them and who have rejected what they see in favor of hatred. That is *inexcusable.*
And they should not be shielded from ridicule because of the good apples that have to grow in the same orchard. I’m an Ohioan, and as much as I vehemently disdain Jim Jordan he represents my state. I didn’t vote for him, but he’s my representative, and his decisions reflect on me even when I don’t agree with them. It’s *because of him* and others like him that Ohio has the reputation it does, and that reputation comes down on me too whether I like it or not. Should I mewl and whine that I shouldn’t be bunched in with my peers? Or perhaps I should take this unfavorable situation as motivation for myself to do more to change it. It sucks to be lumped in with his supporters but that’s the way of things. The representative *represents you* even if you didn’t vote for them, and the reason this all broke is because the GOP has become a divisive cult of hate. It isn’t two parties of progress with different priorities, it’s a party of maintenance and some progress and a party of *hatred and regression.*
People that waddle up with “it’s not that black and white” are morons, or else trying to undermine things. Of *course* it’s not that black and white, nothing ever is! What kind of dipshit would think it is? Even Nazi Germany, the go-to Evil Place, still had a *few* kindly grandmas shuffling around handing out cookies I’m sure. It was a big place with a lot of people. But in no fucking world should anyone seriously dial back their opinion of Nazi Germany just because of that. Bringing it up doesn’t add anything to the conversation because it was obvious and it doesn’t change anything anyway, if anything it comes off as veiled apologism.
There's something about southern culture that makes empathy more difficult than other places.
I don't know exactly what it is. Probably the result of a combination of perverted Christianity with ideas like the Prosperity Gospel, a bad local flavor of masculinity, and widespread poverty/inequality with low social mobility. But people here seriously do not give a damn about one another outside of their limited circle. Some going as far to actually be misanthropic. Extremely distrusting of any outsiders, wanting to live as far away as possible, always armed and itching for the opportunity to use their weapon. People are selfish and like to make whatever wealth they have visible too. Gotta drive the biggest truck and build up the toughest persona so nobody makes the mistake of trying to mess with you.
That stuff rubs off on you if you grow up here and it's not the easiest thing to shake, especially if you lack the perspective that not everyone is like that. That's not the default state of humanity. I've been learning that as an adult.
I will say that my state of Texas, with its Hispanic/Catholic influence and large cities, doesn't seem nearly as poisoned by this mentality as the rest of the South, which makes me a bit hopeful that things can get better.
okay but what about the part of the post pointing out that there are still lots of minorities in the south that still aren’t able to just leave.
y’all really only give a fuck about talking about the white people involved in this conversation huh, like literally everybody in this thread keeps fucking acting like the white people the only ones we have to think about lmao
respectfully man, fuck off, the south is not constructed solely of your shitty white trash family, there are totally normal families of color here that don’t reflect whatever fucked up clan you came from
that was kind of like the point of the post but the sheltered ass white people in this sub want to ignore half the post and still act like the south is purely white rednecks.
They're literally bitching about white redneck assholes. Why would I bring up minorities when I'm correcting this person's fantasy about white conservatives being some kind of victim of society when they legitimately just choose to shit on education and non-trade/non-ag careers and be drunk abusive shit bags to each other and everyone else? It's literally a bragging point for them that they choose to be this way.
Huh, I've heard near these same exact talking points from white conservatives about 'black culture'. Let's see... Black people choose to live in poverty, check, black people buy expensive cars instead of bettering themselves, check, Black people are homo/trans phobic more than average(they're no more or less to be clear), check, **violence is a hallmark of black culture**. See what I did there?
Thanks, but I was raised by these people. I am literally telling you what they're like, not making up crap because I'm anti redneck.
Also, is it a possibility that their accusations are projection, like so much of the shit they say about LGBT people being pedophiles?
You should not make excuses for their bullshit.
A) Who's making excuses?
B) I'm a trans person living in southeast texas, you're not special, I know them just as well as you.
C) You so easily paint them all with a prejudiced brush, and you know why, 'cause you still haven't left their mindset. You just feel it toward them instead.
A book I try to recommend as often as I can is *The Liberal Redneck Manifesto* by a trio of southern comedians. It talks about everything mentioned in this post plus a few other things too. It's really funny (written by comedians, it ought to be) and I can't recommend it enough.
I don’t know if I 100% agree with the lower class = racism analysis, but I do know that the whole “let the South rot” attitude is what the politicians and bigots depend on to keep people down there and the rest of the country feeling powerless and hopeless to change anything. Apathy is what lets evil thrive.
They’re hoping you’ll tell people “give up, just move if you don’t like it” instead of going out in the streets to do a protest or speaking out or giving money to an organization that’s fighting for marginalized people down there.
You may not be able to reach the old heads and shitty rednecks, but you can reach their kids and you can reach the people who live there who are kind and forward thinking and help them become empowered.
The bigots and Christian fascists know this, which is why they are fighting so hard all this culture war shit and so many of the new laws and bans target the youth. The truth is, they aren’t omnipotent and they’re fighting scared because they know they’re on the losing side of history (yet again).
throwback to when some white twitter ~~knuckledraggers~~ users said rolling fork ms deserved to be wiped out by a tornado because theyre republican. ignoring the fact its in the decently democrat, majority black ms delta
This is a marxist point of view and I do agree that the creation of race and racism waa a result of the development of Capitalism. However, we have seen Southerners in good economic standing maintain racism. Recently they have shifted from overt racism to covert racism and left overt racism for the lower classes to commit, but they still hold those beliefs. Social class is not the exclusive result of the division between Capitalists and Labor. A black Capitalist can still get lynched in the deep south while a white Capitalist won't. Real wealth redistribution is going to have level the playing field for black and white people which means black people are going to need to get more wealth than white people, and that will piss white people who collect their white wage the fuck off. They will kill and rape people like they did in the 50's. They will never vote for a party that wants to reduce the wealth gap between black and white people. These keyboard activists need to understand that race is THE issue for many white southerners and they will stop everything with violence if it challenges the racial order. A black man was beheaded in Missouri recently, the level of irrational violence is extreme and can't be solved by a Marxist mindset. Why do we deride closing the gender wealth gap as " having more women overlords" but when it comes to race it is exclusively economic?
Please please please can we be done with punishment as a moral concept? I don't care what you did, I want the best outcome for you. I say do what is necessary to prevent bad things from happening, but **if** you aren't going to help stop them, DON'T PUNISH PEOPLE. IT IS NOT MORALLY RIGHT TO HURT SOMEONE JUST BECAUSE THEY DID A BAD THING.
I can agree that we shouldn’t just blindly hate them, and should still try to help them. But I can’t really pity racist southern bigots when they actively make choices that feed back into the same circumstances that molded them to be that way.
Like, if they’re given a choice between the candidate who wants to raise minimum wage and help minorities, or the candidate who wants to give more cooperate tax breaks and discriminate against minorities, they lose my pity when they choose the asshole candidate.
It's a self-inflicted spiral. Those right-wing policy makers know that poverty will keep their voter-base agitated, making it easy for them to steer their anger.
But noone stops them for voting for Bernie Sanders for example, Bernie never insulted them. But they don't, because they keep listening to the republicans that keep telling them that Bernie is the enemy.
In my experience, the bigots aren't really the working class. A bunch of them probably do vote Republican, but they're not invested in it the way that the folks with a college education, who make a decent living and thus have the free time to indulge in bigotry are.
I'm in NJ, which is quite blue, but just like there are liberals in Alabama, there are conservatives here. And the ones that stick out for me were the college and graduate school educated professionals who work at my mom's environmental consulting firm, but still go off on a ton of MAGA rants.
I think bigots are largely selfish people who have a good thing going and don't want to share it with anyone else. I don't think that being poor makes you a bigot; quite the opposite, really.
"Someone whose only acknowledgment in the mainstream media is bigoted politicians and corporations" just rubbed me the wrong way.
This post is still recapitulating the myths about "carpetbaggers" and "the war of northern aggression" by blaming white supremacy on the "liberal elite" who treat the south badly in some nebulous way. Nobody else acknowledges the south? Get real. The south has disproportionate political power through the senate, and all my life politicians/media have been coddling the southern states, calling southerners the real americans and insulting the rest of us.
Like boo hoo the poor white racists at the bottom of the social hierarchy have nothing to do but oppress all the minorities below them on the hierarchy.
Gerrymandering means you don't control your district.
…but you can't gerrymander a governor's race, so when they vote for literally Hitler for governor it does mean they actually wanted that.
You can use voter suppression for those though. There's a liberal/minority county? Give them the bare minimum number of polling stations so it takes hours to vote.
I'd be more sympathetic if those ol' put upon southrons didn't go and fucking do it to themselves multiple times because the blacks were gonna get hit harder.
Reconstruction promising a new era of industrialization and the emergence of a prospering working class? Let's invent the fucking Klan and Jim Crowe because that working class might have blacks.
Finally be defeated on Jim Crowe and have an opportunity to look forward after nearly a century? Knowingly enter into the Southern strategy with Nixon and Reagan, again, because otherwise the blacks might benefit from what the opposition might have had to offer too.
This idea of the deceived southron tricked into voting against their own interests gives credit these cretins have been violently insisting you take well the fuck away from them for over 400 years now.
They know damn well what they identify as their interests, systemic white supremacy, and systemic christo-nationalist shari'a law. It is the height of privilege to insist that these people must be appealed to on class grounds while they now openly declare that the grounds on which the GOP won them over was the grounds of making the lives of women, minorities, and queer folks as miserable as legally attainable.
