Good morning!
Welcome to Issue 41.4 of Digestable, your daily mouthful of real things happening in the world, minus alarmist pandemic news.
Today’s news, fermented:
My pre-coffee thought about today, scrolling through the news, was ‘it’s a different world.’ But no, it’s the same one—where white supremacy has been allowed to run rampant, domestic terrorists have been protected by their whiteness, and Black women continue to save this country from its damned self.
Elie Mystal, as he so often does, wrote the piece everyone on my twitter feed was thinking about: The Confederacy Finally Stormed the Capitol.
He says, in comparing what happened yesterday to what happens at every Black Lives Matter protest:
“The double standard is not surprising, but it is instructive. Our society is permissive of white rage. That rage is constantly coddled, explained, massaged, and justified. We are forever told that white anger must be understood, white grievance must be explained, and white racism must be studied because if we just dig down deep enough, we’ll find that it’s actually motivated by some other, more benign factor.
In contrast, Black anger is arrested. Black rage is executed. Black grievance is dismissed. It’s not that Black people don’t have cause to storm the Capitol and demand redress for injustices committed against us—it’s that a Black person, with or without a weapon, wouldn’t get two steps inside Statuary Hall without being gunned down by police.”
He goes on to talk about Joe Biden’s denouncement of what went down yesterday; Biden’s claim that this is a ‘dark moment’ is like white women’s cry that Trump is ‘not my president.’ This is America. We’ve seen this before. As Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, director of the Highlander Center, said on yesterday’s Frontline call, ‘white supremacists are not innovative.’
White supremacy exists, Black people and allies fight back and win, then white America shows up to erode gains on civil rights and liberties. See: abolition of slavery and reconstruction (Jim Crow); the Civil Rights movement (the rise of mass incarceration); the election of Barack Obama and beginning of the Black Lives Matter era (election of Tr*mp and rise of white supremacist heteropatriarchal capitalism).
The fact that a white guy marched through the Capitol holding a Confederate flag on the same day that Georgians elected a Black person and a Jewish person to represent them is apt at…best? and terrifying at worst. Bree Newsome, who scaled a South Carolina flagpole to remove that same flag, said:
There call to impeach and remove Tr*mp is growing; it remains to be seen what will shake out today.
Let’s go back for a second, and talk about how domestic terrorists were able to storm one of the (supposedly) most highly-secured buildings in the nation. In fact, these rioters were planning…for weeks…in plain sight.
And yet:
“For reasons that remained unclear Wednesday night, the law enforcement authorities charged with protecting the nation’s entire legislative branch — nearly all of the 535 members of Congress gathered in a joint session, along with Vice President Mike Pence — were ill-prepared to contain the forces massed against them.”
If you needed a clearer picture of the ways in which the police and military states are aligned with the ‘dissatisfied self-righteous pent-up rage dude’ stereotype that yields cops that murder Black people, mass shooters, Tr*mp voters, unemployed former workers on fossil fuel infrastructure, and so on, here it is.
Police, including the ones that failed to prevent yesterday’s Capitol storming, see themselves in these rioters. Your picture is a literal picture—cops taking selfies with terrorists. Thinking that this is anything other than the real America is, frankly, delusional.
If this leaves you feeling empty and/or enraged, good. That’s how a perfect manifestation of white supremacist terror should make you feel. If you’re looking for something new to disbelieve, here’s a dwarf giraffe.
(via)
*Hot Goss*
Brought to you by the superb Latifah Azlan.
Well, after a day that started off pretty optimistically for a lot of people in the United States, a lot of us went to bed last night with a sense of choking dread after witnessing the crazed attempts at forcing a coup by white supremacist insurrectionists who descended upon Washington DC and stormed the Capitol with curiously (/s) minimal consequences. It was a nasty culmination of the past four years and it's hard to think about silly celebrity gossip after a day like yesterday. Who really cares about WildeStyles at a time like this?! Ya'll want the tea?? Olivia was Harry's guest to his friend's small and intimate wedding of less than 20 guests, they showed up holding hands, and now there are photos of the pair with their arms wrapped around each other in Santa Barbara. News outlets are calling this a "display of PDA" which, I'm prudish and all but seriously? There isn't even direct skin-to-skin contact in any of these "PDA" photos so until I see someone's tongue down the other person's throat, don't even bother giving me anymore updates on WildeStyles. Yes, they're probably dating. I mean, what else is there to say?
Thankfully, the Beauty Community of Youtube came through with some relevant, wider news-related goss. Every so often, drama erupts in the Beauty Community and it takes up like, double the amount of time I usually allocate for following and decoding the ~*Hot Goss*~ because it almost always involves multiple camps and more than five people. And so it was last night, while the US Capitol was being overrun by psychotic, delusional, violent, racist white people that Amanda Ensing decided to tweet her support of the insurrection. With 1 million followers on her Youtube channel and Instagram page, Amanda is one of the biggest content creators in the beauty space. She's also a well-known Tr*mper who is extremely vocal of her support for the rotting basket of satsumas the Unites States has called president for the last four years. She faced backlash once that information came to light but undeterred, this bitch merely doubled down on her support and frequently wields her BA in Political Science as armor from criticism as if the stupidest, most braindead, smug people we all know aren't political science majors in college who think they're God's gift to earth because their know what 'libertarianism' is now and only have China, Iran, and Cuba as any frame for comparison for anything remotely related to politics at all ever.
Amanda's tweets were meant by considerable backlash from plenty of other beauty Youtubers, who called her out on her shit. Gabriel Zamora criticized her for finding a serious situation in which four people have died, popcorn-levels of entertainment. Smokey Glow calls Amanda out on being a troll, stating that she's doing all of this for attention and to boost her engagement rates since her channel is dying. And Jackie Aina, Alissa Ashley, and MakeupByShayla all dragged her for her ignorance, but because Amanda's your standard issue racist Tr*mp supporter, she only ever fired back at the three content creators calling her out who also happen to be Black, implying that they were uneducated and poor. Suffice to say, there were many, many, many other Beauty Youtubers who jumped into the fray but did that change Amanda's mind? Of course not. This bitch predictably resorted to religious scripture, invoking passages like Isaiah 54:17 ("No weapon formed against you shall prosper...") as irrefutable evidence that she was in the right.
So listen, I think God has demonstrated last night that no weapon, no plan, no delusion that has gone into this insurrection will "prosper" in any way really, at least not right now, there's still plenty of sane, functioning people in the government who have realized just how far they've gone in stoking these flames. Yes, they're all hypocrites and bigots who should still be burnt in a pyre as our collective offering to a higher being of our individual choosing for righting the wrongs of the last year (maybe four years? maybe more?) but for now, for today, they're sobering up a little and realizing that when you fuck around, you will in fact, find out. And because of that, not all things with God are possible. Overturning an election that has been repeatedly verified to have been conducted without any evidence of voter fraud despite Tr*mp's claims to the contrary? Not possible. Getting every single judge you've installed on the Supreme Court to try and overturn the election on your behalf? Turns out, not possible. Banking on your Vice President to pull some last ditch effort to overturn the election? Evidently, not possible.
Now, I don't know much about Christian theology but as a Muslim, we believe in a concept called qada and qadar -- the predestination of all things; fate and destiny. And acceptance in qada and qadar is one of the pillars of Islam, so what is meant to be will be; it has been; and it is. Basically, Amanda Ensing should get the fuck over it and work on matching her foundation to her neck. That might actually help revive her dying channel without having to resort to playing stupid games to win stupid prizes!