The ops question is about America. I explicitly made a top level comment about America.

When someone asked for a tldr I did not specify Irish Americans, but that should be clear from the thread, my post and the op.

You’re replying to a comment where I explicitly specified America.

America is not the world but we’re talking about America here.

i’m not.

if you want to understand why the history of racism against irish americans after the wave of immigration in response to the manmade famine doesn’t factor into racism irish americans experience today (none, zero, irish americans do not experience racism today), read my top level comment.

the defining factors are that irish americans were integrated into white supremacist power structures and black americans weren’t, that st. patricks day isn’t treated with any reverence in the united states and is instead one of the big four drinking holidays and the negative stereotypes of irish americans from the 1800s don’t survive today in word or in deed.

i chose not to touch on the lingering economic impact of racism against irish americans as opposed to racism against black americans because they’re in two different universes. one was largely dismantled before any of us were born and the other is still systemic and pervasive to this day.

No.

Serving a dish which is part of the post slavery white supremacist negative stereotype of black Americans used to reify the Jim Crow and segregationist regimes on the day set aside to mark the freeing of the last slaves would not be more or less racist weather black Americans enjoyed eating it or not.

Are people getting upset over nothing? I don’t know. Are some people not allowed to get upset? I don’t know.

Thanks for catching that. I kept trying to figure out how to frame greenwood and Parrish street as similar early attempts to bring black Americans into the fold of capital, one of which saw a violent attack by the white hegemon that was opposed to expansion of capital to black Americans but it just kept not fitting.

I guess my brain just subbed it in cause I was turning it over in my head. Edited.

Irish people are white and therefore cannot experience racism.

Irish people are white.

They didn’t start out that way in America, because race is a social construct used by the state to achieve its ends and when a shit ton of Irish people were coming over to the United States to escape the manmade potato famine the terms of their acceptance into American society was that they’d be doing the shittiest work.

American society dealt with this contradiction by adopting the racial pseudoscience that put Irish people below “real whites”.

Whiteness isn’t something innate that can be measured objectively (although pseudoscientific methods claim to be able to do so!), it’s a basic subjective measure of where one stands in the white supremacist power structure.

The white supremacist power structure informs all sorts of stuff like can you get a loan, can you get insurance, do you need to be more afraid of dying to the cops than usual, how loud can you play your music, pretty much every aspect of life in America.

After Catholicism became more widely accepted in the us, and a shit ton of Irish people became cops (so that the white supremacist state could surveil their communities) Irish people were eventually considered white.

Black people in America aren’t white. That might seem like an obvious thing to say, but it’s important to be clear that the process of integration that the Irish immigrant wave went through was never really offered to black Americans.

A person could argue that we are living through that process right now and I think there is a process of integration going on but it’s not making black Americans part of the broader white American group but instead giving black Americans a seat at the table of capital. That’s a significantly different deal.

Anyway, there’s this thing called racism, which is where a society uses the completely made up category of race to discriminate against groups of people to achieve its ends.

Some examples of American racism are slavery, segregation, redlining, the treatment of agricultural workers, the treatment of rail workers, etc.

What’s important is that racism is when a society (or its members) discriminate against some group. There is power in the discrimination and it’s being used against a group.

If a bank decides not to lend to white people it doesn’t hurt white people because there’s literally all the other banks that they can go to and get loans. There is discrimination being used against a group in that example, but it has no power over them because they’ll just go to all the banks that (and I’m quoting directly from a Bank of America sign here) don’t “serve coloreds”.

Okay, so why am I saying this? We’re talking about food!

There’s an old stereotype that black people eat watermelon and fried chicken. There’s a long and storied history to the food stereotypes of black Americans but I’ll spare you the tangent and just say it’s visible in all sorts of Jim crow and segregation era media and arts and crafts stuff.

If you got one of those “antique mall” type places you can probably see some of it there.

During and before Jim Crow and segregation, those stereotypes were deployed to depict black Americans as at best ignorant country bumpkins and at worst subhuman apes.

So to serve the stereotypical food of a racist caricature on a day that is intended to remember the freeing of the last slaves is at best thoughtless reproduction of a racist stereotype and at worst malicious intentional reification of a racist stereotype!

But why isn’t it racist to serve corned beef on saint patricks day? Well for one thing, saint Patrick’s day isn’t seriously celebrated as a remembrance of Irish American culture or the experience of immigrants almost anywhere in the us. It’s one of the big four, a drinking holiday with a dress code.

It’s also not perpetuating harmful stereotype to run a homemade Reuben special on saint Patrick’s day. No one bites into a Rachel and thinks “lol, those dumb micks are only good for driving spikes, drinking and swearing allegiance to Rome” or “if only they could multiply the way they multiply, maybe they wouldn’t be so poor, sad!”

Now that’s not to say it’s racist to prepare or eat fried chicken or watermelon. As a southerner I got strong feelings about both.

But pretty much it boils down to Irish people are white.

E: I fucking made a stupid ass mistake and substituted greenwood for the freeing of the last slaves when describing the context of Juneteenth. My dumbass brain was going “tell em about how greenwood and Parrish street were about giving black Americans a seat at the table of capital, instead of equality under white supremacy” over and over again the whole time I was writing this stream of consciousness ass post and when I couldn’t find a place to shoehorn it in the ol’ brain took over and did it anyway. Thanks to fryhyde for pointing it out!