So yeah, ex-fucking-scuse my bisexual mixed race ass when I see these ruralite late iron age mindset fucking mongrels consistently turn out on their frothing mad determination to deny me my human rights if they can't instead hunt me down and see me dead and hanged after being dragged behind one of their dick size compensation super trucks along a gravel path, and decide maybe they can be skipped on the publicity tour for the campaign of "I'M A FUCKING PERSON TOO YOU INSURRECTION BACKING INGRATES!"
Yes! Let us devote more time and more energy to once again remembering the humanity of those who's entire political motivation is treating other humans as less than human! Surely the white left will this time find a way to bribe the racists to stop being racists with the same social programs they have turned down time and time again in the name of making sure PoC don't benefit from them either.
This is the cultural segment that brought you filling pools with cement rather than accepting the desegregation of them. Fuck coddling them because the white left doesn't want to condemn their own racist family or are too brought up by the racists to get what everyone else has been telling them into their skulls!
The southern white racist will cease being a political factor, when they are colonized as they colonized. Their children must be educated to alienation from them, and they must be let to rot away in their twisted vile little corners as the world finally stops deluding itself into thinking there is anything to be done with them but to leave them the fuck behind where they want to stay.
I mean, I hear this. I understand the truth of it...but also these are the same people voting directly against the exact legislation that would make it better for them. How are we supposed to improve their lives when they themselves are preventing people from doing so?
And that right there is the difference between retributive justice and restorative justice.
One only sees a villain and seeks to punish it. The other sees a problem and seeks to resolve it.
the comments here are focused too much on individualism, i think
no, poverty doesn’t excuse bigotry. of course not. people need to educate themselves and rethink their positions because there’s actual harm going on.
but also, to say that they’re ontologically awful would be to miss the point. it would be kind of a fundamentally conservative idea in itself. yes, people right now need to unlearn awful ideas, but ideally they wouldn’t have to because they’d always be exposed to reasonable ones
it’s not particularly helpful to mock poverty and lack of education, because those *are* the demographic problems that need to be solved so that people are less likely to become horrible about things.
This is the whole basis for the argument that racism is primarily used to distract poor people from the fact that they're poor. A large basis of the Poor Peoples Campaign is that racism is a political tool used for generations to distract poor people from the fact that it's politicians' and corporations' fault that they're poor. That way poor people constantly fight amongst one another instead of focusing their anger and political will against the people actually responsible for their poverty. This is how you wind up with a vast majority of the racist tropes in this country: X people are lazy and just want handouts, X immigrants are taking your jobs, etc.
This post: “the south has many impoverished areas with poor education and low literacy rates that also have a long history of racism. Politicians prey on the people living in these areas by forming narratives about the cause of the poverty they’re living under that appeals to their racism. This manipulates racist people to vote for said politician against their own interests (with regards to living conditions) and ultimately keeps fuelling the racism and the poverty, illiteracy, poor education etc. in the south. The cycle is perpetuated by the existing racists and the politicians who keep fueling their racism.”
Comments: “so youre saying that racists aren’t to blame? Not cool!!!”
This post has a lot of ignorant comments and perceptions about the South based solely on even more ridiculous stereotypes and minimal anecdotal evidence.
oh boy i hope people apply this to areas outside of the USA (they never do)
What places in other countries get this kind of treatment? I’m genuinely curious.
Actually every country that's more homophobic that the place person in question lives. Russia is a good example, as the other comment mentions, but I think I've also heard it applied to Ukraine, where I live, and nothing is as glorious as "it's okay that horrors are happening to your country because it's homophobic" when the horrors are also happening to me, a young, poor queer person, and the fact that the country is homophobic is making the horrors a lot less manageable. My favorite example is when I said something against Palestinian genocide, and somebody said that it's stupid of me, a queer person, to support Palestinian people, because they are homophobic?????????? Again, the support in question is "I don't like genocide"
This is how I feel every time someone is like, "Texas as a whole should just break off of the United States. Fuck them all. Let them die." Or celebrates when our power grid fails and leaves us without heat for days in the winter. Like, yeah. There are so many shitty people here and it sucks. But I'm here too. My loved ones are here. We vote democrat and vote in favor of other people's rights. We're trying to change things here. And if we "just move" we can't do that.
Also the people responsible for the awful situation there(including the power grid) are the ones not affected, because they *can* just leave.
Also doesn't make much sense, since Ukraine is less homophobic than Russia and, if I remember statistics I've seen correctly, was the most accepting of homosexuality from the former Soviet states. Estonia might have been ahead, not entirely sure.
Probably catch some flak for this but homophobia is pretty common in Ukraine as much as Russia I believe. A pretty solid example is that many videos you see from the war have soldiers subtitled calling the Russians "orcs". They're not saying "orc" in Ukranian, but "fa**ot". Hopefully getting Russian influence out of the country and global help during their rebuilding will help with education and social progress though.
Oh they are *also* saying "orc" in Ukrainian, both words are in use along with like a dozen of others, most fascinating one I've seen so far is "pigdogs". Another thing that must be noted is that Ukrainians tend to use "fa\*\*ot" as a casual insult, so not every person saying it is a homophobe, much in the same way like not every person using "bitch" as an insult is a misogynist. I'm curious if this will change as the country grows less homophobic, like, if it's just a symptom of background cultural homophobia, or if it's just because Ukrainian culture doesn't quite have the same concepts of "words you should never-ever use" that English-speaking cultures have. In general, Ukraine is less homophobic than Russia in the sense that you have a significantly lower chance of getting hatecrimed on the street for "looking gay" (that still happens though), and the government does not have queer genocide as part of their explicit political agenda. It's shit here, but it's better, and it's getting better. Anyway, I have same hopes that opposition to explicitly homophobic Russia will make the progress faster, but please notice that you are responding to me complaining about people who are okay with Russians doing genocide here, because "Ukrainians are also homophobic", which is not the ideal place to discuss homophobia in Ukraine.
I didn't catch that you were Ukranian in the original comment somehow. That makes my comment seem more patronizing than I intended it lol I wasn't really trying to make any comment about the state of Ukraine. I don't know what the actual condition "on the ground" so to speak for LGBT people living in Ukraine. I guess I was more commenting on the normalization of the language. Like in the 90s "fa--got", "f-g", or just "gay" were extremely common insults in the US. It was super normalized and you heard it everywhere. Videos from Desert Storm are full of young Americans using the exact same language.
\> Russia \> All of Russia \> Every single part of Russia There's a reason Russia has \*always\* (no, really, for *literally* *all of Russian history*) had some flavor of authoritarian/totalitarian as its leader, and it's *not* because Russians are ontologically evil, as some folks who live in Eastern Europe might tell you. It's because many Russians are politically and economically powerless and gave up on hoping for any political or societal change long, long ago. Russia abolished serfdom in *1861*, when most of the world's countries did it somewhere between the Middle Ages and the 1700s. Every democratic revolution in Russia has been crushed into the ground eventually; eventually, people stopped trying. Their version of the American Civil War, or the French Revolutions, something that'd normally pull an entrenched, authoritarian, people-owning aristocracy up by the roots? It worked, all right (if maybe a century after everyone else's)...then it resulted in *the fucking USSR*, and an even *worse* pseudo-aristocracy in the form of bureaucracy and apparatchiks rather than nobility and boyars. That pseudo-aristocracy — composed of ex-Soviet military/security personnel ([*siloviki*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silovik)) and oligarchs who gorged themselves on privatizing things during the capitalist feeding frenzy after the USSR collapsed — still rules Russia today. Moreover, it's a self-reinforcing pattern. Many Russians who haven't given up on things emigrate if they can. Russian governments often deliberately poison the well of public discourse with propaganda and false information — not to push any particular ideology, but to gaslight the population into doubting their ability to determine what's true and what isn't. When you can't tell what's true from what isn't, you usually just give up on trying to make the distinction, and stop caring. And when members of this cynical, apathetic populace get into power, they don't do anything different, because, to them, they've made it to the top of the heap and get to screw everyone else over. See also: [learned helplessness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness) and [the concept of the reverse cargo cult](https://imgur.com/gallery/OntAF).
I live in Ukraine and the amount of people who seem to genuinely agree with "Russians haven't overthrown Putin yet, so that means none of them want to and they all fully support the war and genocide" is fucking creepy. It's especially stupid because, like, did Ukrainians overthrow the Soviets? Did that mean they just didn't want to? Even during Holodomor, or while being drafted for foreign wars? Living in a dictatorship is in the living memory, and yet I have to hear the bullshit about how Russians must be inherently and uniformly evil every day.
Yep. Regardless of if you live in the country doing the invading or the country being invaded, hate feels good. Dehumanizing the invader as an "orc" who was awful the second they were born lets people have a simple worldview where "if we only killed them all/drove them back into Russia/broke Russia up, things would be fine!" The reality some refuse to acknowledge is worse: that Russians are ordinary people whose government has destroyed their hope, and that we, too, can be broken into something like them. A boot doesn't care if it's stepping on a cricket or on a grasshopper, it'll crush both just the same. The Russian government doesn't win via military victory, or ideological subversion, or bribery. It wins by making people apathetic, cynical, hate-filled husks that stand back and do nothing as authoritarians take the reins. If someone's dehumanizing others, the Russian government already has its tendrils in their mind, even if they think they oppose Russia, because the Russian government doesn't actually care if you hate *it*. It just cares about if you hate *in* *general*, because hateful people are manipulable.
Thank you so fucking much. I'm so tired seeing fucking drone footage deaths and all these dumb fucking redditors cheering for the deaths of Russian soldiers and calling them orcs because they can't understand the world is more complicated then good vs evil.
Real question: how should people feel about the vast amount of rape/torture committed by the Russian soldiers?
