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Election roundup: Racist with plastic Easter eggs traipses around Roslindale, spreading hate as he goes
By adamg on Sat, 10/16/2021 - 12:45pm
For the past couple of weeks, somebody's been going around Roslindale tossing plastic Easter eggs into people's yards that, when opened, have the above piece of paper in them. Calling the candidate a "communist" would be kind of laughable for anybody who actually knows what "communism" means, but aside from that, it's become a code-word for "Asian-American" since the start of the pandemic.
Pshaw, you say? See the racist stylings of failed City Council candidate Donnie Palmer, also targeted at Wu, and in greater detail, since one does have more space on a Facebook page than on a piece of paper crumpled into a plastic egg (speaking of Palmer, seems Charlie Baker objects to state GOP money going to support the racist loser).
Meanwhile, over in neighboring West Roxbury, the Tamer campaign was working very hard to alert voters that Kendra Hicks is Black, via some flier/card/e-mail message that, in addition to comparing her alleged positions with that of fair-haired Tamer, makes sure to show Hicks in classic Black-o-vision:
In other news, state Rep. Liz Malia of Jamaica Plain made it official today: She's won't be running for re-election:
My time in public service has been a gift. For nearly 30 years, I’ve worked alongside a steady crew of dedicated activists in Wards 11, 12 and 19. I have also had the privilege of exchanging ideas with many new people who bring diverse perspectives and experience, and an enthusiasm for the democratic process. Together we’ve enacted laws that helped Massachusetts live up to its progressive reputation- marriage equality, near-universal healthcare, increased access to mental health services- and there’s so much more to do. With nine months left in the legislative session, safety net policies will be my focus. I hope to ensure more resources for accessible and affordable mental health programs, substance use disorder treatment, victims of the sex trade, and any other issues we can push.
The Dorchester Reporter sums up a poll that shows Michael Flaherty and Julia Mejia currently top the field for the four at-large council seats, but that 45% of voters still haven't made up their minds on the race. Two years ago, of course, Mejia won the fourth seat by just one vote.
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Comments
Pshaw, I say
And not just because your link doesn't proof your thesis. The reality today is that the right views anyone slightly left of center (an excellent example, Michelle Wu) as a communist while, to some extent, the left views anyone right of center as a "fascist." Doesn't make it right to refer to Wu as a communist, but it doesn't make the mislabeling of Wu as a communist a racist act. Lot's of politicians have been getting that label. Nancy Pelosi gets it all the time, and she's an Italian American whose stock portfolio does not match that of a communist.
Palmer was blatant in his anti-Asian views. Of course, if he actually studied politics and foreign policy, he'd know that the last thing a Taiwanese person would do would be to listen to Chairman Xi.
Except Trump fits the
Except Trump fits the definition of a fascist. And fascists are always very bad where as communists aren’t necessarily bad or good.
Just read the Globe article
Just read the Globe article today about AEG’s husband, the slumlord ( my words not the Globe’s). Almost all the comments had nothing to do with the article. Instead they kept calling Wu a communist and they called the Globe communist.
There’s a lot of right wing idiots out there and it seems to be a major component of AEG’s base
The Herald comment section is
The Herald comment section is mostly extreme right idiots.
globe is mostly right of center idiots.
/r/boston is mostly left of center idiots.
universalhub is mostly extreme left idiots.
and you, Refugee
of course, you are above the fray
There are always those
who are just idiots.
And then there are these *idiots* <3
https://www.yardbarker.com/media/4/8/4823dc7f7c0dc593e4524249990f42c8515...
And then there are these *idiots* <3
https://www.yardbarker.com/media/4/8/4823dc7f7c0dc593e4524249990f42c8515...
No
No, I'm an idiot who's also in the wrong comment section.
...what
If this site were mostly extreme left, or even fairly left, there wouldn't be all these white people thinking we get to decide something isn't racist, or who don't understand the concept of impact > intent.
I'm not going to debate that
As an argument can be made, but you made me think of a related issue. Extremely myopic Clinton supporters tried to cast her loss in terms of Trump voters being racist. Look, I'm not even going to pretend that there wasn't a segment of Trump voters that may have been racist, but the reality is that Trump won by turning states, counties, and at the end of the day individual voters that voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 into Trump voters, so to claim that they wouldn't vote for the white woman after twice voting for who people considered to be the black guy is really reaching at best. Now, sexist? Maybe, and a better argument to boot.
