#maybe it was specifically like 'latine heritage month shows' or something but

[comas-are-for-sleeping]

wait also NOTE: i fucking LOVE that there is such a growing group of rep now, like u said podcasts (i.e. tma the beloved??? or at least the fandom idk??? where did the poc fanart come from like is that canon is it hcs) and like COMICS (like squire and the well etc!!!) and just. SO many things dude!!!! and los espookys as well!!!! it's just so cool that there are so many things now

Yes!!! Things are happening I am so excited for the future!!!

Steven Universe trailblazer? hmm

[drippingbrainstories]

The Proposition

 After my talk with my Dad, we seemed to have become comfortable with each  other. He didn't fault me for the things I did, and I didn't fault him for  what he had been doing or now liked to do. We both had developed a  fascination with Restroom sex, him, more the participant, me, more the  voyeur, although if excited enough, I'd play too. A calm had settled over my  world over the past week and I enjoyed it. Besides studying, it allowed me to  catch up on all the smut material that Rick kept bringing me, telling me each  time that his father said Hello and to not be a stranger. I just needed to  work through all that I had learned about Al, his desires and fetishes before  I would be comfortable around him.    As I laid on my bed, thumbing through "ETHNIC MEN" for the first  time on my own, i could see why my Dad and mother were attracted to the  magazine. It was packed full of hot men of African American, Latin, Indian,  and Asian heritage. I was strongly attracted to the Latin men, but after my  Dad telling me about his 3 way with Al and Ron, the Black friend bodybuilder  of Al's, I was taking a close look at all the hot Black men, their nice dark  skin and mostly huge cocks. I was starting to get hot, when I heard a knock,  knock on the door frame of my open bedroom door. I looked up to see my mother  standing in the doorway smiling, wearing a short silky, thin robe open in the  front. I could see the deep valley between her big tits, and the smooth lips  of her cunt. As always, her huge nipples were poking out the material of the  robe like they were trying to escape. After her teasing smile, she told me  that Rick was on the phone for me and I could take it in her bedroom or the  kitchen. I decided the kitchen for some privacy. I got off the bed, grabbed  some jeans and put them on, tucking my semi hard cock down the leg, all while  my mother stood there watching.    I picked up the phone off the counter and told Rick Hello and that I hadn't  seen him for a while. He said he had been working a lot and with his other  commitments, he didn't have much time lately. I didn't ask what the other  commitments were, but I could guess knowing Rick, his family, and what he and  they were doing, he was probably right. He said he had a favor to ask me. I  told him to go for it. He said his parents would like to talk to me about  something. I was really curious as to what they could possibly want to talk  to me about. Rick said he didn't know but would ask me if I'd come over and  talk to them. I told him I would for him and asked when did they want me to  come over. He said tomorrow after I got out of school. I told him to tell  them I'd be there between 3:00 and 3:30. He said he really appreciated my  willingness to do this and said we needed to hang out soon. I agreed and told  him not to work too hard. He laughed and said never, just hardly enough and  we hung up.    The next day at school, I was constantly thinking about my after school  meeting with Rick's parents. I could understand meeting with Al, but Rick's  mother, Marta, I'd only seen and talked to a handful of times. She was the  kind of woman you would expect Al to be married to and be the mother of 3  hot, handsome young men. From what I could remember, Marta always seemed to  be in the background and quiet. She was a beautiful Latin woman with a very  fit body for a mother of 3. I suppose she had to take care of herself to keep  up with Al the bodybuilder. My curiosity was driving me crazy and taking over  my thoughts throughout the day.    Finally 2:45 got here and I was out and on my way to Rick's house. As I  walked out of the school, there was Rick sitting leaning against his  motorcycle waiting. He waved me over and told me he would give me a ride to his  house on his way to work at the gas station. I got on his motorcycle with him  and we headed off towards his house. As we got to his house and he stopped  the motorcycle for me to get off, he looked at me and told me to listen, but  I didn't have to do anything I didn't want to, especially for him. He nodded  toward the house and took off down the street to work.    Now I was concerned and had the feeling Rick knew what this was all about.  The only way I'll know is to go listen and talk to them. I walked up the  driveway and knocked on the front door. It was a little after 3:00 so I was  on time. I heard someone coming to the door. The knob turned, the door opened  and there in a short, white, terrycloth robe stood Al. His huge muscular body  looked like it wanted to jump out of the robe. He was showing a deeper  cleavage than most women would. He smiled and said he had just got out of the  shower, to come in and sit down. I entered their living room and sat in the  overstuffed chair where the last interaction with Al started. I couldn't help  but think of it as it was still rated the hottest experience I've had up to  this point in my life. I felt a stirring on my chest and in my jeans as I  realized Al was naked under the robe.    