Althouse

Bike bus participants hope that its growing popularity will convince local leaders to do more on issues like speeding and congestion. “We want to show people that you can’t have safe streets for kids unless you literally have people guiding the way,” said Chris Roberti, a father who helps organize the ride to P.S. 110.The school lost Matthew Jensen, an English teacher, to a hit-and-run two years ago. The tragedy galvanized the community to push the city to redesign McGuinness Boulevard, the high-speed thoroughfare in Greenpoint where it happened. These days, a bike bus passes through it, with a police escort. 

It needs to be safe. I'm wary of an approach that puts the kids out there first and uses them to increase pressure to make the streets safe. 

For now, bike bus routes tend to exist in whiter and wealthier neighborhoods. When a reporter joined the Bergen route, no children participated for its first mile through Crown Heights, where cycling infrastructure is less accessible....

Is biking a white-people activity? Or is it that streets in white neighborhoods are more bike-friendly? 

Here's a WaPo article by Nathan Cardon from a couple years ago: "American cycling has a racism problem/How racism has shaped the history — and present — of bicycle use."

USA Cycling recently revealed that its membership was 86 percent White, 83 percent male and 50 percent middle-aged. Beginning in June 2020, Bicycling magazine gave space to Black cyclists who testified to the racially exclusionary nature of cycling. The magazine also revealed a study of police data showing that Black cyclists are stopped up to three times as often as Whites, and it reported on a recent case from Texas, in which a White man beat a Black cyclist while hurling slurs at him....

From the beginning of the bicycle revolution in the 1890s, White Americans worked to stop Black men, women and children from riding bicycles. This was especially true in the South. Threatened by the radical mobility of the bicycle, White southerners attempted to prevent Black Americans from riding in public and sought to curtail the rise of a separate Black cycling culture — the legacy of which modern cycling is confronting to this day.... 

As a symbol of modernity and speed, the popularity of the bicycle declined swiftly at the start of the 20th century to be replaced by the new American obsession with the automobile... 

In 1900, the head of the dying Tennessee Division of the League of American Wheelmen concluded that the “principal cause of the deterioration of cycling in the State is owing to the reduction of cost of bicycles, thereby enabling the colored brother and sister to possess wheels, and as a result one can see in [Nashville] about ten times as many colored people riding as you do White people, and it is a rare sight at present to see a White woman riding a wheel.”...

Grossman’s sheepdog analogy has become popular among law enforcement, servicemembers, and veterans... Now, the right seems to consider Penny an extension of law enforcement, a sheepdog protecting his subway flock...

Seems? What evidence is there that people think Penny was herding the sheep-people of the subway? He was restraining Neely. That's not like anything a dog does to a wolf. 

It gets much worse:

Aspiring sheepdogs face a dilemma, however. In the animal kingdom, it’s easy to distinguish a sheep from a wolf; among humans, it’s more difficult. “Faced with this problem, how can you tell a wolf from a sheep?' asked Michael Cummings and Eric Cummings in Slate. "The easiest way is race."

It's racial because the dog-humans need an easy way to distinguish human wolves from human sheep? But Neely was singled out by his own words and behavior. 

In the Neely case, it matters who was doing the killing but also who was being killed. And if Penny is a sheepdog, then Neely, a Black man, is a wolf....

Yes, his words and behavior were assessed by a person who could see that he was black and that may have affected judgment, but talk about doing what's "easiest" — you're assuming racism.   

While Neely is dehumanized, Penny is valorized.... Penny’s defenders populate the world with vicious caricatures. If there are only sheep, sheepdogs, and wolves, Neely had no chance to be a human. Neither does anyone else....

[C]ritical race scholar, journalist and activist El Jones... says, “The caucacity of it all is that not only can everything that we generate be taken and used, but then white people can turn around and say, it was never yours in the first place — claiming to be the expert on blackness,” explaining that it is audacious for a white person to rewrite the origin stories of Black colloquialisms....

“Caucacity” — a combination of “Caucasian” and “audacity,” is a term coined in 2019 by the Bodega Boys podcast, and has been used all over social media as a way to “marvel at the baffling behaviors of white folks” and capture their “willingness to take bold risks” due to the comfort that privilege provides.

That is, the phrase expresses a belief in the superior position of white people. It's critical of that perceived position, of course, but don't be so rigid. It also reinforces the idea that the high position of white people is real. 

Philip Bump feels called to explain (at WaPo) after a man named Mauricio Garcia killed 8 people in a shopping mall in Texas. There's reason to think that Garcia held white supremacist/neo-Nazi beliefs because he wore a patch with the letters "RWDS," which, we are told, stands for "Right Wing Death Squad."

Maybe the letters don't really mean that or maybe Garcia didn't know the meaning, and maybe Garcia was white, but the point of Bump's column is to assume, based on the name, that Garcia was non-white and that he wore the patch because he was a white supremacist and then to try to explain why.

Bump's second point is that "white supremacy" may be less about race than about "Western civilization." It may not seek race-based superiority but to preserve the "structures of power that largely benefit Whites."

If you don't understand why non-white people might advocate white supremacy, Bump says, it's because you are too "rigid" in your understanding of "white" and "supremacy."

Seems we’ll be hearing all about this Texas shooter’s white supremacy ideology while the Nashville trans Christian school shooter’s manifesto needs to be kept covered up for our own good

Yeah, I was just working on a blog post about that non-white white supremacist in Texas

Yeah, I just sent you a link about that

Cool, well you know what they say — great minds think alike

Yeah, so do stupid minds. 

I was just about to say that

That's the headline at The Washington Post.

I remember when it was considered important at least to pretend that judicial elections where nonpartisan and that judges decided cases according to something that was quaintly called "the law." 

The article does throw a crumb of nostalgia to those of us who remember:

Judicial candidates in Wisconsin do not run with party labels, but...

10 words and then the "but" grabs back any concession to the old pretense: 

... the race was steeped in partisanship....

Lots of political money sloshed over both candidates. And: 

At Protasiewicz’s victory party in downtown Milwaukee, the three liberals who sit on the court marched into the hotel ballroom arm in arm to Lizzo’s “About Damn Time.”

Marched, did they? 

Speaking of "About Damn Time," there has never been a black person elected to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. There was one black justice appointed by the governor to fill a vacancy in 2004, but he was defeated the first time he faced an election. 

"About Damn Time" begins "It's bad bitch o'clock, yeah, it's thick-thirty." That's the song they chose to blast as 3 white female justices "marched" in celebration of political power acquired through the election of another white female justice.

They later joined Protasiewicz onstage, and the four of them — the court’s incoming majority — held their hands aloft as the crowd chanted “Janet!”

Meanwhile, in the Republican camp, the loser Dan Kelly gave one of the least gracious concession speeches you will ever hear: 

On Tuesday night, Kelly accused Protasiewicz of spreading “rancid slanders” and said he did not have a “worthy opponent to which I can concede.”...

“I wish Wisconsin the best of luck because I think it’s going to need it,” he said, speaking from a rural, lakeside hotel 70 miles north of Madison.

"In Kamala Harris, Ghanaians see someone at the table who looks like them. But that doesn’t mean that trust was baked into the equation."