And don't miss this absolute banger:
As sociologist and New York Times columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom put it last October, "Their rhetoric — and the conventional wisdom that flows from it — suggests that we cannot talk about economic solutions without abandoning our commitment to the Black, Latino, gay, transgender and female poor that are the lifeblood of the Democratic Party’s base. The conceit at the heart of that belief is that poor white people are too racist, and too uniquely ignorant of their racism, to vote in their best interests. Therefore, Democrats have to accept a little racism to win the working class." Cottom is a Black woman; Black women are the single most loyal constituency of the party, the ones who vote for it in the highest numbers, but I have never heard similar arguments about how we must bend to their needs no matter what. She continues, "Our culture is built to eternally forgive men, generally, and white men of means, especially, for their mistakes. Every single time, they were young and immature and it would be a shame to hold them accountable for anything they did wrong."
PTSD – post-traumatic stress disorder – has been cited, including by Platner, as a justification for his post-military conduct. On the one hand, while it may explain it, it doesn't justify that behavior in a candidate for senate. On the other, another Marine who served in Iraq, David J. Morris, who wrote a powerful book, The Evil Hours, about PTSD, wrote me some years ago, “The science on the subject is prettyclear: according to the New England Journal of Medicine, rape is about four times more likely to result in diagnosable PTSD than combat. Think about that for a moment— being raped is four times more psychologically disturbing than going off to a war and being shot at and blown up. And because there are currently no enduring cultural narratives that allow women to look upon their survival as somehow heroic or honorable, the potential for enduring damage is even greater.” A significant percentage of American women are survivors of male violence, including intimate partner violence and rape, yet I rarely hear PTSD invoked to justify or excuse their – our – behavior, and I've never heard it invoked to justify violence by women.
gracieabrams
blakekathryn