Al sat on the overstuffed leather couch across from me and the first thing he  said was, "Relax, you haven't done anything wrong." He then started  in by telling me that he and Marta had talked to Rick about me. I looked at  him in both shock and fear, but he immediately said that Rick didn't tell  them anything bad, in fact they liked what they heard, even were very  interested in what they heard. Now I was really curious. Al said that Rick  had told them that I had a sexual relationship with my mother and father and  that he had even been involved in some of it. Al said that after pushing Rick  really hard for details, he relented and told them graphic details of at  least the things he was involved in, including fucking and being fucked by  me, sucking my Dad, and watching my mother play with herself in front of us.  Al wanted to know more from me about what my relationship was with my  parents. I didn't know how to say it other than the real truth. I told Al I  had been sucking and fucking with my mother for about 3 months anytime she  wanted to. She had teased me and finally initiated the involvement. I had  only been involved with my Dad for a little over a month and we had just  fucked recently.    Looking at me with a big grin on his face, Al said, "That's  perfect." I wondered what he meant and was sure I would find out. While  we had been talking, Al had been slowly untying his robe and pulling it open.  More and more of his huge muscular chest was showing, and as he shifted on  the couch to face directly at me, his legs opened up and I could clearly see  his monster cock laying between his legs. His foreskin was pulled back far  enough that I could just see the slit of his cock head, wet with cock juice  bubbles on the slit. He saw me looking at it and said, "You remember our  fun together, don't you?" "I'm thinking about it and it's starting  to get me hot." He blurted out the next question while I was still  stunned by what I was seeing. "Do you like sucking and fucking with your  mother and father?" Caught off guard, my true feelings came out in my  answer, "YES I do.....I like having sex with them....."    Al knew what he was doing. My head was reeling from seeing him tease me and  my body was reacting. My nipples were stiff and tingling, my cock hard and  uncomfortable in my jeans. He knew he had me and suggested I get comfortable.  To make it more tempting under the guise of being comfortable, Al finished  untying his robe and pulled it wide open to show off his smooth muscular  body. I could tell that the teasing was getting to him as much as me because  his huge cock was thickening and stretching out, more of the head showing  under the foreskin. His dark puffy "gyno" nipples looked swollen  and hard. He looked at me and said, "Get comfortable and we will  continue to talk."    I couldn't resist this man. I obliged him and stripped out of my clothes and  sat naked and hard in the chair, my cock twitching, my nipples aching. Al  looked at me and said, "Your nipples look really hard and big."  "I know you love them played with." Rick told me your mother has  huge nipples and loves hers played with too. He also said your father has big  nipples and loves them played with. "Do you all play with each other's  nipples when you have sex?" I told Al that my families attraction to  each other had a lot to do with loving nipple play and having big nipples. He  looked right into my eyes and reached up and pinched both of his puffy  swollen nipples and that white translucent liquid appeared on each nipple.  "Do you like my big nipples?" he said. All I could do was nod my  head yes. He kept pinching them and more liquid oozed out and said to me,  "You can touch your nipples......pinch them for me." I reached up  and grabbed both my very stiff nipples and pinched them hard, making me moan.    While we were sitting there naked in front of each other, playing with our  nipples, Al said he and Marta had a proposition for me. They wanted me to  pleasure them like I did with my parents when they needed it. He said their  boys had been doing it, but they are getting so busy and grown up that they  don't have much time for that anymore. Rick had mentioned that his parents  made then take part in some of their party activities, but never said  anything specific. Now I was getting an idea of what was involved. With that  Al called to Marta who must have been in the bathroom or bedroom.    Marta came into the room from the hall wearing a matching white terrycloth  robe. I could tell she was naked underneath. She came and stood in the middle  of the room and looked at me and smiled and said hello. I felt really  uncomfortable sitting there naked and obviously horny in front of her. She  looked at my body up and down and smiled. She looked at Al who was now semi  hard with his monster cock sticking straight out with cock juice drooling off  the end and said, "Does he want to......will he?" Al looked at me  and said, "Do you want to........will you?" I just looked at both  of them and had a confused look on my face. Al said, "Maybe he wants to  see more of what we have to offer", and stood up dropping his robe on the  couch, walked to behind Marta and put his hands on the tie to her robe.    