As for your good/bad dichotomy, I'd say that Franco wasn't really horrible they way Mao was horrible. He was just horrible the way Erich Honecker was horrible, or perhaps only as bad as Tito was. The universe of fascist leaders is very limited, while we have totalitarians who rooted themselves in the works of Marx in a wide range of countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. I do believe that Trump does not believe in fascism. Trump believes in Trumpism.
lol
“i’ll give you that some Trump voters might be racist” has to be the best sentence of the year. real top tier stuff.
The statement is true
Yet I believe I provided evident to disprove the notion that all Trump supporters in 2016 were racist. Better proof than Gaffin’s theory that when morons call slightly to the left politicians “communists,” they are being racist.
Just to be clear
You do not believe that the term "communist" has used as a racial slur against Asian-Americans in recent times?
What I'm saying is
The term "communist" has been erroneously used as a slur against center-left polticians. Wu is a center-left politician.
Now, linking Asians or Asian-Americans to the repressive government in Beijing is a thing, and it is worse than calling Marty Walsh a communist, but again, were Wu Italian-American and running the same campaign with the same platform, she's probably get the "communist" tag against her by those who wouldn't know a communist if they heard one. Palmer, on the other hand, called her a puppet of Beijing. That's a pretty racially loaded statement.
He called Ayanna Pressley a "stone cold commie" a few weeks ago
Punchy also wavers on whether Ms. Wu was born in Chicago or Taiwan or China.
I would imagine
That he looks at the current Democratic Party as a direct descendent of the Communist Party USA.
or
maybe these ideologies and attitudes are too complex to encapsulate with a simple label.
yes, communist is getting thrown around left and right to describe anyone who doesn’t support Christopher Columbus or whatever, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t also a racist trope. right? i feel like the concept isn’t particularly controversial.
you said something to the effect of “Trump doesn’t believe in fascism, he believes in Trumpism” as though there couldn’t be any overlap with those two ideas. a label like fascism is descriptive, not prescriptive.
Nothing new under the sun
Communist/Marxist/socialist have all long been used as a “polite” stand-in for racist and misogynistic slurs.
And this is not some post-Reagan/Lee Atwater or new internet phenomenon; in 1915 Women’s suffrage was a “socialist” endeavor. MLK was “communist”. Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist sentiment conveniently overlapped with anti-Semitic rhetoric. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Kamala Harris were repeatedly labeled as “Marxist” with a straight face. It’s interesting how the radical labels never stuck with Joe Biden, huh? When you can’t use the n-word, b-word, or anti-Semetic slur of choice, just label someone as communist or Marxist—the bigots will understand immediately.
And the reason why this strategy still works today is the “that doesn’t make it racist” crowd credulously dismisses and trivializes racist behavior that doesn’t involve explicit slurs or overt discrimination. The racists know that and exploit it.
I agree with your overall
I agree with your overall point that socialist/communist/Marxist have been used as insults by the right for a long time, but a couple of your examples seem odd to me (and I say this as somebody who identifies to varying degrees as all three of those terms). Socialists were heavily involved in the fight for women's suffrage (https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/03/womens-suffrage-socialist-feminism-fi...) and Martin Luther King was a self described democratic socialist (https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/01/21/11-most-anti-capitalist-qu...). While that's not the same thing as being a communist, it's probably closer to that than to being a moderate liberal (whom he spoke out against on multiple occasions).
I also don't think that the use of those terms as epithets is always a cover for racism. That's certainly the motive some of the time, but it's also just an easy way to denigrate your opponent in a country that has been bombarded with anticommunist rhetoric for over a century.
Weaponizing the words
If you look at the suffrage example linked above, opponents aren’t merely making the factual link between the socialists and the suffragettes, they weaponized it:
The flyer explicitly says you must prevent women’s suffrage to prevent socialism. The idea is laughably absurd and is obviously a convenient cover to uphold the patriarchy.
Regarding King, although a self-proclaimed proponent of social democracy, intense FBI scrutiny revealed that King had no communist leanings. Furthermore, King’s social democracy is based in capitalism and closer moderate liberalism than it is to totalitarian, seize-the-mean-of-production communism. It would be absurd to see King as a communist, but that didn’t stop his racist opponents from weaponizing the word against him.
I stand by my examples.
I just thought it was odd
I just thought it was odd that you lumped those examples (which have leftist associations) in with things like people calling Kamala Harris (who arguably has no ideology at all, let alone a leftist one) a socialist.
Again, MLK was not a communist, but he was an anti-capitalist with a lot of influence among a large segment of the population. This was viewed as a threat by the FBI and was the reason that he was subjected to surveillance (and more) under COINTELPRO.
I also think we have differing understandings of what communism is. It's a society where the concepts of state, class, and money have withered away, not a totalitarian regime. Stalinism is not communism.
