Friday, November 27, 2020

Mostly Spared This Year

There was a brief flurry of "you must give a hug to your sad Trump supporter friends!" but we were mostly spared the annual Thanksgiving tradition of white centrists telling us how "we" can be loving and welcoming to "our" conservative friends and relatives during the turkey meals this year.

These fantasies always reveal a lot about the people who write them and the editors who publish them. They are white. Their imagined audience is white and liberal, but in an "intolerant left" way, unlike the writer. They gloss over the fact that what's offensive about these conservative relatives isn't that they want a lower top marginal tax rate, it's that they're loud and proud racists who won't shut the fuck up and stop doing racisms even at Thanksgiving.

People of color are entirely not present in this conversation. No one explains to the conservatives hosting Thanksgiving (for some reason the liberals are always hosting them, and the conservatives the invited guests) that they need to be more accepting of their liberal guests and their odd objections to racism.

Even when conservatives run the entire country (yes, Commie Joe is about to wield the Hammer and Sickle for the next glorious 4 year plan, but mostly conservatives do!), it is the liberals (white) who are supposed to reach out to their conservative (white) brethren.

They'll be back next year.