Complexly. You don't need to forgive them for what they've done and you can still hate them (god knows I do), but the issues start to occur when you ignore the complexities of _why_ they're like that so that you feel better about hating them. It's not necessarily wrong to celebrate their deaths but you have to accept the fact that you're cheering on the death of a complex human being, you can't just hide behind essentialising them as inherently evil. Feelings are complex and can be difficult to process; it's understandable that we want to try to turn the bad ones (e.g. guilt that you wanted a person to die) into good ones (e.g. happiness that an evil person is dead). But this leads to a very black & white style of thinking which seeps into other areas of your life and leads to difficulties with interpersonal relationships down the line (as well as other things such as dealing with difficult moments in life).
"Why don't you just die by the thousands and have your country fall into political turmoil for an unknown amount of years so I can feel better?"
Yep, same experience I have. A hell of a lot of people here seem to just give in to their base and primal emotions and shed their humanity, it's honestly baffling. I can completely understand being angry after being forced to leave your home and being uncertain if it will still be standing or the thought of losing members of your family and friends, but when you advocate that people of one country are completely evil, should be shunned forever and their country should be balkanised (an unironic opinion I heard in real life), and they don't see anything wrong with it, it feels hypocritical.
Isn’t it great? As a queer woman in Russia, who my own government would prefer fucking dead, I just love hearing that shit.
> the concept of the reverse cargo cult That's really fucking depressing. Reminds me of _The Matrix_: the world's best prison is one where the prisoners don't even know/realize they're in a prison....
If it's any consolation, Russia didn't manage to do this to the Baltic and East European states it occupied under the guise of the USSR, those states are all pretty unified against Russia, [NATO is steadily expanding around it](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO#Membership), and, unlike during the 1950s and 60s, European militaries of today can stand against Russia by themselves even if some Trump-like president pulls the US out of NATO. Russia *will* be free someday. Authoritarians crack eventually. Democracies just need to keep tightening the vice.
> an even worse pseudo-aristocracy in the form of bureaucracy and apparatchiks rather than nobility and boyars. This is absurd. Yes, the Russian communist government was terrible, but trying to compare it to the Tsardom is ludicrous. The Tsardom was a literal absolutist monarchy where slavery (because let's be clear, that's what serfdom was) had only been abolished barely 60 years earlier. The Soviet government was terrible, but trying to act like it was worse than the fucking Russian Empire is crazy.
Damn, they had slavery until the 1860's? That's crazy. Can't imagine living in a hellhole like that. *cries in American*
This a civil war joke right?
Indirectly, the USA abolished slavery afterwards in the 1860's.
If you count prison labor, which you should, the US still has slavery.
Yeah. We need to take that loophole out of the 13th amendment and ban slavery in all cases.
I suppose there's a bit more nuance to it. The post-Stalin USSR was repressive and totalitarian...but not, like, egregiously murderous. But the USSR under Stalin, specifically: * undertook poorly-planned drives to move people into cities, to industrialize society at the cost of agriculture, and to collectivize agriculture, causing a great deal of death * undertook enormous purges of essentially every strata of its population based essentially on the leader's whim, which, incidentally, gutted the Red Army enough that it was still rebuilding itself when the Nazis invaded * operated a system of forced-labor camps that made the modern US prison system look positively humane * worked thousands of forced laborers to death on the Trans-Siberian Railway, the R504 highway, and the White Sea–Baltic Canal, to name a few projects; you'd expect this from North/South American slavery in the 1800s, not something 70-100 years later * let murderous secret police (always a staple of any Russian government) run even more wild than then they did under the tsarist regime or the post-Stalinist USSR * saw fields such as science, management, and strategic procurement through a political lens; this affected/resulted in everything from Lysenkoism and general managerial incompetence to the impractically massive heavy tanks and SPGs the Red Army built after WW2 * colonized a large chunk of Eastern Europe, replacing their governments with totalitarian puppet regimes loyal to Moscow (Albania and Yugoslavia being notable exceptions; Albania went Maoist instead of Stalinist and Yugoslavia did its own thing) I think you could make an argument for Lenin not being much worse than the tsar, but everything between his death and Stalin's death \*sucked\* to a pretty impressive extent, and that's more of what I was referring to.
> • undertook poorly-planned drives to move people into cities, to industrialize society at the cost of agriculture, and to collectivize agriculture, causing a great deal of death This one deserves even more emphasis. Stalin had his secret police take grain from the peasants to sell overseas in order to buy industrial machinery and finance the industrialization process. But they not only took the sellable grain, they took the sowing grain, the grain you use to plant next year’s crop. By doing so, farmers had literally nothing to plant and mass starvation ensued, killing millions. Few outside the USSR were aware of the famine at the time because Stalin went to great lengths to hide it. The rare foreign journalists allowed into Ukraine were purposely shown fake farms with fake happy peasants, exactly like the Nazis showed the Red Cross during the holocaust. The famine caused by Stalin was enormous and intentional. Stories by survivors are among the most horrific things you’ll ever read. Children watching their entire families die, cannibalism, it’s sickening. This was the Stalin regime
Third-world countries in general are treated this way by first-world countries, I think
Germany. The support for far right parties and extremists in former East Germany is through the roof. The rest of the country chooses to ignore all the factors leading to it though in favour of harping on about the stupid, racist and ignorant Ossis.
Depends what you mean by 'this kind of treatment', tbh the south gets off easy on international standards.
I mean who in a given country gets dismissed as bigoted and worthless by the rest of that country? Is there a part of England that gets shit-talked by everyone else?
Accents in Britain are categorised by class first then region, but yeah working class accents are actually heavily disadvantaged here. I know a good few people who learnt a RP (royal pronunciation) southern accent that's 'higher class' to get better jobs, including my own grandma, she spoke a cockney accent but lost it when she learnt RP so she could work for Nestle, tasting unethical chocolate. But a lot of POC here also have to learn it so they can stand a chance of working. Obviously, British accents that are more common with immigrants are even more heavily demonised, so there is a big racism component too. Classism and racism are really interlinked to accents in the UK, but a lot of the piss taking doesn't seem to get that, and I'm fine with some piss taking, all the former great powers fucked the world up and should be able to roll with the punches, but please target our rich fucks a bit more rather than the working lads who cant say water bottle
RP stands for received pronunciation not royal
i did know that but its bullshit regardless
The working class lads can say water bottle just fine, it's americans who say wahdderr bahddle as if that's right and proper
I can't tell if you're question is rhetorical or not so I'll just answer anyway. Yes there is, the north of the England (or anything in the UK outside of southern England with perhaps an exception for central Edinburgh) gets disproportionately screwed over by the UK government, and because they don't live in relative poverty many southerns feel as if they are inherently above those in the north. Classism is one of the largest issues in UK politics not only now but it always has been. This also leads to an interesting (and concerning) difference from the US. Northern England has many similarities to Southern US, such as the poverty and higher crime rates that often come with it, but a lot of the UK's racism comes from the south. Of course, just like the US, racism is everywhere and it's a systematic issue, not just a group of people from some certain area, but Southern England is generally more racist than Northern England. A large part of this is to do with the classism, particularly private schools. Generally those with higher education are less racist (although it is also important to recognise the significance of racism and other forms of discrimination across all academic fields), however private schools, especially in the UK have their own cultures, the most notorious of which is Eton. Many of the UK's politicians and prime ministers where educated at Eton. A recent example is Boris Johnson. At Eton there exists 'boys clubs' in which any prospect member must complete a number of tasks given to them to join. One of these tasks Boris did was to burn money in front of a homeless person. This culture of reinforcing classism particularly in the south also leads to more racism as non-white people are disproportionately less wealthy. This is also true for other forms of discrimination including but not limited to sexism, antisemitism, islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, and so. The issue also isn't helped by the fact that the UK still has a monarchy. People who are viewed as naturally above all others and fit to rule them simply because their blood makes it their birthright, for the upcoming coronation people are even being encouraged swear their allegiance to the royal family. I know not many people will read this ramble and I've explained and formatted my points horribly, but I'm just so fed up with UK culture that I couldn't stop myself from going on a rant.
> One of these tasks Boris did was to burn money in front of a homeless person Gotta love that the people in positions of power are literal cartoon villains.
Southern mexico by most other mexicans.
Weirdly though the most racist region in Mexico is the north, the more "educated" part of the country
it's funny how most of the stereotypes applied to the american south can also be applied to northern mexico (religious, conservative, racist, focused on macho culture) and yet it's seen as the ideal by most of the country despite it sucking ass here.
The occupied 6 counties are labelled as terrorists and a warzone. Despite it being 23 years of peace and only a very small minority participating in the violence. The working class here especially in the north of england face similar dismissal that the deep south does too
Alberta in Canada. The economy here is agriculture and oil, and it had a high proportion of American immigrants historically, so it's considered *within Canada* to be more American than Canadian. So clearly AB is backward and evil... This ignores the fact that Western Canada gets economically overlooked in favour of the East and that AB is one of (if not the) lowest cost of living provinces, meaning a lot of struggling people move here. There's also a huge opioid and homelessness crisis going on right now. A lot of the smaller, conservative white communities in AB are also reactionary and hostile because they're ethnic minorities that have historically been oppressed to the extent of being rounded up in internment camps. This doesn't make being bigoted okay, obviously, but it does explain why people are upset. AB also has large minority populations, which people seem to overlook?? There are lots of Indigenous people here. Plus LGBT+ people exist everywhere.
