Appropriate that which is Appropriate

It's important to understand we're in the appropriation phase of "civil rights", a period of wealth confiscation and privilege transfer from white to non-white. From culture to commerce new terms and limits are being rationalized as necessary racial justice as professions, cultural domains and even physical spaces are carved out from which whites are to be excluded. The language is all theory and romance (and sinister; at some point black "scholars" started talking about the white "role"in the New America to come) but the result is very much material and economic.

It began in earnest with the Obama Administration, and was well on its way to finalizing a sort of post-white order, with whites serving as a legacy oppressor even as their numbers dwindled. Most importantly it was about the orderly transfer of that wealth and power--it had to go to the right people after all. Needless to say Trump derailed all that, if only for the moment.

This is what all this talk of cultural appropriation and representation is about. It's why Google is convulsing right now under its own attempts to transfer half of its employment opportunity to favored groups. It's everywhere, and a proper economic analysis of its cost, and the costs to come if we continue on this path, would probably make our collective head explode.

The initial fervor that greeted Obama's rise was based for many whites on the notion it would solve America's race problem, reassuring black Americans finally of our sincerity and inspiring them to do better. It's as if the average liberal really understands it isn't white racism holding people back; he just thinks black people don't know it yet. Once they do, things will sort out. Eight years after Obama black people show less signs of catching on. The myth of white racism is more jealously held than ever.

If blacks generally hadn't been paying attention to the culture's positive encouragement Obama certainly had. He took up the archetype he learned on TV and it worked better than any amount of authenticity. A little fake inflection here, a little pretending to like hip hop there. Authenticity is overrated.
The notion that he, in turn, would inspire, finally, black America to pull its weight resembled something like an economic stimulus program, without even the temporary bump. The "Obama Effect" purported to find its positive effects, and quickly fizzled out. Another social justice perpetual motion machine never got going.

Not that blacks weren't inspired by Obama's election. Urban blacks responded right away, discovering and improvising on the flash mob concept. There was a new confidence and energy in black America, but it wasn't expressed by black America becoming more law abiding and successful, whiter; it was expressed--but of course--by more confident blacks being blacker.  As usual, blacks had a whole different idea of what things meant than their white "allies".

Their position as a group will not be improved through thrift and industry--even if mere discipline and effort were all it took to equalize us economically and every which way, in so succeeding it would remove the source of black America's unique power and position: their suffering.
But they can't compete with whites at being white and most importantly they don't want to. What they want is to be themselves, to assert themselves, to mold their world--just like anyone else--to make it more amenable and less alien. You can't blame them.
Authenticity--the authenticity Obama lacks, can never attain, is more important than any quality of life metric. To the extent to which the average person feels alienated from his culture--and who doesn't now?--might be directly proportional to the degree to which that culture has been absorbed by other cultures. Consider the degree to which black culture has molded American culture.
Black America's position as a group is improved through political power–they’ve already managed to carve out an out-sized degree of autonomy and influence purely through political action and demagogy. That demagogy--BLM and the rest of what passes for black civil rights--complements perfectly the pre-existing violence and mayhem that produce its martyrs.

The malice behind Obama's toothy grin came out after the Democrats got pummeled hard in Obama's first mid-terms. The fake gloves came off. The Trayvon Martin campaign was whipped up heading into the 2012 elections and produced Black Lives Matter, by 2016, whipped into a frenzy by the presidential campaign, its supporters were assassinating the same police working security at its demonstrations.
At the same time the seemingly petty grievances grew greater in number and fury. In Google trends the term "cultural approproation" went from obscurity to relevance 2012 with Obama's second presidential run, increased up to the administration's second mid-term elections and remains at that plateau now in the time of Trump.

Even the kitsch element in black politics, always profound, got cornier--Ta Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me came out it 2015.

Another conversation we won't have: the failure of the promised Obama Effect and the scandal of the actual Obama Effect. The reality is racial resentment has gotten so much worse over the last eight years it's hard to measure because the terms of debate have had to change that much to keep up with it--resistance not being an option.

The effect of eight years of Obama has been to render the race problem insoluble. On the good side, his policies and rhetoric hastened the rise of the alt right and Trump.

Portland's Weekend

 

Joey Gibson's "Trump Free Speech Rally Portland" was permitted for Terry Schrunk Plaza directly across from Portland's City Hall. To its north is Chapman Square, where the hardcore masked and black-clad antifa were massing as if for an assault. Here police clear them out with flash bangs. That's the bronze statue The Promised Land, commemorating the Oregon Trail, draped in red flags. Chapman Square was originally intended as a women's only park--a safe space.

All week the city had been preparing in tandem with national and international media by framing this all in light of the commuter train stabbing of two good Samaritans by a local lunatic who had turned up at an earlier pro Trump rally draped in a flag and flashing Nazi salutes. He appears to be more crazy than political--and more left than right politically.
Myself I don't understand the logic of the argument, such as it is, that says the existence of a fatal extremist on my side somehow negates all my concerns and objective analysis. But the city indulged itself, at least in the media, and people seem genuinely unable to see the obscenity of political manipulation in all the competing outrage.