Al while looking at me, untied the robe and pulled it open. Under the robe  was Marta's really hot, dark skinned Latin body. She had long black hair down  to the middle of her back. Her face was of a beautiful Latin woman with dark  piercing brown eyes like all the Burke men and full puffy lips. Her tits were  big with very dark, almost black aureoles almost 2 inches wide, with at least  3/4 inch stiff nipples sticking out. Her stomach was flat and taught unlike most  women who had birthed 3 kids, which told me she worked out like the rest of  the family. Below the flat belly was a small patch of black hair just above  swollen, smooth, dark cunt lips with her clit looking swollen and sticking  out. Her cunt lips and clit glistened in the light of the room from the juice  on them.    Al pulled the robe off her shoulders and threw it on the couch. They were  both now naked in front of me, obviously turned on by the look of Al's stiff  cock and the juice on her cunt. As she stood there, her nipples got even  harder and longer. Al walked both of them up to right in front of me and the  smell coming off both of them was overpowering. Between the hot cunt smell  and the hot man smell, my head was feeling fuzzy and all I could think about  was sex. Al looked at me at said, "Lean forward and smell how hot her  cunt is for you." He cupped her big tits and flicked her nipples and  said, "She even has big, hard, Latin nipples to play with and suck  on." "Taste that hot cunt." "Take a lick of it.....flick  her clit with your tongue." I obeyed Al and felt Marta push her cunt  against my face and moan as I licked her slit and flicked her clit.    As Al massaged Marta's big tits and pulled on her nipples and I licked her  cunt up and down and kept flicking my tongue over her clit, Al was talking to  me, saying how much Marta loved to be fucked by young men, to have her cunt  licked and her nipples sucked on. Al stepped a little to the side of Marta  and pushed his now rock hard monster cock towards me saying, "See how  horny I get seeing my wife pleasured." "Will you pleasure her for  me while I watch?" I was may beyond the point of saying no for any  reason. I said, "Yes, I'll pleasure her anytime you want." Al  grabbed his cock stroking the foreskin back and forth and said, "I want  you to fuck her now......slide your cock in her and suck on her big  nipples." Al laid Marta down in the middle of the living room and stood  at her head saying, "Fuck her, fuck her for me now."    I came off the chair and got on my knees in between her legs, looking first  at her hot, wet, cunt and next at Al who was now stroking his big cock. I  grabbed my cock and put the head against her wet lips and started rubbing it  up and down her slit, stopping to tap it on her clit each time. My cock head  was now dripping wet and Marta was moaning, breathing hard, trashing her head  back and forth and cupping her big tits, offering them up to be played with.  I couldn't wait any longer and found the place on her slit where the entrance  to that hot, wet cunt was and pushed my cock into her. She let out a loud  moan and said her first real statement, "YES, fuck me, fuck me please  hard." I started pumping in and out of her and leaned forward to her  cupped tits and flicked each nipple with my tongue. That caused her to thrust  her tits up at me and moan, "Suck, suck." I took one big dark  nipple in my mouth and started sucking on it like a baby. She took her hand  and held my head to her nipple, only letting go to let me switch nipples and  suck the other one. Marta was a nipple pig and we had a connection in that  way.    I must have been fucking her and sucking her nipples for at least 10 minutes  when I felt something wet hitting on my back. I took my mouth off of Marta's  now swollen black nipples and looked up. Al was stroking his drooling cock  and the wet was his cock juice dripping on my back. He saw me looking up and  pointed his wet drooling head at me and said, "Lick it......taste my  juice, suck the head." I couldn't resist Al's big snake of a cock. I  swiped my tongue over the head and collected as much of his cock juice as my  tongue would hold and gobbled it down. I took the head of his thick, fat cock  in my mouth and sucked on it. He was loving it and his other hand was going  from one swollen nipple to another pulling on them. They were actually slick  and wet from his leaking from his nipples. Marta was watching me attacking  his big cock and was pulling on her nipples as she fucked her cunt against  me. The 3 of us were lost in the lust of the situation. I took my mouth off  of Al and needed to go back to Marta's big black nipples. As I took the  nipple into my mouth she wrapped her legs around my ass and started pulling  me hard into her cunt. That must have triggered Al, because the next thing I  felt was a shower of cock juice hit from my upper back to my ass. Next I felt  Marta's hot cunt start to spasm and she screamed as she went off. Her  gripping and spasms of her cunt acted like milking my cock and I blasted into  her with my cock juice. It was like a dream and I came down by laying my head  on her big tits and just resting for a few minutes. I could feel Al shaking  off the last of his cock juice on my back and he collapsed on the couch.  Marta rubbed my head while I laid on her tits and I finally lifted my head and  looked at her. She lifted her head towards me and kissed me on the lips  saying in whispered words, "Thank you."    I slowly lifted myself off and out of her and back to my knees where I looked  at the beautiful Latin woman, body all shiny with sweat, her nipples still  swollen and sticking up. I heard Al say in the background, "Does this  mean you accept our proposition?" I looked at both of these hot, Latin  sex machines and said, "How can I resist?" It's a proposition too  good to resist. Did I say I have a weakness for Latins............I did and I  do..............

