The title of this diary comes from this article
Protests and looting naturally capture attention. But the real rage smolders in meetings where officials redraw precincts to dilute African American voting strength or seek to slash the government payrolls that have long served as sources of black employment. It goes virtually unnoticed, however, because white rage doesn’t have to take to the streets and face rubber bullets to be heard. Instead, white rage carries an aura of respectability and has access to the courts, police, legislatures and governors, who cast its efforts as noble, though they are actually driven by the most ignoble motivations.
The Klan may be less evident than it was many years ago, but they have been replaced by more "acceptable" faces of bigots and fear mongers. The smiling faces spew hate on a 24 hour basis.
If you are a person of color.
If you are a member of the LGBT community
If you are a woman
Then you know exactly what I mean by "smiling faces"
Hatred spewed in the name of:
Family
Religion
"Right" to life
Security
Often wrapped up in the terms of "christian morality".
We have a color coded stand your ground interpretation.
We have a color coded presumption of innocence.
We have a gender and color coded "blame the victim" system.
The bigots wrap their hatred with wails of "religious persecution of christians", "the evils and fears of big government", "feminization of the male" and "the hardships of being white".
We even laugh when the smiling faces claim that tragedy and catastrophe are the will of god for our "sins".
So much of it in fact that we actually fail to see and call it out for what it is.
And think of a recent study by Stanford University psychology researchers concluding that, when white people were told that black Americans are incarcerated in numbers far beyond their proportion of the population, “they reported being more afraid of crime and more likely to support the kinds of punitive policies that exacerbate the racial disparities,” such as three-strikes or stop-and-frisk laws.
The way we look at the world has been polluted to such an extent where the presumption of the victim's guilt pardons, domestic violence, rape, and murder all because the victim was [fill in the blank]
Hell even the St. Louis County prosecutor cannot be bothered
The latest evidence that the fix is in came this week from The Post’s Kimberly Kindy and Carol Leonnig, who discovered that McCulloch’s office has declined so far to recommend any charges to the grand jury. Instead, McCulloch’s prosecutors handling the case are taking the highly unusual course of dumping all evidence on the jurors and leaving them to make sense of it.
Just a thought