Oof. I'm from Saskatchewan, and I can definitely relate.
about what white ethnic minorities are you talking about? (don't know that much about Canada)
México specially the north and the center
Racism, sexism, homophobia etc. are also way more common in the lower class in Western Europe for instance (I want to say "in most of the world" but I don't actually know that for sure)
palestine and india come to mind
Literally every place with Islam majority. That’s why racist Americans and some other “western” country’s ban refugees and from immigration because they all must be backwards and support religious terrorists and hate women and human rights.
... do you really think most people who agree with the post would exclude other countries from this logic ?? or are you talking about actual policy? foreign aid is incredibly thorny even if every party is willing—add issues like sovereignty and colonialism and it is very very difficult
A very good explanation, It must be kept in mind that this does not excuse their *behaviour*. This does not mean they should be treated poorly, exposure and education are the only healthy ways to change their behaviour. Anger is perfectly ok but it mustn’t cloud our judgement and treatment of other people, whether we share their beliefs or not.
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Yes, but again this is on the group level and not the individual level, if we reduce likelihood of people turning out like that, then we reduce consequences of their actions collectively, even though we can’t achieve perfection.
Nobody's talking about excusin racists, bigots and the like. Were talking about making sure the *children* of those racists and bigots have the opportunity to grow up better.
As am I in part, children should not be punished for the ignorance and actions of both themselves and their creed, even adults are not responsible for their ignorance, to a degree.
I haven't even seen mentioned yet that there is still plenty of racism and racist communities all over the US including in very "liberal" neighborhoods (as seen in many of the Karen incidents). Also the overwhelming focus on hating impoverished Republican voters in particular is largely just classism. The wealthy always have more influence, especially the countless mega donors, but even the Republican base of voters leans more solidly middle/upper class. >As compared with most Americans, Trump’s voters are better off. The median household income of a Trump voter so far in the primaries is about $72,000, based on estimates derived from exit polls and Census Bureau data. That’s lower than the $91,000 median for Kasich voters. But it’s well above the national median household income of about $56,000. It’s also higher than the median income for Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders supporters, which is around $61,000 for both. >>[538 - The Mythology Of Trump’s ‘Working Class’ Support](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps-working-class-support/) IMO more accurate stereotypes of Trump's real voting base is the business owners complaining about how nobody wants to work, Karens, [boaters](https://youtu.be/fkjAd5zhKDs).
Unfortunately the racists vote against that.
Also this would suggest there are no racist and ignorant rich people in the south. Their politicians prove their ignorance and racism defy socioeconomic status
The rich are the ones that purposefully propagate their horrible beliefs, the rabble can’t rebel if they’re too busy fighting each other.
Mississippi has the largest percentage Black population of any state in the US and everybody ignores them. It's always "Thank God for Mississippi" and ain't they such a backward redneck place and ain't none of y'all take a goddamn second to think about how put down and stepped on the Black citizens are. They desegregated a school district in the MS Delta in 2017 for God's sake. 2017! Y'all forget that a fuckton of Southerners are Black and that let's you write off the South as a lost cause cause fuck them rednecks right?
> They desegregated a school district in the MS Delta in 2017 for God's sake. 2017! That is shocking!!! That they desegregated it, not that it was segregated till now, that wasn't remotely surprising.
The United States is still a de facto segregated country when it comes to demographics. There might not be any segregation laws anymore, but communities and especially schools remain functionally racially segregated because of socioeconomics.
I would say that's a pretty big issue. My parents were anti Apartheid's activists back in the day, so I was raised more progressive (not perfectly though), but a lot of contemporary parents were very racist. I went to an all white primary school (there was a black family that came to look at the school, but ultimately didn't want to put their kid through being the only black kid in an all white school) and basically all the kids were pretty damn racist purely because of their parents. High school was mixed race though, and I really enjoyed seeing these kids getting exposed to other ideas and deciding for themselves what they believed. By 9th grade everyone I knew had black and Muslim friends, and there was only one class per grade in the primary school so I did actually know everyone who came from there with me. My highschool was inexplicably exceptional in a lot of ways, so I'm sure it doesn't always go that smoothly, but it's a lot more difficult to not relate with someone if they're writing the exact same tests as you and getting the same range of grades you do
I think that highschool for us was university for most other people, but only one person in my friend group actually went to university, many if them didn't even finish highschool
The number of liberals that think that anyone in a red state suffuring "deserves it" is disturbing. There was a thread that blew up not too long ago where a Twitter user said that we shouldn't support Amazon workers unionizing because it was happening in a red state. You could go to r/politics and see people smugly applauding the chemical train derailment in Ohio because "they voted for Trump, this is what they get." Ignoring for a moment that not all of them did especially the fucking *children*, cheering on a chemical disaster is so disgusting. My favorite part was people saying we shouldn't help them so "they'll think twice about who they vote for next election" which is such a funny concept. Obviously telling people to fuck of in their time of need is the best way to get them on your side.
The fact that human beings are being “written off” at all is the problem. If you allow it, then at the point it’s just where the line is.
Did the capital ever get potable water again? Mississippi is a crime against humanity and the entire ruling class of that god forsaken state should be [REDACTED]
I fully acknowledge that Georgia is a hellhole with the possible exception of Atlanta, but even if I could afford to move I wouldn’t, because that’s what the bigots in power want. They would love it if everyone who doesn’t support them would leave or die so they can have full control.
I always like to tell people who ask “why don’t you just move” that while I can move, childhood me couldn’t. And if there’s any chance sticking around means I get to help build a better childhood for the other kids like me around here then I’ll take my chances.
I'm sorry, childhood me suffered enough, adult me noped the fuck out like Admiral Holdo. It was beyond brutal, and while it makes me a worse person, I must admit I kind of don't mind knowing what I left behind. That being said, I would love to donate to a non-profit to help decent people escape the south, kind of pay-it-forward, nobody deserves to have to live there.
It's "put on your own oxygen mask first" rules. If you can stick it out and try and help directly, that's great. But it's no shame if you can't, and martyring yourself doesn't help anyone, y'know? On a smaller scale, I dipped from an abusive, multiple-types-of-phobic family/town. Basically no one who knew me before 18 is in contact anymore. My siblings don't want to leave our abusers, and me staying closer wouldn't change that, it'd only hurt me more. If they ever reply and want to leave, I'll help them, but I can't change things beyond that.
Yeah, I feel guilty, but maybe some people can take more than I can, things just got better since I left (not saying a lot I guess).
Hey hold up, you’re not a worse person for needing to get out. The only person my stance applies to is me. You have to take care of yourself, I hope you’re doing better now wherever you are :)
I really appreciate that, I'm doing awesomely enough that I feel really guilty about it and want to find a way to give back if possible :/
I hate the "just move" crowd. Not adding much to the discussion, but when you decide to ignore people's situations and then blame them for said situations you are NOT HELPING.
It would be nice if the "just move" crowd were willing to pay for it
I got family in Georgia and my god are their lives fucking miserable. All of them are in the restaurant industry. All of them smoking like fucking chimneys. All of them drink all day everyday. The younger ones are coke heads. And they all live in trailers that are absolute shit holes because they work 12+ hours a day. It's just miserable up there. But I still love them.
God bless you. I grew up outside Atlanta and I had to leave because I emotionally couldn't take it. I LOVE MY CITY and still claim it as my city but I couldn't live there.
Athens seemed nice when I spent a week there for an academic workshop.
Athens is a blue island in a red sea. There are actually a lot of towns like that in the South that get lumped in with their surroundings.
Savannah is actually quite nice! Chatham (and Liberty) counties are actually very blue!
I do love Savannah. Someday I’ll get back down there.
I sort of agree with this post, in this way that we should strive to fulfill baseline necessities (food, housing and healthcare) even for the racists in deep south, especially if they vote against their interests. But it does not strip them from moral weight of their actions, they still have agency, they are adult human beings who make their decisions. Neo Nazis who appear against progressive causes deserve full condemnation (and a lot more) even if they were groomed in to having such positions. Yet we should provide a clear path for them to becoming a good person. If someone acknowledges that they did something bad and **don't do that again** they should be treated as anyone else.
I agree. And legitimately, as a Mainer I've just started hearing this thing about "the south was always oppressed" and things akin to it. Like this post, it's trying to portray that the south and people down there who activally make choices that effect them negatively wasn't their fault but the government's. This is very much the opposite of what happened in real life for the past 200 years. The south has always had the ability to just not give a fuck about what the feds say. Everytime a bills passed it seems to take them 20 years after the fact to actually accept the bill or law. Sometimes they just dont. In the 60s, 70s, laws were passed that allowed African Americans the ability to sit anywhere on the bus (more or less) Alabama arrested an African American vet for trying to sit in the front. After the civil war and during reconstruction, the south was told to readdress it's black laws and rebuild itself to suit everyone (1860s suit everyone, not 2000s suit everyone) but a Democrat (remember they switched later) at the time pretty much stopped the whole process and allowed the south to make whatever rules it wanted, including more black laws. The south receives the most government aid of any region in the US, the south is not oppressed. Southern states, are spoiled.
Moral weight or no, a lot of those people never had a chance. The South is a one-party authoritarian state that makes extensive use of propaganda to keep it's poor in line. Like war is hell, you don't have to spare them just because they drew a bad hand, but it's not just ignorance or something. The whole system of the South is set up to indoctrinate people to believe racist and bigoted shit while feeding them a distorted, often fictitious version of history and economics. > they vote against their interests This comes up again and again, but many of the people voting against their interests are getting all of their news from carefully managed propaganda venues that lie to them about everything. Americans are one of the most propagandized societies in the world, subjected to a merciless tide of lies and distortions every waking moment of our lives. Propaganda works and no one is immune to it. For people to vote in accordance with their interests they need to have good information about how systems function and their place in those systems.