[marcoshassanlevy]

In January 2001, Deftones played Hard Rock Live in Mexico City, selling out three dates. Half a year before, they had released their third album, White Pony, an album that dared to go places heavy music had not gone before and served as an excuse for them to visit Mexican territory—the biggest band from the nu metal genre at that point to do so. Inside, the crowd devoted themselves to the music coming from the stage; singer Chino Moreno spent the first couple of songs singing from the middle of the crowd, moshing and crowd-surfing with the band and losing his shoes in the process. Many fans had been waiting for this moment for years, but for every explosion of distortion that prompted the crowd in slam-dancing motions, every one of the songs from their latest album—overall lush and slow-moving—was greeted with screaming singalongs. For all the Mexican fans present in those three nights, they were their band playing complex introspective music that erupted in the heaviest riffs possible. The future of heavy music was quiet, dissonant, and seductive, and young fans were all for it. Twenty years after the release of the album, it remains a milestone of guitar music.

In many ways, Deftones’ importance to nu metal is gigantic, but nu metal’s importance to Deftones is almost null. Formed by vocalist Camilo “Chino” Moreno, guitarist Stephen Carpenter, bassist Chi Cheng, and drummer Abe Cunningham, Deftones debuted in 1995 with Adrenaline. The band soon shared a friendship, influences, and musical sensibilities with Korn, who themselves began their recording career the previous year. Together, they synthesized a mixture of metal, hip-hop, and alternative music that inspired legions of bands that soon infiltrated the mainstream. While Korn put their effort on eye-grabbing videos and catchy (if impossibly heavy) songs, Deftones expanded their sonic palette with 1997’s Around the Fur. By the time White Pony was released, the genre had become a presence on MTV’s TRL and radio, popularized by Limp Bizkit, Papa Roach, and Kid Rock–who all exploited the worst qualities of the music. Instead of trying to capitalize on their pioneer status of the genre, Deftones decided to break with the tag altogether.

Nu metal’s huge popularity owed its ability to sell anger to a young audience, but this proved to be its undoing. Korn made their mark by singing frank, straight-forward lyrics about abuse, sometimes dramatized with throat-destroying screams and heavy-as-shit breakdowns—a model soon adopted by most nu metal practitioners. Anger at abusers and figures of power were sometimes coupled with rage against vulnerable groups like women and LGBTQ people, weaponizing hatred and intolerance in the process. With White Pony, Deftones broke away from anger. Sure, they could still play downtuned riffs with the best of them and Moreno’s screams were some of the most intense in the game, but they were not pronouncing words of hate or retaliation. Deftones showed a new level in which feelings could be expressed in a more nuanced way without sacrificing excitement in their music.

