Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
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- “Americans have long been trained to see the deficiencies of people rather than policy. It’s a pretty easy mistake to make: People are in our faces. Policies are distant. We are particularly poor at seeing the policies lurking behind the struggles of people.”
- “I had been taught that racist ideas cause racist policies. That ignorance and hate cause racist ideas. That the root problem of the racism is ignorance and hate. But that gets the chain of events exactly wrong. The root problem - from Prince Henry to President Trump - has always been the self-interest of the racist power.”
- “Race is a mirage but one that humanity has organized itself around in very real ways. Imagining away the existence of races in a racist world is as conserving and harmful as imagining away classes in a capitalistic world - it allows the ruling races and classes to keep on ruling.”
- “We are not meant to fear suits with policies that kill. We are not meant to fear good White males with AR-15s. No, we are to fear the weary, unarmed Latinx body from Latin America. The Arab body kneeling to Allah is to be feared. The Black body from hell is to be feared.”
- “To be antiracist is to see all cultures in all their differences as on the same level, as equals. When we see cultural difference, we are seeing cultural difference - nothing more, nothing less.”
- “One of racism’s harms is the way it falls on the unexceptional Black person who is asked to be extraordinary just to survive - and, even worse, the Black screwup who faces the abyss after one error, while the White screwup is handed second chances and empathy.”
- “Making individuals responsible for the perceived behavior of racial groups and making whole racial groups responsible for the behavior of individuals are the two ways that behavioral racism infects our perception of the world.”
- “We must discern the difference between racist power (racist policymakers) and White people. For decades, racist power contributed to stagnating wages, destroying unions, deregulating banks and corporations, and steering funding for schools into prison and military budgets, policies that have often drawn a backlash from some White people.”
- “Racist power, hoarding wealth and resources, has the most to lose in the building of an equitable society. As we’ve learned, racist power produces racist policy out of self-interest and then produces racist ideas to justify those policies. But racist ideas also suppress the resistance to policies that are detrimental to White people, by convincing average White people that inequity is rooted in ‘personal failure’ and is unrelated to policies. Racist power manipulates ordinary White people into resisting equalization policies by drilling them on what they are losing with equalization policies and how those equalization policies are anti-White.”
- “White supremacists love that America used to be, even though America used to be - and still is - teeming with millions of struggling White people. White supremacists blame non-White people for the struggles of White people when any objective analysis of their plight primarily implicates the rich White Trumps they support.”
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Billion Dollar Whale - The story of Jho Low and how he effectively stole billions of dollars from the Malaysian taxpayers and fooled many in Wall Street and Hollywood into thinking he was the real deal.