Even with perfect algorithms I think it’s reasonable to expect problems within society to sharpen.

I mean if there was some theoretical social media entity completely disconnected from optimization for its own benefit then the people using that system would still have been provided the tools to do all their social relations faster, more often and with more intensity.

That’s gonna, and maybe I’m giving away the game here, uh, heighten the contradictions.

I’m so sorry for not being clearer about the meaning my words have.

In the context of a shooting by cops I’m using “no threat” to mean no threat that merits deadly force, not that it wasnt a crazy situation.

My point was never to say that the situation wasn’t unique or that fear or feeling threatened never factored in, but the situation in which that woman was shot didn’t constitute a threat to anyone that merited deadly force.

She was unarmed (again, I remember some news trying to say that her pocketknife constituted a weapon but whatever), was climbing in through a barrier that she had to be lifted up to reach and could have been restrained with several different tools or techniques at the disposal of the cop that shot her.

If there were no other options available then a person could believe otherwise and plenty of cops have gotten off for killings because they said their service weapon was their only option.

I was hoping it would be clear what I meant by “no threat” when I explained how lots of people had said all those things they thought the cop could have done, but that’s my fault.

Idk, my experience talking to people who claimed to have voted democrat showed otherwise. I had a lot of older people saying they didn’t have to shoot her. Someone who lives a couple of roads over even said the “just shoot her in the leg” line.

I guess for people who are old enough to remember like maybe Kent state forwards there’s a real bad association with cops or national guard shooting anyone protesting, demonstrating or rioting or whatever and I think if it goes off bigger this time around that’s a bigger problem.

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Okay so if this becomes a pattern how do we break the cycle of having to dome protesters every election cycle? Historically it hasn’t been good for the state to have constant uprisings no matter if you support their cause or not.

I agree with you that most Americans were shocked in general or didn’t care but I think there was a significant amount of people whose perceptions were maybe changed.

Do you think the scale would change things? If this becomes a pattern, what’s the way out?

There’s a lot of people in the replies saying something along these lines but none as succinctly put as you.

What’s the right way for the state to deal with “idiots” when it doesn’t care what they think? Certainly after this next January 6 the state can’t just kill them, what’s the response from the state you’d like to see?

Okay, I’ll defend what I said so that it’s clear that I brought it up not to troll or engage in bad faith but as an example of the effects of state violence on public trust.

Regardless of weather or not you believe the states defense of its agents actions, you can’t deny that the woman who was shot was unarmed (I think I saw some news articles trying to call her armed because she had a pocketknife, but come on!) and that there were alternatives to deadly force available. I saw them discussed online and heard even my very vote blue no matter who style lib neighbors say them when we talked about the news.

Some of the stuff I remember hearing people say was “push her back through”, “push her back through with a stick” “let her come through and arrest her” “beat people trying to come through with a stick” and “shoot into the air/ground to disperse them”.

I’m not bringing those things up to then give you the opportunity to ask me to defend them, but to provide examples of normal everyday people’s responses to seeing the states agents kill someone who looked like them or someone they knew and only became more sympathetic as her background was reported on and pictures of her from before January 6 surfaced.

I also know that she was brought up in the news as a victim of state violence and her name was used as a kind of dogwhistle for stop the steal type right wingers and even normal republican types for little while.

I don’t remember it because I don’t run in those circles but it had a cadence like “Sharon bobbit” or something.

The effect of that one death was very polarizing and did little to build broader trust in government except for with people who took the controversial “I don’t like those people/they’re criminals so good riddance” view.

So that’s why I brought it up and specifically said that she posed no threat. Not because I wanted to defend the people who did January 6 or the ones who use her name as a shibboleth but because it’s a good example of state violence suppressing January 6 prompting a negative response.

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the state justifies its actions. i’m not asking if the justifications are accurate or not, but what the outcomes of those actions are with regards to peoples trust and perception of the government.

regardless of weather many people were willing to approve of the state’s justification, what will happen to our trust in our government when january 6 part 2 participants are getting hosed down with m855a1 this time?

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Duh.

It’s astounding to me that a second January sixth isn’t at the top of people’s minds this go round.

Not because it’ll be successful (although there’s always a chance) but because we already have elected officials who believe that trump won the 2020 election and there will only be more this time around.

What’s the long term effect of legitimizing disbelief in a functioning democracy? America never was one, but what does it mean when there’s double or triple digit numbers of elected officials who publicly say so?

The usual explanation for distrust in government has nothing to do with people recognizing reality and changing their views based on it but instead blames that change on lack of bread and circuses, no basics of life and no distraction from reality.

We certainly don’t have the basics of life, but the distraction machine is running like a champ slaps hood you could fit like seven more dissociative technologies in this sucker!

What combination of lack of basic necessities and distractions are driving people’s belief (true or false!) that the election was stolen and that our fake democracy is actually fake?

Isn’t social media just a distillation of the interactions innate in society? If exposure to social media is damaging that’s indicative of deeply flawed and damaging society.