Friday, August 25, 2017

How I Respond to Critics of My "White Supremacists by Default" Comments on CNN


  

 In the last two years, I have watched Neo Nazis and the KKK rise to a level of influence and visibility that they have not had since the 1960's, possibly not since the the Great Depression. And  I have been horrified
that they have given credit to Donald Trump as both candidate and President for their renewed influence
'
 I count many Trump supporters among my tennis partners and people I work with the national anti-testing movement. And I have some Trump supporters in my family. When I saw this happening, I begged them to speak out and get Mr Trump to decisively repudiate this array of extreme racists who were using his candidacy to elevate themselve

 With few exceptions they declined to give this matter much attention, either because they wanted to prevent Hillary Clinton from being President, or because they saw the issue as tangential

 However, to many people in the country, especially African Americans, this matter was hardly tangential as it brought up tragic circumstances in their history which they hoped they had left behind

 Now we are facing a face off in many of our communities which has reach dangerous proportions.

Following the election of Mr Trump, there were numerous incidents in schools in Eastern Long Island, Ohio and other places where white students chanted at their Latino classmates " Build A Wall" and "We Will Deport You."

I have also witnessed racially provocative behavior on the part of white students at Fordham that we have not had since the late 1980's. In fall of 2015, when Mr Trump was starting his candidacy, a group of white students at a swimming team party chanted, so that other students in their building could hear them "White Power"  "Barack Obama is a Nigger" and "Martin Luther King is a Nigger"

 I used this forum of the CNN article to raise the alarm about a rising tide of White Racism  which is anything but abstract to Blacks, Latinos, Muslims and other targets. I am hoping that decent people of all political persuasions, but especially conservatives, clamp down hard on the Neo- Nazis and White Supremacists who have sought cover in their movement.

Turning away and ignoring the powerful impact of this on our social fabric will only make things worse

 I see some signs that people are waking up And am willing to take the heat for ruffling some features to get things moving in the right direction

All the Best

Dr Mark Naison

PS  This survey was brought to my attention recently.  It suggests that I was not exaggerating

3 comments:

Hans Ostrom said...

Thanks for the post. It seems the GOP has been a White Supremacist party for decades, with its "Southern Strategy," racist gerrymandering, "war on drugs," and undermining of the Voting Rights Act. The media rarely called/calls the part out on this. Thanks again.

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Unknown said...

"When I saw this happening, I begged them to speak out and get Mr Trump to decisively repudiate this array of extreme racists who were using his candidacy to elevate themselve"

So you asked them to engage in a wholesale fallacy of composition. Specifically to hold a figure solely accountable for a visible minority, in a manner you have never even considered doing to a black or left-wing figure in your entire life.

While deferring to a study of a sample size of approximately 1000, asserting it's representation of a tenth of the population (not the 50 percent you claimed), and obfuscating that the study also indicates that 4 out of 10 respondents couldn't even nail down a definition of 'alt-right', likely because of it's use to any variety of dissent, up to and including the like of Bret and Eric Weinstien.

And thus, felt infinitely and infallibly serene in applying the same inductive fallacy to an entire race, in a manner which you effectively have never, and likely will never, interrogate for the remainder of your life.

I'm grateful for your clarity, however inadvertent. I didn't vote for Trump, but I don't think I could have imagined an article more exculpating of moral obligation to the arbitrary claims of adherents to black and/or left wing ethnic fascisms, and this will serve as reminder that any intuition toward the guilt that I was raised to yield to is betrayal of reason by preexisting neurochemical constructs, and not the other way around.