“Those that scraped the fire were slaine with the sword; some hewed to peeces, others rune throw with their rapiers, so as they were quickly dispatchte, and very few escapted...It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fyer, and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stincke and sente there of... [The pilgrims] gave the prayers thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to inclose their enemise in their hands, and give them so speedy a victory over so proud and insulting an enimie.”

"The treatment of enslaved Black people was generally characterized by degradation, dehumanization, and fatal brutalities. The violent tactics of whippings, rapes and executions was a normal way of life for them. Men were stripped of any form of pride and self respect by being humiliated in front of his family. Women were often taken from their husbands and raped at their owner’s discretion which further diminished the black man’s sense of self worth as well as the woman’s self esteem (Dubois, The Souls Of Black Folk, 1903).

The brutal treatment of Black people continued well after slavery legally ended, through the days of Jim Crow, Civil Rights, and, to a certain extent today. The trauma caused by this psychological brutality resulted in severe damaged to the mind of the victims, which manifested as an identity crisis, self hate,  low self worth, and  a distrust of the world at large. This mentality has been passed down through generations.

Today, conditions such as low socioeconomic status, social deprivation, inadequate education, high unemployment, and the criminal industrial complex has reinforced this negative mentality, which has and  still affects behavior in the Black community today, including young black boys."

"Being kind to black people can mark you for life, so consider this when you encounter racism and wonder why more people don’t stop to offer help."

"...I still wake up in the morning and check out reality carefully, as I would touch a sore tooth with my tongue, as I have woken up after someone has died or I've needed to incorporate some other piece of shocking news. In times of integrating something big and awful into my whole being, I often wake up thinking, 'Something's wrong. What is it?' And in this case, what has gotten into my system in a new, visceral, cellular level, is that racism is wrong. Is that racism and unconscious white privilege are radically, red level blinking light, call 911, wrong. Hold the presses, stop business as usual, put down your remote control and listen wrong. Not just before the Emancipation Proclamation, but now."

“'Many actually went out of their way to purposefully ignore me, and they wouldn’t even make eye contact. I’d approach them and say, "Happy Thanksgiving," many of them I wouldn’t ask for any food or any kind of money, and their inability to even acknowledge me being there was very surprising,' he said, noting that five people even asked him to leave."

"Even the most complex cult doctrines ultimately reduce reality into two basic poles: black versus white; good versus evil; spiritual world versus physical world; us versus them."

"Breitbart: 'Obama administration paves the way for sharia law.'”

And all in the name of "Freedom",...

 

An early case was that of the Scypion sisters, who sued the most prominent family in St. Louis and won their freedom, on the grounds that their mother was Native American and so could not have been legally enslaved. Lydia Titus, a free woman living in Illinois, watched helplessly as white men kidnapped her five children and two grandchildren in the middle of the night, taking them across the border to the slave state of Missouri. Titus enlisted the law to prove that their capture was illegal, and eventually the family was reunited. An enslaved man named John Merry tried to buy his freedom for $100 and a horse, but his master took the horse and the money and kept John Merry as a slave—until John Merry took him to court.

Slaves risked jail time for bringing suits, because, as disputed property, they could be essentially impounded while the court made its decision. But jail also kept them safe from retaliation, as slave owners who were sued sometimes kidnapped the plaintiffs and sold them farther south. The slaves, meanwhile, got no support or encouragement from abolitionist groups back East. “These folks were on their own,” VanderVelde says.

The Establishment did not engineer their failures. The Establishment predicted their failures, which is not the same thing as causing them.

This sort of thing strikes me as sort of thing the Establishment types talk about when they suggest some in the Tea Party have a "reality problem." It's this relentless doubling-down and never admitting an obvious mistake, always looking for a scapegoat to justify one's own errors.

This is related to, I suppose, the incorrect idea that staking out the Hardest-Core Most Maximalist position in political campaigns shifts the Overton Window in your direction. Oh, it shifts the window a little if you win.

If you lose, it shifts it the other way. It shifts it away from you. It demonstrates, with rock-solid evidence, that you have reached the farthest perimeter of politically-viable thought, and thus sets an absolute boundary on such thought.

Prior to the experiment, one could claim there was no outer boundary on how Conservative one could run, and yet still win; after the experiment, that boundary is located.

…This sort of reality-denying -- for purposes of Never Having To Admit, Not Even Once, You Got A Minor Political Calculation Wrong -- suggests to people that the speaker is simply not to be taken seriously, which is quite the opposite of what the speaker intends.

And quite opposite of what I think would be useful for this country, for I do think the Tea Party would do the country a service by dragging it, kicking and screaming, towards a more representative and smaller-government politics.

But this kind of thing? People shrug and just decide "Write those people off; they're crazy in the first place."