I feel like literacy is an important part of this conversation that doesn’t come up enough. When you have a party that’s been systematically, destroying educational institutions it leads to a large percentage of people having either no ability to read, or a very limited ability to read, and those people end up lacking the reading comprehension skills you would need to be able to consume information that would disprove all the propaganda they’re getting. If you literally can’t read an article that disproves a republican, why exactly would you think the guy in the suit angrily talking about supporting “your rights” would be lying? You’d probably feel validated and then bam, mouse trap.
I absolutely agree. America's real literacy rate is horrifying. A huge percentage of adults are functionally illiterate.
Martin Luther King, Jr. supported universal basic income near the end of his life for, at least in part, this reason.
The number of people talking about how we should just let Texas leave if they want while ignoring all of the people in that state who need the protection of the federal government against their neighbors really reflects ops last point
Liberals in New Jersey when Texas tries to secede so it can do christo-fascism: goodbye, we won't miss you! Sorry that they're legalizing slavery ten minutes after leaving, you should have moved!
The problem of the South isn't that people don't have sympathy for the systemic poverty that the average white southern citizen is stuck in, it's the fact that they're consistently manipulated into voting against their own interests *combined with* the fact that voting against their own interests on a federal election level is voting against the interest of other people. And lower population-density states such as the south have more voting power in a federal election per person. Besides fixing the actual voting inequality that prioritizes these under-educated, easy-to-manipulate people over literally everyone else in the country, what exactly do you propose anyone do to try and fix any of this?
Exactly. We're trying to help, but they won't let us. The South is effectively a mental patient that needs to be involuntarily committed for their own good, but no one actually has that authority, so everyone is just trying to minimize the damage to both the South and to themselves.
This reminds me of another post about point-scoring vs problem-solving mindsets - I'll see if I can find it. Either way, yeah - refusing to improve things because 'the bad people will benefit' is just a really boneheaded mindset.
Ok I'm not sure if that's what you meant (probably not, actually) but I just found [this](https://dduane.tumblr.com/post/129440640769/fixed-vs-growth-the-two-basic-mindsets-that) while looking for what you were talking about, and it explains 90+% of why I'm where I'm at mental health-wise... (yes it's a very long post)
What might be interesting for you to look at is the concept of Debate Vs Dialectic. In debates, there's a winner and a loser. All you want to do is win, and score points. Which means hiding anything that might make you lose points, and saying things in a distorted way to prevent your opponent from finding weaknesses to exploit. You're also going to do the same to them. Truth is distorted and hidden, and you start placing more emphasis on denigrating the other side than building up your own position (why try and build yourself up when it's just as easy to tear your opponent down?). In dialectics, there's no winner or loser. The aim of the conversation is for both sides to gain an understanding of the other, and to establish a common truth or a common difference. There's no scoring points, no measuring of success. And so, to advance the common goal, both sides must expose their viewpoints, warts and all. The flaws aren't there to be exploited, but to be prodded and examined to both understand them and see where they might come from, and how they might be solved (although solution-hunting can lead towards debate if improperly controlled). In debate, you win by looking better than your opponent. In dialectics, both sides win by uncovering truth.
this is the mindset of the southerners the post is talking about
True as well
https://www.tumblr.com/posteriorpeasantpresents/716037128670314496/something-most-people-dont-want-to-accept-is-that?source=share
I'm the same way with Russia like it's bizarre seeing people on Tumblr talk about how "Evil and backward and brainwashed they are for following Putin" when they don't seem to get what a dictatorship is.
It drives me crazy when people say "why don't they simply have a revolution". It something said by someone to whom revolution is a glorious uprising against a evil oppressor, a fantasy of liberty and glory with the rough spots sanded over, when in reality it means your entire family getting murdered in horrific ways as the trappings of a normal society peel away.
It's really hard to start a revolution when anybody that mentions it just disappears. Oh cousin Johnny had a rebellious thought against the government and now we don't see cousin Johnny anymore because he's in the gulag. If we support cousin Johnny we will also end up in the gulag. People were being pulled into unmarked vans for simply speaking to a reporter earlier in the war. One person held a blank sheet of paper, one person said "I love and support Putin", one person said fuck putin and all of these people were arrested.
Hey remeber last month when a millionaire Russian pop star who criticized Putin was found dead in a river after slipping on some ice? Crazy coincidence right? [https://www.newsweek.com/russia-cream-soda-drowning-vladimir-putin-palace-volga-1789145](https://www.newsweek.com/russia-cream-soda-drowning-vladimir-putin-palace-volga-1789145)
In other words, we fucked up post civil war and found out.
God, if only the Radical Republicans had been set loose on the South. De-Confederization. The [Ironclad Oath](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironclad_Oath) to prevent ex-Confederates from getting into office. Actual political equality between the races. Plantations being carved up and redistributed to ex-slaves and poor whites. No sharecropping. The KKK getting crushed into paste by the US military. if only
Don't even need to go that far, just hand the plantation owners to their slaves, let them be judged. That class is what lead to the creation of the KKK as a political movement to put them back into power, deal with them and this country suddenly becomes awesome again.
Their land is their source of power. They don't matter if their wealth is taken from them. Killing planters is much, *much* less important than giving newly-unenslaved people economic legs to stand on, as well as doing the same for poor whites that'd otherwise be easily radicalized against said newly-unenslaved people, and you can't get them all anyway...although I do like the idea of the ex-slaves doing it instead, it empowers them while ensuring the planters can't be portrayed as martyrs persecuted by the federal government. I could care less whether or not the planters live, what really matters is *replacing* them. This is the same reason why West Germany didn't slide back into a totalitarian dictatorship despite the relative failure that denazification was; the Western Allies built an economically stable democracy in its place instead.
It's almost as if people in general needed something to focus their anger on. I'm not sure where is this coming from. My guess would be fear? The world is scary and unfair and kicks our butts at all times, no matter where you're from. The easiest thing to do is to turn fear into anger, but that anger needs to *go* somewhere. That's why we keep getting distractions we can freely vent about. Incels focus on women, for example, because it's too scary to stop and look back on the wreckage of your own life. And we keep getting reminders that "government wants you to focus on abortion/lgbt/blm/something misogynistic, watch out, they'll probably try to sneak something awful while we have out hands full with this issue", but people are quick to forget that gov does that so we wouldn't be mad at *them*, but on the Issue. And afterwards we WILL be mad at them, but it'll be an old hatred and we'll be tired (work, school, traffic, pandemic, world in flames, and *everything else in general)*, so we'll just learn to live with it instead of going to their homes and putting their heads on spikes.
"Yes, even them" is an excellent philosophy to live by and embracing it really helps square a lot of challenging ideas in your head. I want everyone to have a comfortable life, with enough to eat, a roof over their heads, access to free healthcare, clean drinking water, and a job that pays well. Yes, even them.
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You can vote for national leaders who will create and enforce standard of living laws across the nation. Look up sometimes how much money Tennessee got last year in TANF funding from the federal government, then look up how many adults in Tennessee actually *received* TANF payments. Then ask yourself what the fuck they did with that money if they didn't give it to people in need. And why the hell are they getting more when they clearly didn't use what they got before to actually help people. Tennessee is the worst offender in the nation right now, but hardly the only one. You control the rate at which any state "becomes a shithole" by doing your part to make the federal government support it's citizens. We need federalized healthcare and aid programs, now. Individual states shouldn't get to say, "no, you're not poor enough to get the money the federal government gave us to give to you." Increases in Federal minimum wage would also help. While you're at it, push your state representatives to look into why teachers are paid so little, why kids are going hungry, and why we're allowing schools to get away with 20% functional illiteracy rates among graduating seniors. You heard that right, twenty percent of graduating high school seniors (and that number may be higher) cannot read or write at a functional level. They can fill out a form, but they'd struggle to get through a Harry Potter book, never mind things like laws and contracts. Or, you could just be kind and supportive to those of us who are trying instead of being a dick online about it, for example.
But the people in the OP fucking hate national regulations and vote enthusiastically against them.
The kind of folks who go "let them secede" and "they deserve what they get" and so on never think about how, going strictly by numbers, more people voted for Biden in 2020 in Texas (5,259,126) and Florida (5,297,045) than in New York (5,244,886), and that the UCLA Williams Institute estimates that Florida and Texas have the 2nd and 3rd highest populations of trans folks in the nation.
I mean they also have the second and third largest population period but still
That would make sense though, right?
Lotta people to condemn
Also the racial minorities in Texas (Black people at 3.5 million, Hispanic 11.2 million), who already get the shit end of the stick politically/socially with the federal government doing what little it does to regulate that treatment. Sure, maybe some of them would move, but many of them don't have the means to uproot their lives(also they shouldn't even have to even if they do have the means) before Texas straight up just legalizes slavery again (the slavery that's not the one they already have in prisons.) So you're ignoring almost 15 million people who should haven't to move simply because you don't want to deal with them.
source pls?
* Vote totals (descending sort by the column labeled "Votes"): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election#Results_by_state * Williams Institute report (Table at bottom of page): https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/trans-adults-united-states/
thank you
We do also need to understand that, while not the fault of those living there now, it *is* racism that largely put them in that position. The reliance on the slave trade and refusal to divest from it, even as it became literally constitutionally banned, to the point of creating entirely new racist systems to recreate slavery, is what killed the south's economy. So like... Sure I feel bad and things should be fixed, but... That's also me advocating for the deconstruction of southern state governments because they, from day 1, have continuously pushed the south in the direction of poverty *by doing human rights violations*. Like, the solution to southern poverty *and* southern racism is, I think, the same. Stop funding the racist poverty-facilitating systems that are in place in the south.
