[Video] NBC cuts interview short after man points to private equity ruining his city instead of participating in nostalgia ramblings
[Video] NBC cuts interview short after man points to private equity ruining his city instead of participating in nostalgia ramblings
The cherry on top:
This was the twist of a great movie about corrupt cops
movie nameIn Rebel Ridge, the protagonist, a black guy, is trying to get a bag of bail money back from a corrupt police department that enacted civil forfeiture. It often cuts away to the one black woman in the dept who has to drive a shittier car than the rest. Then, we learn there’s an informant to IA inside the dept trying to bring them down. The protagonist figures it’s the black woman. He’s wrong; she betrays him, trying to arrest him. Turns out, the informant was the white guy who first stole his money, as a way of trying to build trust with a department that had been doing a lot of the same.
I don’t often get to talk about this because I’m a straight white guy from the south with a thick accent. I ain’t upset about it because I would assume the worst of me too.
I think it’s at least semi common knowledge that conservative/racist/sexist/homophobic white men often assume all other straight white men think the same as them and will say some wild shit on that assumption. Well it wasn’t common but I definitely remember a few black folks that may as well have been Stephen from Django Unchained
They are saying as an individual who has undoubtedly been subject to those systemic abuses Bullshit!
Plenty of black women are part of the Owner Class, plenty of white men are part of the Working Class - what’s almost perfectly correlated with being subject the systemic abuses of class is “not being rich”, more than race (even in the US, which is extra fucked up) and way, way more than gender.
There is no reason to pull out “identitarian markers” when talking about class inequality unless one has been indoctrinated in a Neoliberal “divide and conquer” fake-Leftist political ideology designed to divide the fight for Equality For All into a hierarchy of “differently deserving of having Equality” based on things people wore born with rather than need, a view of others and how deserving they are that mirrors the way the Far-Right sees the world.
Not being filthy rich and having to slog in the mud like the rest of us to just keep one’s head above the surface is infinitelly more correlated to not being in the Owner Class than one’s count of X chromossomes in pair 23 or one’s gene for melanine production.
It really pisses me off how people from some political cultures with a very rightwing Overtoon Window, even whilst they have the best of intentions, have been brainwashed into classifying their fellow human beings and having expectations on them (i.e. Prejudices) using the very same architecture of thinking as the Far-Right, to the point that even when they talk about “class inequality” their mind sees “identitarian markers” (just like the Fascists) rather that “Working Class” which is from where the actual expression “class inequality” originates from.
I understand that wealth is the primary decider of one’s rights in America.
However you can’t say that Reagan deliberately putting drugs in black neighborhoods didn’t have a systemic effect on the advantages of black people in America.
You can’t say that women earning 80% as much as men doesn’t have an effect on how high they could reach.
I don’t think that any one thing decides which class you’re going to be but it does stack the cards against you. Maybe this person never experienced it but she certainly had a higher chance of it.
Re-read what I wrote - being black is nowhere as correlated with suffering systemic abuses from wealth inequality as is being poor or working class, more so for being a woman as per your own numbers: earning in average 80% of what men earn is far less unequal than the average worker earning less than 0.3% of what a CEO earns (and way less than that when compared to a billionaire).
There is no inherent poverty in being black or a woman, there’s only that which has been placed there by people who - like Reagan - when they look at other human beings don’t see people, they see ethnicity or gender, and by following a logic that expects afro-americans or women to all be “something” and “having an obligation to behave in certain way” purely because of their race or gender, you’re following THE EXACT SAME SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE as the racists and sexists like Reagan of classifying people based on genetics and then having expectations on them and determining what they deserve based on that.
Fighting inequality by using the very same proxies of worth and deserving as the Far-Right is validating and prolonging the very fundations of Far-Right thinking that say that people should be treated first and foremost based on race and gender. Those who do so, whether they think that they’re leftwing or not, are part of the problem, not part of the solution.
It’s thus not surprising that this kind of thinking is most widespread in Neoliberal countries whose Overtoon Window is way to the right of most countries - you don’t shift politics to the Left by accepting and working on top of the very same foundations of social thinking of the Fascists.
You fight the suffering of systemic abuses by punishing and stopping the abusers and helping the ACTUAL victims, not by accepting the reductive and prejudicial proxies of the abusers themselves and shaping your thinking on the subject and fighting around those - that’s just willfully playing by the rules of the Fascists.
> The US vice-president, JD Vance, was greeted by a chorus of boos during when he appeared at the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Milan on Friday Archived version: https://archive.is/20260207023645/https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/06/nbc-appears-to-cut-crowds-booing-of-jd-vance-from-winter-olympics-broadcast [https://archive.is/20260207023645/https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/06/nbc-appears-to-cut-crowds-booing-of-jd-vance-from-winter-olympics-broadcast] — Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.