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Tereza Coraggio's avatar

I've been thinking that what we're dealing with is white trash racism, by which I mean racism against what's seen by liberals as white trash. Coming from Appalachia myself, where I've been fixing up my childhood home, there's a pervasive sense of being rejected by the degreed class, especially if you're white and male. Meanwhile in the liberal bastion I call home now, they're throwing the book at two young kids who drove over and left tire marks on a Black Lives Matter mural (consisting only of those words) that stretches on pavement in front of city hall. Prosecutors want damages over $100K plus five years in prison. Black residents say that it's traumatized them so much and made them feel so unsafe, they can't go to work somedays. The black population of my county is 1%. We're 33% Latino but they seem able to go to work. If these kids had felt that it was a statement their lives didn't matter, haven't we just proven them right? If it was a statue they felt demeaned their ancestors, we'd be celebrating them--if they were black. Instead, no one cares what led them to burn rubber on the city's most prominent declaration that they had no right to exist.

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wess mcmichael's avatar

Thank you Mr. Taibbi. I don’t have extra funds, but I subscribe to you because you do interviews like this. If we are brave with words now, maybe the children will not have to be brave with bullets later.

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