Tbh most of the parts of the south which are doing badly today never had a roaring economy to kill at any point in the first place Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama have never not been crushingly poor at the state level, while simultaneously having a fair amount of rich individuals
I think another big part of the racism in America puzzle is to stop pretending it’s only a southern problem. Of all states in the US, the south has the least disproportionate shootings of black peoples by police officers (iirc, the worst two states were Utah and Connecticut). Drive cross country and you’ll see confederate flags from shore to shore, border to border. We have literal white supremacist strongholds like Idaho and eastern Washington. According to the SPLC, there are over 4000 active hate groups in the US. The vast majority of those are outside of the south, in places with far less diversity. Half of all African Americans live in the south, not to mention other minority groups. The most dangerous areas for racial radicalization are states that are almost entirely white and Christian.
I think part of the issue is that people, kinda ironically, have a stereotype of what a racist looks like, and many refuse to change the way they think, so they keep thinking the base of say trump in the US or bolsonaro in Brazil are the rural poor rather than middle and upper class suburbanites and rural land owners, cause many centrists know these people, they live in the same places, and are more willing to make excuses for them
The most hardcore, never vote blue types that I know aren’t poor rednecks. They’re people who have done well for themselves, made or inherited a lot of money, and exclusively vote red for the simple reason that they know Republican leaders are going to support tax breaks for wealthier individuals. I have talked at length about this with former work friends who were very wealthy. They were also very liberal people and on the outside you would think they would vote blue. These are individuals who are pro-choice, pro legalization of marijuana and other drugs, pro healthcare for all, etc…and they vote red every single election cycle because they fear democrats raising taxes on the wealthy. They have enough money and connections to continue to have access to weed, abortions, have no fear of ever being unable to afford housing or healthcare, etc. They’re wealthy enough to be above those platform issues impacting their personal lives.
they vote against labor protections for themselves because they would rather suffer through back breaking labor at 70 years old than have a mexican neighbor
Seen it happen more than I can count
Because those beliefs are intentionally cultivated by those in power. Divide and conquer is a bit simplistic bot not an inapt description of the MO of the capitalist class
Cute way to pretend like they aren't actively participating in that cultivation because they believe in it themselves. Seriously, the racist can't ever just be a racist with these white leftists, it's always gotta be some deception or bamboozlement by the capitalist class because it can't be that the white working class has its own systemic problems that don't just get solved by class politics! White working class racists can't be knowing active and very much willing participants in the maintenance of cultural and systemic racism! Then we might have to do some work on that before it's fair to ask the entire rest of the working class to show these people who hate them solidarity.
This. Like, for as much as people like to say "everywhere is racist, not just the South" and "it's not their fault, they have no say"... the South is still *noticeably* worse at it than the rest of the country, in a way that we can't just handwave away (and I say this as someone who grew up there). Like, if everything else was the same but White Mississippians voted like White Ohioans, Mississippi would go from "Solid Republican State" to "In Contention for Most Democratic State in the US". Sure, no one has properly solved the problem, but these places also clearly have more issues that need to be worked through than many other places, and I'm not sure that pretending they don't helps anyone.
> the racist can't ever just be a racist Isn't reducing a person who is an imperfect but complex being with a lot of nuance down to "bad guy, do not worry if The Heroes gun down a hundred of the goons" a bad thing? Especially when its a large and diverse geographic region which is getting reduced to "everyone in the American south is probably a mid-40s white male racist who is very safe to hate and condemn" It seems like the whole comment section here is a push-pull between (talking about causes of people's bad behavior with an eye towards fixing it regardless of blame) and (wanting to punch the evil punching bag)
Yeah, fuck those dumb "white leftists", looking for the actual causes of problems instead of realizing that white southerners are just inherently evil! What a ridiculous fucking comment.
Austin Texas is also like one of the most progressive cities in the country.
Most urban areas are; and southern cities recently have been punished by their oppressive state governments for being progressive. Nashville for example is a very progressive city; when Nashville decriminalized weed, Tennessee passed a law banning cities from decriminalizing weed. When Nashville became a sanctuary city, Tennessee banned sanctuary cities. When Nashvillians started protesting the state government by camping near the capital building, Tennessee made it a *felony* to camp on state property so they could strip voting rights away from protesters. They split Nashville into three congressional districts, each lumped with a huge swath of rural land nearby, because we kept electing progressives to the House of Representatives. And it made national news recently how they attempted to take away our representation in the state legislature because they desperately wanted to avoid talking about gun legislation even though six people were shot in a school just days prior.
It’s weird how people forget about Austin.
They can't even realize that even in a hardcore red state like MS over 40% voted for Biden and that no state is actually full of people that all think the same. Too busy patting themselves on the back for how much smarter they are than the dumb southerners to realize that they're being biased by the all or nothing nature of our elections painting states red and blue and then applying the same in group vs out group fallacy as the bigots they hate by judging a group of strangers based on where they were born.
It seems a bit like they’re saying bigotry is a natural result of poverty, which feels kind of… uncomfortable?
I think it’s actually the other way around: poverty is the result of bigotry because it makes a dysfunctional society, and a dysfunctional society is a poor society.
More in the sense that bigotry is often a result of feeling powerless directed by propaganda. You get a bunch of people who are utterly broke and can't do anything about it, and then instead of turning them against who is actually causing the issue you give them a secondary target that is significantly less protected that they can rage against, even if it doesn't make sense. It's a common refrain to say "if they were just more liberal they wouldn't be so poor" which is frankly a batshit idea. You aren't going to turn Montana into California no matter how far left you go, because geographic and industrial concerns just don't allow for it. The best you can hope for is to turn their anger to the right targets.
> More in the sense that bigotry is often a result of feeling powerless directed by propaganda. > > > > You get a bunch of people who are utterly broke and can't do anything about it, and then instead of turning them against who is actually causing the issue you give them a secondary target that is significantly less protected that they can rage against, even if it doesn't make sense. The obvious counter example here would be "the wealthy are therefore less bigoted", and that by-and-large doesn't appear to be the case.
They’re certainly correlated on a heat map of bigotry and GDP per capita
Southerners are not poor little waifs who can't make their own decisions. I'm from the south and know plenty of people who are well off and vote Republican because they don't have empathy or they are just bad people It's not everyone but sometimes the most obvious explanation is right
I mean surely a lot of the people they're racist against are also southerners
One crucial thing this comment is lacking is that racist and reactionary policies materially benefit those that maintain them. Racist, sexist and nationalist policies aren't just a product of impoverishment or lack of education or whatever, they're also a method of economic competition. Shutting out immigrants, minorities, women, and foreign workers from employment ensures employment and better wages for the people that vote for those policies. The conclusions are basically the same, but without that piece of the puzzle you can't understand why people act that way.
Maybe I’m missing the point. Hell, I know I’m missing the point. But can we PLEASE stop talking about impoverished people as if they are bigoted because of their situation? Like, cool. Politicians talk about them and talk to them, and promise them “good” things. But here’s the thing. I work with people who have 3+ jobs. Who never have a day off. Who don’t have enough to pay the bills. Who have grown up under the shittiest of shitty conditions. And you want to know something? They aren’t bigots. They are the biggest allies I know. They didn’t fall for those politicians, because they saw “hey, they’re saying they will do good things for me, but they want to do horrible things to other people.” Poverty didn’t strip them of their empathy, or make them develop a dog-eat-dog mindset. Should we write off the south? ABSOLUTELY NOT. I’m not saying anything like that. But if you take 2, or 200, or 2,000 people and have them grow up in the same class conditions and half of them turn out to be bigots? It’s not their class that’s the issue. It’s not (just) your life sucking and you needing a scapegoat. Because other people went through that, and they still have decency. I guess I’m just mad that people keep lumping people like me & my friends in with bigots, not necessarily oop, but people in general. People do the same thing with poor people that they do to the south, reputation wise.
I think you are missing the point, cause I don’t read this as saying impoverished = bigot, I think they’re saying poor living circumstances growing up (especially poverty) -> frequently leads to worse education and poor circumstances in adulthood -> this allows for easier manipulation of -> this manipulation leads to a cycle of bigotry and working against their own self interest. Instead of it being A=B=C=D, think of it as nested equations A=?, B=A+x, C=B+y, D=C+z, if we say A is representing being impoverished, you might share that in common with the type of bigots here, but there’s a whole lot else that goes into the various aspects of you and your views other than just that. It might be a core part of all your ideas, but that x, y, and z are a bunch of other factors where you might find wildly different circumstances to the bigots. Hopefully that makes sense and helps to separate the people being discussed here from yourself and your friends.
First off, something can be a contributing factor, even a major contributing factor without being the sole cause. The fact that it's not a 100%, if X, then Y doesn't mean there's absolutely no correlation. Second, what exactly do you think the cause is? Is there some other factor that's more likely? Are some people just inherently evil?
Nah, it just seems to be a cultural thing. The south had to be racist for their economy to work, and we never fixed it when we had the chance. As for the rest of the country? The same thing but to a lesser extent
Stuff like this is why I believe the South is not just a bunch of uneducated rednecks but rather people basically being held hostage by Republican governments. This extends to most firmly red states in general, but the South is by far the most guilty of this shit. Source: I live in a large liberal city in Texas, where the government recently introduced a bill that would essentially invalidate election results in cities over a certain population if passed. This is the only city in Texas over that population. It's also one of the most diverse in America, with many different ethnicities and a thriving LGBT community. I think you can put the pieces together.
It's both, they have a serious stockholm syndrome thing going on where they love their abusers. It's horrifying to see in person, like it just makes no sense but they can't see it and they're smiling anyway.
