Monday, May 03, 2021

USA is no longer racist

CNN reports:
President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday agreed with South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott that the United States as a nation is not racist, but added that the country has a history of racism that cannot be overlooked.
I think thats right. NY Times adds:
Historically, however, there is no question that the country was founded by racists and white supremacists, and that much of the early wealth of this country was built on the backs of enslaved Africans, and much of the early expansion came at the expense of the massacre of the land’s Indigenous people and broken treaties with them.

Eight of the first 10 presidents personally enslaved Africans. In 1856, the chief justice of the Supreme Court wrote about the Dred Scott case, in an infamous ruling that would be issued in 1857, that Black people “had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

The country went on to fight a Civil War over whether some states could maintain slavery as they wished. Even some of the people arguing for, and fighting for, an end to slavery had expressed their white supremacist beliefs.

Abraham Lincoln said during his famous debates against Stephen A. Douglas in 1858 said that among white people and Black ones “there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I, as much as any other man, am in favor of the superior position being assigned to the white man.”

Elsewhere it has an essay on How the N-Word Became Unsayable, where it says the word dozens of times, even tho it fired its best reporter for saying it privately in South America. and its article on Platonic Marriage has to include these definitions:
Asexual is defined as having no sexual feelings or desires; aromantic means having no desire for a romantic relationship. Hetero-monogamous is a sexual relationship between a man and a woman. Pansexual is defined as sexual, romantic, or emotional attraction toward people regardless of their sex or gender identity. A platonic marriage is a deep bond and lifelong commitment to a nesting partner you build a shared life with. Demisexual is defined as only being sexually attracted to someone with whom you have an emotional bond.
It also calls these people "queer", without defining it.

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