دانلود کتاب نژاد، فرهنگ عامه، و افراط گرایی راست افراطی در ایالات متحده

In Summer 2020, tens of thousands of people marched in support of racial justice around the world. The marches began as protest against the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, United States but they spread across the world as people took to the streets to call for racial justice and to protest systemic racism. Like many others, I was outside of the United States and watched the marches growing and spreading across US cities and globally. Surely, this would be the catalyst for change, I thought. Surely, the state cannot just ignore these calls for racial justice, calls that came from a multiracial group of people of all ages (PBS, 2020). And, yet, by Spring 2022, it is not just racial equity that appears elusive in the United States but, instead, there have been reactionary moves toward codifying and strengthening anti-Black, anti-LGBTQA+ and anti-women’s rights laws and policies. The racists, it seems, have won. The issue that began the anti-racist protests of Summer 2020—that of police brutality in the United States—has also not changed much in the two years since then. In the United States, police budgets remain disproportionately high as compared to budgets for social services. Police killings are at similar levels. Gun violence has not declined. Indeed, recent studies have shown the police attacked civilians and journalists repeatedly (“nearly 1,000” cases of police brutality, according to one study) during Summer 2020 while treating far-right protesters far more leniently (Thomas et al., 2020). This is despite the fact that the antiracist Black Lives Matter protests were overwhelmingly peaceful. As the authors of a study on protests state: “the Black Lives Matter uprisings were remarkably nonviolent. When there was violence, very often police or counterprotesters were reportedly directing it at the protesters” (Chenoweth & Pressman, 2020). The hopes of 2020’s racial justice protests and, especially, the possibilities for institutional changes have not been met. However, it can be argued the multiracial protest movement itself is a sign of the existence of an anti-racist present. That being said, the institutional and systemic inertia is best exemplified by how the mainstream right in the United States is acting in multiple arenas to consolidate its minority hold on power by enacting policies and laws restricting voting access, banning books, legislating against the LGBTQA + community, and overturning women’s rights. In the twelve months prior to April 2022, Republicanled politicians and right-wing Conservative media also worked to erase the memory of their supporters’ attack on the United States government on January 6, 2020 (Chapter 7 has more on this). In that time, they also successfully stoked fears that teachers were influencing students about “critical race theory” (without defining what this meant), linked Democrats and non-Conservatives with pedophilia, and introduced and ratified laws that discriminated against gay and transgender people. In many states, Republicans made it more difficult to vote. In states like Florida and Texas, Republicans also passed laws banning books from public schools—the majority of these banned books were written by authors of color and were on topics related to race, gender, and sexuality (Brownworth, 2022).