Just a year after Limp Bizkit hit it big with a song called “Nookie,” White Pony tapped into a hedonistic energy that had been absent for much of the history of heavy metal, doing away with juvenile humor, clichés, and predatory and abusive language. Moreno could play a seductive and often submissive figure in his lyrics while the music reflected the sentiment through layered, dimly-lit hallucinatory elegance, which was contrasted by atmospheric (if crushing) power chords in the choruses and aided by the incorporation of turntablist and keyboardist Frank Delgado. Album opener “Feiticeira” is the prime example of this, setting the mood right away, while “Digital Bath” searches for desire in dark corridors. Lyrically, “Change (In The House Of Flies)” taps into both Kafka and Cronenberg while evoking an Eyes Wide Shut mood in the video, (also worth noting: the b-side to the single release was a cover of Sade’s “No Ordinary Love”). The voyeuristic “Passenger” is sung in a duet with Tool/A Perfect Circle frontman Maynard James Keenan, a car sex fantasy that gives us implied homoerotism without it being cartoonish. The BDSM fever dream that is “Knife Party” finds it’s pleasure through dissonance, climaxing with guest vocalist Rodleen Getsic channeling Diamanda Galás, who performs an opera of shrieks and moans into probably their most virtuosic moment on record. It’s not that the band forgot their roots, though; songs like “Korea,” “Street Carp,” and “Elite” (the latter which earned them a Grammy award) were some of the heaviest in their career.

After its release, White Pony hit big commercially but didn’t cross into 7-digit territory like Korn and Limp Bizkit were doing at the time. Hearing potential in the album’s slow burning closer “Pink Maggit,” their label commissioned the band to record another version of the track. As far as attempts to cash-in go, “Back To School” is probably the best outcome; it’s one of the few rap rock songs that are still listenable in 2020. “Back To School” is a flex, a way for them to tell their contemporaries how rap rock should be done at a time when so many newcomers were trying their luck. Deftones, the OG’s, sent them “back to school,” yet it’s anything but aggressive. The lyrics read as a reaffirmation of self-worth. It’s not angry at all. Maybe that’s why it didn’t top the charts.

While the sound of White Pony was multilayered and their lyrics abstract and evocative, fans could still get a primal kick out of their music. It invited fans to invest themselves into something deeper which could be a reason why it has been so influential ever since. The mainstream rock style that replaced nu metal in the charts, mid-00s emo, took many notes from White Pony; future metal festival headliners like Mastodon were also listening to their arty infusion of heavy riffs with melody. It kicked open a door for newer metal and hardcore bands to incorporate music that was previously deemed not heavy enough to belong in the genre; and in recent years, their sounds have found their way to Soundcloud rap and modern trap.

For Latinx fans, Deftones showed them that you didn’t need to be white to be innovators. White Pony introduced the band to a wider audience in Latin America, although the band never fully embraced their heritage. Speaking to NPR in 2016, Moreno said, “[When we formed], the majority of the kids in the neighborhood weren’t into rock and roll or skateboarding, so we kind of came together, and as we grew up together we realized there was nothing really like us; not in our neighborhood, not in our town […] Early on there was [sic] a lot of people who would always bring up our race and say things like, ‘You guys are Mexican dudes, and you’re playing heavy metal. Is that weird?’ [Laughs] I never thought it was weird at all, but I guess from the neighborhood standpoint we were the only kids doing that. I just figure that music is universal, or at least it’s always been that way to me. But I definitely did feel like we were doing something that was our own.” This is exactly why Deftones resonate with their Latinx fans. Many other kids were the only ones with similar interests in their neighborhoods, and they showed them that they also could play music that was challenging and far-reaching and that you could also skate to it. White Pony remains a massive album because it recognizes the universality in the specifics, that pretentiousness can be reeled in to express honest emotion.