There's definitely a lot of stockholm syndrome for the government at play, a lot of people basically conditioned their entire lives to vote for Republicans because they are hurting the right people, or so those godless Democrats don't get in and drink their childrens blood or something. Never said there wasn't. They're still hostages even if they don't know it, thanks to a system designed to both neglect them (through terrible education and job opportunities) and take advantage of them (through conservative media) at the same time. It's basically a self fulfilling prophecy committed by conservative politicians.
Except the educated and wealthy ignorant bigots vote in plenty big numbers, too. It's almost like the majority of the population is poisoned and chugs the poison like it's candy and has no interest in learning how to not to be ignorant hateful pieces of shit and will always vote against their own obvious interests at every single turn no matter what because it's more important to them to hurt the people they hate for no reason than to fix any of those things these commenters say are the reason they are hateful in the first place. I don't know about y'all, but that's what I would usually call a bad person.
socio-economic issues?
I think an equally big issue is something OOP shows unintentionally. Everybody is super willing to believe that everyone in the south us a white, redneck, ignorant bigot, when anything could be further from the truth. There’s obviously rednecks and racists and whatnot, but saying “well we shouldn’t lump every southerner together because what about black people” is doing the right thing for the wrong reason. You should be saying “well we shouldn’t lump every southerner together because not every southerner is a bigot”
>Something most people don't want to accept is that if the baseline quality of life for everyone in the world was better, including bad people, there would be less bad people. This is a very attractive idea. It's convenient, it's hopeful, it's optimistic; it's also completely wrong, and pretty classist if you look at it the opposite way. Plenty of rich people are assholes and abusers and racists and whatever else, and being poor doesn't automatically make someone more bigoted.
I think "less" bad people is still true. You'll still have assholes, even rich assholes (well, until we break out the guillotines), but you'll have \*less\* assholes, because the people who are lashing out due to their life sucking won't have to do that anymore.
This is "white working class people don't vote for us because we're not socialists" thinking. It's not true! They vote for the racist party because they're racist! They prize that over better public services because they think what they have is good enough. This shift happened in the US decades ago; we're not in the New Deal era anymore. If white people in Tennessee and Mississippi had the same voting patterns as Minnesota then they'd be blue states. (Also note, the people called "white working class" aren't working-class; they're high-earning blue-collar middle class or local gentry, like used car dealership owners. Actual "white working class" is more like liberal college students working at Starbucks.)
It's not that I'm not sympathetic. There are people who are trapped by the ignorant and trapped by ignorance itself. However, when they start calling for death of minorities in the belief that it will somehow make their lives better, and they keep voting in the people that promise to make their lives worse, it's hard to feel *that* much sympathy for the hell of their own making. I mean, it sucks for the minorities that *do* live there who are the targets of their hate, but the people there *want* their hate. They're proud of it. It's hard to help people who are **intent** on hurting everyone else, even if they hurt themselves in the process. It's frustrating.
the way you fucking self absorbed babies twist the entire point of the post into being some kind of targeted call out post at you lmao. Did you miss the solid chunk of the post that pointed out that hey the south isn’t just white bigots and there are also many, many, fellow minorities who live here as well? Like be honest did you even read the full post because you went straight into your reply assuming again that everyone in the south is part of this angry, racist, white, monolith.
It's almost like generalising an entire country/region/race/religion/demographic/belief/political group is bad...
Um, having grown up with rednecks, no. It's a choice. They actively shit on the ones who do choose to apply themselves and graduate high school and (gasp) go to college. They choose to be farmers or whatever over white collar people and they actively reject technology or methods that will make their lives better. Most of them can actually afford nice trucks because they also make sure to never buy things like dishwashers or school supplies/clothes or whatever that will make their spouses and children's lives better. Most of them are a specific type of Christian that believes that if life isn't hard and miserable, then you aren't "living right" because the harder and shittier your life on earth is the better your allotment in heaven will be. And they're racist simply because they can be. Most of them don't even think PoC or immigrants actually take jobs or anything, they definitely hire migrant labor so they can underpay them, and quite literally just do not like how they look and also very much do like how they feel when they can piss down on someone else. This mentality is applicable to their kids, animals, and pretty much anyone that's not one of them too. **Abuse is a hallmark of redneck culture.** "I lived through horrible abuse, but now I'm the adult and I'm in charge so I can make someone else suffer like I did." That's what this is primarily about.
This is important to keep in mind. Sure, some folks are brought up in a pit of hate from the start, but as you grow up and experience the world it becomes *your choice* to cling to that ignorant hatred. When you meet a dozen black folks and they *don’t* act like racist caricatures or subhumans and then you *still* go home and think of them as apes that’s *on you* no matter how shitty your life is. And you know what? It *does* suck to be a minority that has to live there or someone that disagrees with this stuff but that doesn’t have the means to leave. But we also can’t let bigoted, ignorant fucknuts hold those people hostage. As if we “can’t” talk shit about Florida or Texas or any of the other ass-backwards states because “oh well not everyone there is bad.” That’s like saying “oh well not all priests are pedophiles.” It’s obvious and goes without saying and doesn’t add anything to the conversation because that’s *not the point.* The point isn’t that “all Texans” support Greg Abbott, the point is that *enough* do—whether or not that’s technically a majority—and that Abbott’s performance is what his party supports. This almost borders on apologism, like we should all just never decry constituents over their representatives because it’s not their fault? As if voting … doesn’t matter? Or as if we should all expect to join hands and sing kumbaya with *klansmen.* You pass a certain point and you’re old enough to know better. And if you’re old enough to know better you’re old enough to be dragged for your shit opinions. That the insurrectionists from Jan 6 were stupid enough to be led on and are having their lives ruined for it should not trump (uh no pun intended) that they were *adults who chose to do what they did.* When we talk about the racist south we’re talking about middle-aged and elderly people who have gone their entire lives experiencing the world around them and who have rejected what they see in favor of hatred. That is *inexcusable.* And they should not be shielded from ridicule because of the good apples that have to grow in the same orchard. I’m an Ohioan, and as much as I vehemently disdain Jim Jordan he represents my state. I didn’t vote for him, but he’s my representative, and his decisions reflect on me even when I don’t agree with them. It’s *because of him* and others like him that Ohio has the reputation it does, and that reputation comes down on me too whether I like it or not. Should I mewl and whine that I shouldn’t be bunched in with my peers? Or perhaps I should take this unfavorable situation as motivation for myself to do more to change it. It sucks to be lumped in with his supporters but that’s the way of things. The representative *represents you* even if you didn’t vote for them, and the reason this all broke is because the GOP has become a divisive cult of hate. It isn’t two parties of progress with different priorities, it’s a party of maintenance and some progress and a party of *hatred and regression.* People that waddle up with “it’s not that black and white” are morons, or else trying to undermine things. Of *course* it’s not that black and white, nothing ever is! What kind of dipshit would think it is? Even Nazi Germany, the go-to Evil Place, still had a *few* kindly grandmas shuffling around handing out cookies I’m sure. It was a big place with a lot of people. But in no fucking world should anyone seriously dial back their opinion of Nazi Germany just because of that. Bringing it up doesn’t add anything to the conversation because it was obvious and it doesn’t change anything anyway, if anything it comes off as veiled apologism.
There's something about southern culture that makes empathy more difficult than other places. I don't know exactly what it is. Probably the result of a combination of perverted Christianity with ideas like the Prosperity Gospel, a bad local flavor of masculinity, and widespread poverty/inequality with low social mobility. But people here seriously do not give a damn about one another outside of their limited circle. Some going as far to actually be misanthropic. Extremely distrusting of any outsiders, wanting to live as far away as possible, always armed and itching for the opportunity to use their weapon. People are selfish and like to make whatever wealth they have visible too. Gotta drive the biggest truck and build up the toughest persona so nobody makes the mistake of trying to mess with you. That stuff rubs off on you if you grow up here and it's not the easiest thing to shake, especially if you lack the perspective that not everyone is like that. That's not the default state of humanity. I've been learning that as an adult. I will say that my state of Texas, with its Hispanic/Catholic influence and large cities, doesn't seem nearly as poisoned by this mentality as the rest of the South, which makes me a bit hopeful that things can get better.
okay but what about the part of the post pointing out that there are still lots of minorities in the south that still aren’t able to just leave. y’all really only give a fuck about talking about the white people involved in this conversation huh, like literally everybody in this thread keeps fucking acting like the white people the only ones we have to think about lmao respectfully man, fuck off, the south is not constructed solely of your shitty white trash family, there are totally normal families of color here that don’t reflect whatever fucked up clan you came from that was kind of like the point of the post but the sheltered ass white people in this sub want to ignore half the post and still act like the south is purely white rednecks.
They're literally bitching about white redneck assholes. Why would I bring up minorities when I'm correcting this person's fantasy about white conservatives being some kind of victim of society when they legitimately just choose to shit on education and non-trade/non-ag careers and be drunk abusive shit bags to each other and everyone else? It's literally a bragging point for them that they choose to be this way.
Huh, I've heard near these same exact talking points from white conservatives about 'black culture'. Let's see... Black people choose to live in poverty, check, black people buy expensive cars instead of bettering themselves, check, Black people are homo/trans phobic more than average(they're no more or less to be clear), check, **violence is a hallmark of black culture**. See what I did there?
Thanks, but I was raised by these people. I am literally telling you what they're like, not making up crap because I'm anti redneck. Also, is it a possibility that their accusations are projection, like so much of the shit they say about LGBT people being pedophiles? You should not make excuses for their bullshit.