Before Chapman Square was cleared, demonstrators had been taunting each other across Madison St for hours. Before this police warned of slingshots in Chapman Park--but the fruit landed here is the only projectile I saw thrown. Looked like a kiwi:

  

There was speculation within the Trump camp that antifa would attack individuals and small groups as they left. Here Trump supporters cheer as antifa are driven out by police.

 


Schrunk Plaza was boxed in on three sides by counter-demonstrations. To the east, in front of the federal building, massed labor activists. This is the view from there:

 

Here I arrive and toward the end stroll through Chapman Park, camp of the antifa, about two hours before scheduled start of the Trump event. Antifa can be heard rallying for action:



Clashes between rivals after the event were rare. There were a few confrontations as demonstrators on both sides hung about after the end of the rally. Here a woman is pepper-sprayed:

 

Black BLM protesters arrive late (of course) and block a street briefly. You can see me getting harassed by a dindu of the political variety and his masked antifa whitefriend. Luckily for me they weren't nuffin (trying to figure out how to retrieve the sound).

 

Searching for Hillary

Something propelled Hillary Clinton along all this time, something that doesn't translate on television and isn't documented in history, something more than cunning and Bill Clinton, some genuine ability. Other pols and media hacks have often claimed to come away impressed with her intelligence.
It could be that the Real Hillary is wise and farsighted, and this shows through. I suspect it's really because Hillary's real knack is for backroom politics despite being an awful candidate for all the technical reasons: voice, appearance, vibe. I imagine Hillary Clinton is really good in the room (as I like to think of it), that is in small groups formulating strategy. This impression is likely magnified in the minds of her peers and toadies, dutifully as feminists, genuinely as fellow political hacks, hopefully as opportunists: "yes, she's brilliant!"

This is the impression I had watching her corner Trump on the tax return issue in the first debate:

CLINTON: Third, we don't know all of his business dealings, but we have been told through investigative reporting that he owes about $650 million to Wall Street and foreign banks. Or maybe he doesn't want the American people, all of you watching tonight, to know that he's paid nothing in federal taxes, because the only years that anybody's ever seen were a couple of years when he had to turn them over to state authorities when he was trying to get a casino license, and they showed he didn't pay any federal income tax.
TRUMP: That makes me smart.
CLINTON: So if he's paid zero, that means zero for troops, zero for vets, zero for schools or health. And I think probably he's not all that enthusiastic about having the rest of our country see what the real reasons are, because it must be something really important, even terrible, that he's trying to hide. And the financial disclosure statements, they don't give you the tax rate. They don't give you all the details that tax returns would. And it just seems to me that this is something that the American people deserve to see. And I have no reason to believe that he's ever going to release his tax returns, because there's something he's hiding.

Watching this I was impressed at how Hillary seemed to relax into this line of attack, growing perceptibly less stiff, less shrill, relishing the play and enjoying the game. This is Hillary Clinton, I thought. Hillary revisited this mode in her bizarre defeat lap the other day (repeating a genuinely fake news item):

“Who is behind driving up Trump’s Twitter followers by the millions?” she said. “We know they’re bots. Why? I assume there’s a reason for everything. Is it to make him look more popular than he is? Is it to try to influence others on Twitter about what the messaging is?”

But she can't be that good. As an anti-feminist, I delight in the thought that Hillary's campaign failed in large part because she led it, and the errors in judgement she made were female errors--most comically, the promotion of Alicia Machado, an outrage only women of a certain age and diminishing number seemed able to feel. Add the sexually ambiguous sidekick with the caddish husband and--well, Hollywood's Soviet-caliber ideological discipline is unfortunate. What a great story to write, cast, shoot. That they leave it on the table shows you it's not all money--and it's not even all fame. Maybe it's not even all power. But not for Hillary.

Of course if I'm right about her in the room skills, I suspect the real tragedy of Hillary is that she leveraged that relatively modest level of political skill and, more importantly, understanding, through cunning, the brand her husband created and her elite coterie into just-missing capturing the White House. And here I fear we see not the convulsions of a corpse but the slasher film monster rising from the flames, plodding toward us, armed with its inextinguishable will-to-power:

"I take responsibility for every decision I made but that's not why I lost. I think it's important we learn the real lessons of this campaign. So I think it's important we learn the real lessons of this campaign. The forces we are up against are not just interested in influencing our elections and our politics, they are going after our economy, and they are going after our unity as a nation, so, yes, back in 98...I have been watching this and I have been the target for a number of years...

But even in the field of crazy videos, Hillary is bested yet again by a flamboyant, charismatic guy:

Anarcho-resistance

Local free weekly Willamette Week reports on ICE coming after criminal "dreamers" in Portland:

The largest reported deportation sweep in the U.S. under President Donald Trump of previously sanctioned immigrants known as "Dreamers" took place last weekend in the Portland area. In the last week, federal immigration agents arrested three people who had been given limited amnesty under President Barack Obama, according to multiple sources. 

The three people had at one time all registered with the U.S. government under an Obama-era program called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which allows undocumented immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children to legally remain here. 

