Vlad, Brittney, and the seeds of discord

Today’s post is blessedly short. Ah…I can hear your sighs of relief. I’m crafting together three, long, multi-part posts that portray that hardest of things for white people to see – institutional racism.  I’ll be helping you see and understand institutional  modern day redlining disguised as zoning; in the US tax code; and in the response to disasters by FEMA. Only the redlining is intentional. The others, like so much in America is, well…just the way it is. Stay tuned. But today, just this quickie.

I used to have a white friend who’d angrily tell me that I saw so much racism only because I was always looking for it. I don’t look for it, and honestly I think that I’ve actually missed most micro-aggressions until much later when a light bulb has gone off and I’ve been like, “OH! That was a race thing!” I’d wish that I’d realized it at the time so I could have responded.  

Around 1990 or so I was living and working in the corporate world in Portland OR. I had a business lunch with a white woman client and had taken her to a restaurant. It was the only time in my life that I’d been refused service anywhere. It wasn’t until I went back to Portland in 2018 to write this story on housing discrimination and discovered what a surprisingly racist city the ‘most livable city in America’ was and still is that it dawned on me that restaurant incident was about race.

So no, Kerby, I don’t think I’m looking for racism everywhere. I’m happiest when I don’t see it. But it is embedded so many places and used to ever-so-subtly nurture the seeds of conflict by those that want to pit Americans against Americans that it’s just hard to not see it. Even our enemies know they can often sow conflict using race. Or they can at least try.

It is worth noting that Russian operatives work to sow division in the U.S., and permitting Biden to win the freedom of a Black married lesbian while keeping a white former Marine in prison is the sort of ploy that could turn the repatriation of an American into a cultural flashpoint. Impressively, both the Griner family and the Whelan family avoided that trap and kept a united front.

Former president Trump, however, played along, complaining bitterly about “a ‘stupid’ and unpatriotic embarrassment for the USA!!!” that had secured the release of “a basketball player who openly hates our Country” instead of “former Marine Paul Whelan,” who “would have been let out for the asking.” Other MAGA Republicans followed suit.

Thankfully Putin’s ploy didn’t work. And full disclosure, I didn’t come up with that insight above. I’m just plagiarizing from Heather Cox Richardson. Oh…and just to be clear, Heather, there is no such thing as a former Marine.