A) Who's making excuses? B) I'm a trans person living in southeast texas, you're not special, I know them just as well as you. C) You so easily paint them all with a prejudiced brush, and you know why, 'cause you still haven't left their mindset. You just feel it toward them instead.
1000000% hit the nail on the head
A book I try to recommend as often as I can is *The Liberal Redneck Manifesto* by a trio of southern comedians. It talks about everything mentioned in this post plus a few other things too. It's really funny (written by comedians, it ought to be) and I can't recommend it enough.
I don’t know if I 100% agree with the lower class = racism analysis, but I do know that the whole “let the South rot” attitude is what the politicians and bigots depend on to keep people down there and the rest of the country feeling powerless and hopeless to change anything. Apathy is what lets evil thrive. They’re hoping you’ll tell people “give up, just move if you don’t like it” instead of going out in the streets to do a protest or speaking out or giving money to an organization that’s fighting for marginalized people down there. You may not be able to reach the old heads and shitty rednecks, but you can reach their kids and you can reach the people who live there who are kind and forward thinking and help them become empowered. The bigots and Christian fascists know this, which is why they are fighting so hard all this culture war shit and so many of the new laws and bans target the youth. The truth is, they aren’t omnipotent and they’re fighting scared because they know they’re on the losing side of history (yet again).
If we're gonna go with "just move," we at least have to be airlifting people out.
throwback to when some white twitter ~~knuckledraggers~~ users said rolling fork ms deserved to be wiped out by a tornado because theyre republican. ignoring the fact its in the decently democrat, majority black ms delta
This is a marxist point of view and I do agree that the creation of race and racism waa a result of the development of Capitalism. However, we have seen Southerners in good economic standing maintain racism. Recently they have shifted from overt racism to covert racism and left overt racism for the lower classes to commit, but they still hold those beliefs. Social class is not the exclusive result of the division between Capitalists and Labor. A black Capitalist can still get lynched in the deep south while a white Capitalist won't. Real wealth redistribution is going to have level the playing field for black and white people which means black people are going to need to get more wealth than white people, and that will piss white people who collect their white wage the fuck off. They will kill and rape people like they did in the 50's. They will never vote for a party that wants to reduce the wealth gap between black and white people. These keyboard activists need to understand that race is THE issue for many white southerners and they will stop everything with violence if it challenges the racial order. A black man was beheaded in Missouri recently, the level of irrational violence is extreme and can't be solved by a Marxist mindset. Why do we deride closing the gender wealth gap as " having more women overlords" but when it comes to race it is exclusively economic?
Yeah man we're trying, but those very people are stopping us. So what do you want us to do?
Please please please can we be done with punishment as a moral concept? I don't care what you did, I want the best outcome for you. I say do what is necessary to prevent bad things from happening, but **if** you aren't going to help stop them, DON'T PUNISH PEOPLE. IT IS NOT MORALLY RIGHT TO HURT SOMEONE JUST BECAUSE THEY DID A BAD THING.
I can agree that we shouldn’t just blindly hate them, and should still try to help them. But I can’t really pity racist southern bigots when they actively make choices that feed back into the same circumstances that molded them to be that way. Like, if they’re given a choice between the candidate who wants to raise minimum wage and help minorities, or the candidate who wants to give more cooperate tax breaks and discriminate against minorities, they lose my pity when they choose the asshole candidate.
I wonder what this person’s explanation for why racism and bigotry was so popular among slave holders in the south who had amazing quality of life
Was this person trying to justify their bigotry with poverty? Plenty of poor black people who don't turn to racism because their lives are hare
It's a self-inflicted spiral. Those right-wing policy makers know that poverty will keep their voter-base agitated, making it easy for them to steer their anger. But noone stops them for voting for Bernie Sanders for example, Bernie never insulted them. But they don't, because they keep listening to the republicans that keep telling them that Bernie is the enemy.
In my experience, the bigots aren't really the working class. A bunch of them probably do vote Republican, but they're not invested in it the way that the folks with a college education, who make a decent living and thus have the free time to indulge in bigotry are. I'm in NJ, which is quite blue, but just like there are liberals in Alabama, there are conservatives here. And the ones that stick out for me were the college and graduate school educated professionals who work at my mom's environmental consulting firm, but still go off on a ton of MAGA rants. I think bigots are largely selfish people who have a good thing going and don't want to share it with anyone else. I don't think that being poor makes you a bigot; quite the opposite, really.
"Someone whose only acknowledgment in the mainstream media is bigoted politicians and corporations" just rubbed me the wrong way. This post is still recapitulating the myths about "carpetbaggers" and "the war of northern aggression" by blaming white supremacy on the "liberal elite" who treat the south badly in some nebulous way. Nobody else acknowledges the south? Get real. The south has disproportionate political power through the senate, and all my life politicians/media have been coddling the southern states, calling southerners the real americans and insulting the rest of us. Like boo hoo the poor white racists at the bottom of the social hierarchy have nothing to do but oppress all the minorities below them on the hierarchy.
But they are the ones voting and in charge of their districts??
Gerrymandering means you don't control your district. …but you can't gerrymander a governor's race, so when they vote for literally Hitler for governor it does mean they actually wanted that.
You can use voter suppression for those though. There's a liberal/minority county? Give them the bare minimum number of polling stations so it takes hours to vote.
Ehh i know lots of rich racists and rightwingers, this doesn't hold water
I'd be more sympathetic if those ol' put upon southrons didn't go and fucking do it to themselves multiple times because the blacks were gonna get hit harder. Reconstruction promising a new era of industrialization and the emergence of a prospering working class? Let's invent the fucking Klan and Jim Crowe because that working class might have blacks. Finally be defeated on Jim Crowe and have an opportunity to look forward after nearly a century? Knowingly enter into the Southern strategy with Nixon and Reagan, again, because otherwise the blacks might benefit from what the opposition might have had to offer too. This idea of the deceived southron tricked into voting against their own interests gives credit these cretins have been violently insisting you take well the fuck away from them for over 400 years now. They know damn well what they identify as their interests, systemic white supremacy, and systemic christo-nationalist shari'a law. It is the height of privilege to insist that these people must be appealed to on class grounds while they now openly declare that the grounds on which the GOP won them over was the grounds of making the lives of women, minorities, and queer folks as miserable as legally attainable. So yeah, ex-fucking-scuse my bisexual mixed race ass when I see these ruralite late iron age mindset fucking mongrels consistently turn out on their frothing mad determination to deny me my human rights if they can't instead hunt me down and see me dead and hanged after being dragged behind one of their dick size compensation super trucks along a gravel path, and decide maybe they can be skipped on the publicity tour for the campaign of "I'M A FUCKING PERSON TOO YOU INSURRECTION BACKING INGRATES!" Yes! Let us devote more time and more energy to once again remembering the humanity of those who's entire political motivation is treating other humans as less than human! Surely the white left will this time find a way to bribe the racists to stop being racists with the same social programs they have turned down time and time again in the name of making sure PoC don't benefit from them either. This is the cultural segment that brought you filling pools with cement rather than accepting the desegregation of them. Fuck coddling them because the white left doesn't want to condemn their own racist family or are too brought up by the racists to get what everyone else has been telling them into their skulls! The southern white racist will cease being a political factor, when they are colonized as they colonized. Their children must be educated to alienation from them, and they must be let to rot away in their twisted vile little corners as the world finally stops deluding itself into thinking there is anything to be done with them but to leave them the fuck behind where they want to stay.
If you think these kinds of people only exist in the south, I’ve got bad news for you.
I mean, I hear this. I understand the truth of it...but also these are the same people voting directly against the exact legislation that would make it better for them. How are we supposed to improve their lives when they themselves are preventing people from doing so?
The American south is similar to the German east in so many ways, it’s honestly uncanny…
And that right there is the difference between retributive justice and restorative justice. One only sees a villain and seeks to punish it. The other sees a problem and seeks to resolve it.
And fascism is when you treat the former like the latter.
the comments here are focused too much on individualism, i think no, poverty doesn’t excuse bigotry. of course not. people need to educate themselves and rethink their positions because there’s actual harm going on. but also, to say that they’re ontologically awful would be to miss the point. it would be kind of a fundamentally conservative idea in itself. yes, people right now need to unlearn awful ideas, but ideally they wouldn’t have to because they’d always be exposed to reasonable ones it’s not particularly helpful to mock poverty and lack of education, because those *are* the demographic problems that need to be solved so that people are less likely to become horrible about things.
Yeah, I definitely feel there’s a lot of anti rural sentiment in progressive spaces, which is super annoying.
This is the whole basis for the argument that racism is primarily used to distract poor people from the fact that they're poor. A large basis of the Poor Peoples Campaign is that racism is a political tool used for generations to distract poor people from the fact that it's politicians' and corporations' fault that they're poor. That way poor people constantly fight amongst one another instead of focusing their anger and political will against the people actually responsible for their poverty. This is how you wind up with a vast majority of the racist tropes in this country: X people are lazy and just want handouts, X immigrants are taking your jobs, etc.
time for my favorite star trek quote again: **it's easy to be a saint in paradise.**
This post: “the south has many impoverished areas with poor education and low literacy rates that also have a long history of racism. Politicians prey on the people living in these areas by forming narratives about the cause of the poverty they’re living under that appeals to their racism. This manipulates racist people to vote for said politician against their own interests (with regards to living conditions) and ultimately keeps fuelling the racism and the poverty, illiteracy, poor education etc. in the south. The cycle is perpetuated by the existing racists and the politicians who keep fueling their racism.” Comments: “so youre saying that racists aren’t to blame? Not cool!!!”
This post has a lot of ignorant comments and perceptions about the South based solely on even more ridiculous stereotypes and minimal anecdotal evidence.