One, Luis Gerado Zazueta, had not renewed his DACA paperwork, says his immigration attorney, Maria Zlateva. Another, Emmanuel Ayala, had gone in for fingerprinting to renew his DACA three days before his arrest, as first reported by local Spanish-language talk show Cita Con Nelly. 

The arrests of the Dreamers added to a growing sense that the White House is targeting so-called "sanctuary cities" like Portland for crackdowns on undocumented immigrants. Two of the DACA arrests came Sunday morning, a day before U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions declared his Justice Department would no longer award millions of dollars in grants to sanctuary cities that decline to cooperate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

I've never seen it mentioned but doubt it escaped Latino activists that daca means "hand it over" in Spanish. One of the dreamers detained because of a drunk driving conviction is a local activist with Latino Network, a city of Portland program to train Latino activists, indoctrinate city employees in Theory and steer city contracts. From the city's website:

Latino Network’s (LN) mission is to provide transformative opportunities, services and advocacy for the education, leadership and civic engagement of our youth, families and communities. LN’s Diverse Civic Leaders Academy works with young emerging Latino leaders to build leadership skills, organizing capabilities, and develop capacity. Trainings focus on the systems of oppression; gender justice; leadership skill building; conflict resolution;economic, environmental and social sustainability; civic engagement; and community organizing techniques such as volunteer recruitment, base-building, meeting planning, turn-out and facilitation. Workshop trainers from government, the non-profit, and private sector provide expertise and give participants the opportunity to learn first-hand from those with real-world leadership experience.

Additionally, participants work with the Center for Intercultural Organizing (CIO) and their PILOT immigrant and refugee participant group on a series of co-trainings to build a cross-cultural coalition. Puentes, or Bridges in Spanish, is an organizing project where we build capacity and develop leadership opportunities for low-income Latinos to be leaders who advocate for the health, well-being, safety, and quality of life of their community. Trainings are on civic engagement, capacity building, leadership development, and involvement in local government, such as testifying to City Council and participating in city and county commissions and boards. Additionally we hold Living Room Dialogues whereby communities work together to dissolve stereotypes, gain deeper understandings and increased collaboration. Dialogues take place between Latinos and members of the police force and between Latino immigrants and the Anglo community. Discussions took place with government officials on the ways to meet the community’s employment and contracting goal. This resulted in government agencies requiring interested prime contractors to attend a mandatory prebid meeting in the Cully neighborhood, the first time a mandatory prebid meeting has been held to support local hiring and minority business contracting.

Room for one more just opened up at the Diverse Civic Leaders Academy, at least. The activist's arrest moved the already worked-up ACLU and others to louder protests, but at this point their histrionics--it's amazing what happens with a little change in policy--can only fortify the deterrent effect of real enforcement:

Romeo Sosa, director of the Portland Voz Workers' Rights Education Project, which runs the day labor center on Northeast Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., says the increase in reported ICE activity in public places spreads fear and encourages self-deportation. "It's an intimidation tactic," he says. By making its agents visible on the streets, ICE hopes "people will be afraid, and they'll pack their stuff and leave the country." Some, Sosa adds, have already done so.

Of the three arrested the activist has a drunk driving conviction, one has a minor weapons charge (brandishing a knife it appears) and one has a marijuana possession charge. It appears about a quarter of those arrested nationwide have no particular conviction cited by ICE. Recall President Trump seemed to soften on "dreamers" early on.

The Weekly:

ICE now labels Multnomah and Washington counties as "non-cooperative jurisdictions" and intends to publish a weekly report of how many immigrants wanted by the agency were not handed over by county jailers as a result of sanctuary policies approved by state and local elected officials. 

The first such report, released March 20, was a mess of jumbled statistics and drew swift criticism from local officials in counties labeled "non-cooperative." The ICE report named Washington County as one of the "highest volume" sanctuary jurisdictions, as it received seven ICE "detainer" orders demanding the transfer of immigrants in local custody during the week of Jan. 28 through Feb. 3. 

This seemed to imply the county protected seven foreign criminals from deportation that week—even though not all of those individuals had been convicted of a crime, nor had their immigration cases been adjudicated. The report also noted that because local law enforcement does not typically inform ICE when denying a detainer, the numbers essentially represented guesswork by ICE personnel. [emphasis added]

Well then, no shit, as they say, it's guesswork. It's also notable that before Trump the feds had simply given up issuing detainers to uncooperative jurisdictions in an environment of non-enforcement, making it a mystery just how many criminal aliens have been released by preening local authorities much less their impact. And it's beyond me what the point is in the following paragraph:

Two immigrants held in the Multnomah County Jail on charges of assault and amphetamine possession were listed in the report—although their alleged crimes were not necessarily any more serious than those of the approximately 1,200 other inmates in county custody on any given day.

And the city wants to help those mere muggers and meth heads:

City officials have taken actions, from creating a training program for city employees to providing $50,000 toward the legal defense of immigrants' cases. 

But that isn't enough for the sort of activists the city is employing at the Diverse Civic Leaders Academy:

But advocates argue the city could go further—by making fewer arrests for low-level offenses, for instance.

Law and order will have to be suspended until this law and order craze blows over.