White Pony has also kept Deftones an active and beloved band. It cemented their sound that has allowed them to release brilliant albums in the past two decades and remain on the touring circle. Unfortunately, they lost Chi Cheng to a car accident in 2013, but have soldiered on with former Quicksand bassist Sergio Vega. They even started their own festival called Día De Los Deftones, which could mean they are ready to show some pride in their roots.

When people talk about nu metal, Deftones are the band most people tend to agree on. In a few months they will re-release this record with a companion remix album called Black Stallion and are working on new music, still inspired and breaking down walls. Still conjuring fever dreams of horses in the house of flies.

Wednesday, June 24, 2020 at 9:37 AM EDT

[theliterateape]

Meetings with Mayonnaise and White People

by Don Hall

There’s no question that following WWII Communism was a legitimate threat to the United States. Global positioning of military, spies on both sides, nuclear domination was at stake. It was a scary time. Intertwined with the anger and fear was a pernicious thread within that, in response to the national angst, in turn poisoned the reasonable fear with demagoguery. Born from that was the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

There is no question today that the time has come for the United States to deal fairly and effectively with the demonization and wholesale deprivation of black Americans in our country. Both the stories we hear and the data we parse through is a damning indictment of righteous laws written only to be enforced by the bigots who fought so hard against them.

It is hard, however, to see a cause so fundamentally right and long overdue be intertwined with demagoguery.

You’ve recommended Robin DiAngelo’s book on white fragility but you haven’t read it, have you? You regularly use the terms “systemic racism” and “anti-racist” but you haven’t waded through any of Derrick Bell or Ibram X. Kendri, amiright?

When it comes to Critical Race Theory, I was an early adopter. I dove into Bell’s Faces at the Bottom of the Well in 1997. At the time I thought it was interesting but flawed and good red meat philosophy for the college campus.

By 2016 I was twice divorced and living with an avowed anti-racist activist whose godfather was 1960’s radical revolutionary Bill Ayers. I saw America and specifically white Americans as fundamentally racist.

Following the third of three blow out breakups with her I had what was to be my final mentoring lunch with The Moth’s resident Latina storyteller.

“Racist is a term that includes anyone benefitting from a racist system,” I mentioned as the conversation turned to Chicago’s history of gentrification. “Bigotry is individual but all white Americans are racist by definition.”

“Even you?” she asked.

“I’m white so, by definition, I’m racist. I don’t think I’m a bigot, though.”

A month or so later, after coming to the fact that her own personal insecurities and need for a following had sent her head first into a path of radical indoctrination, I unfriended her on social media. All hell broke loose. She had people call and text me with threats of violence. She manufactured several fake Facebook accounts, had them engage her real account with insults, and then claimed I had created the fake accounts. She posted a video of her emoting heavily over the fakeness of my friendship.

One of her most potent missives to her following went something like this:

Don Hall is a racist! He even admitted it to me!! He is a confessed racist!!

I should’ve seen it coming.

Now, if this were the fifties, the HUAC could’ve branded me a communist or at least a communist sympathizer.

“Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” 

“No, sir.”

“Have you ever read the works of Karl Marx?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Have you ever attended a meeting with communists?”

“No meetings -“

“Parties?”

“Parties...?”

“Yes. Meetings with alcohol. And communists.”

“...yeah...”

This guilt-by-association thing was the most damning and pervasive aspect of the HUAC and led to blacklisting, careers destroyed, terrified citizens quickly falling to their knees in supplication and naming names to avoid the stigma of being labeled a Commie.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines McCarthyism as "the political practice of publicizing accusations of disloyalty or subversion with insufficient regard to evidence." No one subpoenaed by the HUAC was ever convicted of being communist but a fair number were fined and jailed for refusing to play along. With the definition of who was or was not a communist being so open-ended and ill-defined, only those who either declared their fealty to anti-communism or named names were spared.

My guess is that if Senator Joseph McCarthy had had a Twitter account, his damage to the individual lives he publicly destroyed would’ve been a thousand times worse.

Mind you, the #BlackLivesMatter organization has very specific goals and outline them clearly. The Racial HUAC does not include them or, I’d suggest, the vast majority of those out there in protest.

