Month: March 2017

Understand Yourselves Better

White People: I Don’t Want You To Understand Me Better, I Want You To Understand Yourselves

Ijeoma Oluo:

Why do I know white culture so well? Because I’m a black woman. And while I, and just about any person of color who has spent their lives in a white supremacist society, know enough about white culture to write a book or two on whiteness and option the bestseller movie rights, y’all know almost nothing about us and even less about yourselves.

Find yourselves white people. Find yourselves so that you can know what whiteness is. … Find yourselves so that racism no longer surprises you.

Seeing the world clearly takes trouble. It is ongoing work to educate myself on racism, both my own personal racism and the systemic kind.

The hard part is knowledge of my own footprint:

  • self-interest in continuing racism
  • failure to act when opportunities came up
  • fully believing racist ideas

The easy part is that all I have to do is keep putting one foot in front of the other. Once I learn something it stays learned.

 

We’re ragging on allies for making us spend money on the military:

Trump said Germany has accumulated an immense lack of investment over many years, according to one of our sources, telling Merkel the U.S. feels taken advantage of for spending so much on defense

But we’re increasing military spending:

Trump has sent guidelines to his Cabinet officials, directing them to boost the defense budget for next year by $54 billion—nearly a 10 percent increase—and to get the extra money by draining the budgets of the EPA, the State Department, and other federal agencies.

This is a staggering sum of money. Not since Ronald Reagan’s first year as president has the United States increased defense spending by 10 percent, and that was during a high point in the Cold War

So are we trying to spend less or not?

My guess is that both issues are entirely political. Trump wants to humiliate and dominate Germany, and he wants to look masculine by affiliating himself with the military.

Growing the US military is posturing with toy money. Needing additional military capabilities is not the point, and managing money wisely is not an agenda item.