It's as American as Mom, baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and hating Black people
While students converged on the Tennessee capital in a protest in favor of gun safety legislation, three Democrat state legislators used bullhorns to disrupt the normal legislative proceedings, in a show of support for the students. They called out their GOP colleagues for failing to deliver any meaningful response to the recent shooting at a Christian elementary school that left 6 people dead. (They put off all gun safety measures to 2024)
In a show of power unprecedented in modern history, the heavily Republican body responded with a threat to expel them from elective positions. Expulsion previously required the breaking of a big law, so this would effectively overrule the votes of thousands of voters (also known as ‘the majority’). I noted this plan of action in my last newsletter.
The virtual ink on your screen was barely dry before they followed through on their threat….. sort of. They only expelled two of the Democrats. They kicked out the two Black elected representatives but left the White one in office.
It would be a vast understatement to describe Elie Mystal Jr as someone “who doesn’t mince words.” The lawyer, author and justice correspondent has never even patted a word with a butter knife.
His response thundered with the fierce instructive power of a targeted tornado:
To MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, “There is no accounting for vitriol, Chris, there’s no accounting for hate. The reason why these people, these Republicans, cannot take winning for an answer, is because they hate us.”
Mystal said he knows it’s hard for White people to accept, but, “what the racism comes from is hatred of Black folks. And that is why, despite winning, despite being on top, despite controlling so many of the levers of power, you consistently have Republicans shooting themselves in the foot… they’re willing to shoot themselves in the foot if that shot can go through and hit a Black person because that is the level of hate they feel for our people and we all know it, we all understand it. Black people understand what we are up against all the time.
“This is just one of those rare situations where White people are getting to see it out in the open, just how desperately they hate us, just how much they do not believe that we should be allowed to be equal citizens in this country.”
Mystal went a step further to explain it is precisely this “White male grievance” that former president Donald Trump exploits, “to make himself the leader of the Republican Party. It is hatred. And I know, again The New York Times [says], ‘This is just racially charged.’ No. They hate us and this is what hate looks like.”
It was just a couple of years ago that I was listening to an older white Tennessee college professor describe her marriage there in the mid 1960s. Her groom was just out of law school, they’d bought a few acres to farm, but being from Michigan, he was an outsider. The local political machine was 100% KKK.
They had to leave three or four friends they hired on their property while their marriage took place a half hour away, so the KKK wouldn’t torch their place. They were considered suspect because he was a Northerner. But they were white. She and her husband had stories about the worse things Black families have faced in the 6 decades since.
There’s plenty of non-haters there but the misery inflicted by the haters can be stunning at times. Tennessee is one of just 10 states where 60% or more voted for Trump in 2020. Between 1882 and 1968, it had the 8th most documented lynchings in the country.
Of predominantly Black major cities, Memphis Tennessee is the 2nd largest, just a little behind Detroit. More than 63% of its residents are Black.
Including cities with total populations of 100,000 or more, the highest percentages of Blacks (50% and higher) exist in the following:
Note Jackson MS is the second blackest city. 26% of its residents have incomes below the poverty line which is awful for a state capital. In the Blackest state in the country, Mississippi has the lowest per capita median income in the US.
As a result, they’ve struggled for decades with municipal services. Most of the city’s lacked clean water for more than 2 decades. The reason? The white Republican majority of the state government HATES BLACK PEOPLE and won’t designate funds to rebuild ancient infrastructure.
The current governor, Tate Reeves, is a racist through and through. He refers to Jackson as ‘the murder capital of the world’. A quick Google search showed a list of the 50 worst cities in America for murder rates, and Jackson didn’t even make that list.
And while its 80% Black population couldn’t get anything except bottled water for more than 2 decades, Mississippi as a state has the worst infant mortality rate in the country, double the rate of dead infants that Vermont, California, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey, or New York have. BLACK INFANTS IN MISSISSIPPI die at a rate almost 3 times what those 6 best rate states can do.
Mississippi’s state slogan should be ‘The Can’t Do State Unless You’re White’. If you want to see what a Third World nation looks like, drive along Mississippi Delta country. I guarantee you’ll be shocked. A lot of ramshackle houses with rusty tin roofs. Typically the only modern structures in those towns are ultra conservative Southern Baptist churches, known for their Southern fried pedophilia.
Mississippi has the highest incarceration rate per capita, too. Though Blacks are 44% of Mississippi’s population, 66% of their prison population is Black. Only 24% of the prisoners are part of the state’s White majority there.
With all the infrastructure problems (which Joe Biden’s infrastructure plan is now starting to address since White Mississippians HATE BLACK PEOPLE), lowest income, worst-ass infant mortality rate, most lynchings of any state in US history, and worst incarceration rate in the country you might think the White people would actually try to DO SOMETHING to make it at least look like they’re addressing the problems. HAHAHAHAHA, yeah right.
What the white racist majority decided to fix was to make the capital safer for the white legislators who work there. By increasing the Capital Police Corps so it can cover the whole city, superseding Jackson’s police force and creating a new court system that residents there have no say in. Imposing their will on their serf city, Jackson. Everyone knows the 80% who are Black won’t be safer at all.
By most measures, Mississippi is one of the two worst in the country and Tennessee is in the bottom 8. And they’re not even trying to improve shit. Their racist white pig governing groups aren’t legislatures, they’re hate groups. (Tennessee had the second most hate groups per capita in 2020, behind Montana). Both TN and MS should see prison populations spike as they start filling up the prisons with women seeking abortions, drag queens and other undesirables they can put their boots on the necks of.
It has to be terrifying for Black people who live in those states. I wouldn’t be surprised if either state has secret legislative conferences where they brainstorm new and crueler ways to harm Black people.
Meanwhile back in DC, with its 41% Black population, Republicans don’t have to brainstorm to keep its residents powerless. They still don’t have real representation in both houses of Congress, even though Vermont and Wyoming have fewer residents than that one city does.
Why? Because Republicans HATE BLACK PEOPLE. Except for Clarence Thomas. After Thomas was exposed for cheating on his gift reports yesterday, today he responded with lame excuses:
1) when I came to the SCOTUS, I asked some of the others and (unnamed) ‘they’ told me I didn’t have to report gifts from friends. (Wrong. Always touting ‘originalism as a fake excuse for his biases, why didn’t he research the original intents of the lawmakers who created the gift laws? Also, as I was taught as a kid ‘Ignorance of the law is no excuse’.)
2) Cross my heart, I’ll do it all legal like from now till forever. (But fuck any ethics rules).