Several arguments today, in the McCarthyism in Blackface, do their best to minimize the damage done. 

There is the thread that claims that those who are publicly accused of racism who then are fired from long-held jobs are just fine. Losing a job isn’t the end of the world, it is argued. I’d argue you go back and stream “The Front,” “Trumbo,” or “Good Night and Good Luck” and tell yourself how fine these people have it.

There is the claim that, in these sorts of cultural shifts, there is always some collateral damage. The term “collateral damage” comes from the Viet Nam conflict as a way to dehumanize and minimize the killing of non-combatants (also a dehumanizing term meaning “innocent people”) and accidental destruction of non-military property. The idea of there being collateral damage in the current culture shift is nice and abstract unless you are the collateral being damaged.

The troubles with our current cultural push is in exactly the lack of specifics and false justifications. Mind you, the #BlackLivesMatter organization has very specific goals and outline them clearly. The Racial HUAC does not include them or, I’d suggest, the vast majority of those out there in protest. While these protests represent a tiny slice of the population (polls suggest that the serious majority of Americans trust the police force and have no interest whatsoever in abolishing it; they are more in tune with the idea of substantive reform) the effect of these marches are showing some measure of progressive gain.

The RHUAC is motivated to upend the power dynamic completely and their means is in a definitive lack of specifics.

Structural racism is both quantifiable and data-proven. Organizational bylaws, economic measures taken, the laws of the land. Corporate hiring practices, diversity initiatives, and funding of public schools. These are structural and we can fix these things.

Systemic racism means that everything in the system of society is racist by default. It is racism in the gaps much like God’s will is divinity in the gaps. Prior to the Enlightenment, when someone couldn’t explain why something happened or offer proof one way or another, it was boiled down to Divine Providence. The Will of God.

Today, when something cannot be explained in terms of racial disparity, it is boiled down to systemic racism. White people are racist so anything that demonstrates a different outcome from black people (and strangely absent from disparities between Latin and Asian people) is, by default, racist.

For example, a common stereotype is that while white people generally prefer mayonnaise, black people generally prefer mild sauce. No big deal. Maybe it indicates that whites are more bland in their condiment choices while black people like things a bit spicier. Under the Derrick Bell theory, this is due specifically to white supremacy. How? Who the fuck knows aside from any difference between whites and blacks is automatically racist.

OK. You didn’t read any of Bell’s work. Here’s a quick breakdown of a few central tenets of his worldview:

Critical Race Theory believes racism is present in every aspect of life, every relationship, and every interaction and therefore has its advocates look for it everywhere. He posits a theory called “interest convergence” which states that reforms in the supremicist system are only created for black people when they also benefit white people thus no reform instigated by whites is to be trusted.

According to Bell science, reason, and evidence are a “white” way of knowing and that storytelling and lived experience is a “black” alternative. Pointing out logical exceptions to that lived experience is a sure sign of systemic racism.

As I wrote earlier, it’s a rather brilliant narrative frame. The RHUAC doesn’t have to define any behavior as racist or not because everything is racist when white. Everything. 

“Are you now or have you ever been a racist?” 

“No, sir.”

“Have you ever attended a meeting with white people?”

“Sure —“

“Parties?”

“Parties...?”

“Yes. Meetings with mayonnaise. And white people.”

“...yeah...mayonnaise...?”

“Are you white?”

In the 1950s most Americans were easily manipulated by the fear of Communism. In schools, children learned to “duck and cover.” The Red Scare was pushed on national media and the blind terror of bucking the system and refusing to play along with the game of public accusations of subversion was too great. This was a threat to the American Way of Life, they were told. Commies could be your next door neighbor, they were told. And they believed.

Today we are faced with another manipulation that far too many right thinking people are buying — that “white” equals “racist” without regard to behavior. To be white is to be fully complicit which is both ludicrous and horrifying to consider. There is a cult mind at play with racial hucksters driving an unrelenting academic campaign to grab power through money and influence. No subpoenas necessary, no Congressional hearings.

I grew up watching the movies about McCarthy and his crusade. I’ve read the manifestos of the zealots behind the Red Scare. I’ve read the theories behind the White Scare. They’re too similar for me.