!Antiracist reductionism --- agk's phlog 4 June 2021 @ 1225 --- written on x61 while Evy sleeps so she'll be rested for night shift --- Somebody I've known a long time sent Scot Nakagawa's newsletter 'Does the U.S. Have a White People Problem?' to a listserv. The piece is an odd mash-up. It starts with the excellent old left-populist line that elites divide the people with race prejudice, and that prejudiced white non-elites, despite privilege from racism, are caged away from post-industrial democracy because they don't unite en masse with nonwhites against the elite. So far so good. A. Philip Randolph could get down with that, and he's my hero. Scot slaps away red-brown baiters by saying progress- ive whites should organize conservative whites, and understand what drives their political affinities other than the epithets progressives fling at them (racist, misogynist). Also good. Then he loses his way in confusing arguments about white woman voters and hispanic whites vs nonhispanic whites and demographic change. I'm a leftist white woman who voted for Trump, and not (as Scot accuses) because I was throwing in my lot with a pussy-grabbing husband. I'm a dyke, partnered at the time I voted and now married to a woman. Very committed to women and girls. What they used to call a woman-centered woman. I'm a white woman who made a huge 30-foot long, 8-foot tall banner reading "Racism is a Prison" with an intricate painting of a prison wall and people behind the wire and organized a contingent to carry it at a Klan/National Socialist Movement counterprotest at Stone Mountain, Georgia. I definitely agree with Scot on some things. The only candidate I cared about in the primary was Charles Booker, an enormously popular Senate candidate across my state, a black legislator with left-popular policy (Medicare-for-all, $15 minimum wage, etc). I was notified my mail-in ballot wasn't counted due to a signature irregularity, in a race too close to call on primary night. Eventually the DSCC announced their pick beat Booker by a hair. My vote in the general didn't matter either. My state is deep red, not remotely a swing state that could decide the election. I voted in order to have a stake in the outcome, not in order to influence it. But I voted the way I did because Trump pretty consistently indicated he would do his best to pull US troops out of Syria and Afghanistan and close as many military bases as possible. He worked for a while for a long-overdue rapprochement with a Russia struggling for independence from US neocolonialism. The second time around, he had presided over an improvement in economic well-being, early release of 24,000 Federal prisoners during the pandemic, Operation Warp Speed's effective development and rollout of vaccines (I got vaccinated at work in December and early January, before Biden's inaguration), and the biggest poverty reduction programs in my lifetime (CARES checks, expanded unemployment, college debt and eviction moratoria, programs which disproportionately benefited people of color but also benefited me). My spouse and I got to keep our Medicaid and EBT through his whole term. He was a sh!tty statesman, but despite the constant screaming of his opposition, his presidency was a hopeful time for me. I don't know if Trump's prison relases remotely counter- acted the lasting damage to black families of Biden's 1994 crime bill, or if his payouts and moratoria remote- ly countered the damage of Clinton's welfare reform act or Obama's bailout of banks that held worthless bets on garbage mortgages but not black homeowners whose wealth was illegally expropriated en masse via subprime forclosures. Trump didn't end any wars, but his was the first administration in a long time to not start any. Scot's argument about hispanic vs non-hispanic white voters went over my head. Maybe he's trying to say something about why hispanic and black voters as well as white women moved away from the Democratic party under Trump. It's not because Trump was awesome. He was awful. It's because the Democratic party had even less to offer. It's important to not use a legitimate critique of racism to ignore why people make tough political decisions.