But I'm just picking nits and getting wildly off topic here. Like I said before, I think we're mostly in agreement on your overall point.
anybody who actually knows
"Pshaw" I say... "communist" is a pejorative used for Socialists not for Asian Americans. Is there a smoking gun connecting this propaganda to the former council candidate?
I am willing to acknowledge ...
That Palmer had nothing to do with this.
But that's not why I cited him. I cited him as an example as how the word "communist" has become code for "Asian-American." He put down his dog whistle and got out a bullhorn and pretty explicitly proved the point.
Here is another example. Again, just to be clear, it's an example of anti-Asian hatred; I am NOT accusing US Rep. Chip Roy of having anything to do with plastic Easter eggs in Roslindale.
Oh, it's racist....
We saw an illustrative example here on UH how 'communist' has become a racist epithet (again) for AAPI individuals. See what the Asian women got called when dancing in DTX just this week....
I guess the internet moves fast these days "on both sides."
Thanks for the reminder
Somehow I had completely forgotten about the Downtown Crossing incident, but there's another example of Asian-Americans getting smeared as "communists."
You have to admire the attention to detail
with the plastic egg being Annissa signature pink and all.
I would have cropped the picture to get a tighter view of Michelle, but I suspect they wanted to get the Black person in there, too. Much scary. So fear.
I know it's 2021 and everything is racist.
But this one's a stretch.
I've been on the receiving end of racial taunts but communist was never one, granted I'm mixed race so maybe I just haven't lived long enough.
ha
i like to imagine the writer sitting at his laptop with the slightest smirk across his lips as he takes a long sip of some choice brown liquor
Not sure about this one
I'm not sure this one is racist. People throw the word "communist" around a lot. Although, is it wrong or racist to agree about the carpetbagger part? I like Wu, and I'm definitely planning on voting for her, and I still think she's a carpetbagger from Chicago. At the most I can be accused of being provincial.
Why, though?
After working in government for a decade and 4 city council terms, how much longer does Wu have to be here before you would stop thinking of her as a carpetbagger? What’s the magic number?
It's not her history that
It's not her history that makes her a carpet bagger, it's her actions and her aura. She's going to use the mayor's office as a stepping stone to higher office, just like she is using the city council as a stepping stone to the mayor's office.
God forbid…
…someone take an entry level government position and work their way up through the ranks. Whatever happened to the old-fashioned method of jumping the line by being rich businessman like Mitt Romney or hailing from a dynastic political family like the Kennedys or Bushes?
I'm just sharing what I've
I'm just sharing what I've heard from people on why they think she's a carpetbagger, that isn't why I'm not voting for her personally. Clearly the carpetbagging wasn't a concern for my fellow anon above who is still voting for her. I just think she's too much of an inauthentic robot. Her recent trouble answering questions when not prepared and her debate performance sealed the deal for me.
Okay
Like Mahty?
"aura"
"aura", really? I guess that covers just about any weak-assed manufactured fig-leaf excuse for running down a candidate.
3 generations
give or take. I too, am a carpetbagger. Maybe my great grandchildren will be considered "from here".
Fun quiz; The Boston Police
Fun quiz; The Boston Police Patrolman Association has endorsed which one of these two candidates:
a) Mayoral candidate Michelle Wu
b) Council candidate Donnie Palmer, who (among other things) is anti-vaccine, claim that the 2020 elections were stolen and has tweeted “ARE WE ABOUT TO ELECT A CHINESE CITIZEN TO CONTROL THE CITY OF BOSTON?”
The answer to this trick question can be found in the Dorchester Reporter article referenced in the initial posting.
https://www.dotnews.com/2021/boston-large-council-race-state-gop-backed-...
Kinda disingenuous
to compare endorsements for two different positions in the same election cycle.
But we all agree that the Hicks/Tamer flyer…
…is starkly racist, right?
Did you actually receive it?
Did you actually receive it? I did, and she's in black and white. Her skin is not darkened in tone. Don't see how it's racist
How?
It's Politics 101. Please explain.
What is?
Please, do explain.
This Is How
Attack ads are a normal thing, especially when there are literally just weeks left until the election. With so many undecided voters, it seems important to just get the quickest facts out there in one hit. It is also very normal to have the Opponent in black and white. It just so happens that she is ....um....a Black person. I don't see the racism, but I do see the stark contrasts in ideologies.
I know I won't win here. One can’t win trying to be rational and fair when you’re up against people who don’t believe in debate or reason, which is true for those who subscribe to Woke ideas. There is no burden on them to make sense or justify themselves. On the contrary, making no sense is seen as a revolutionary act while demanding sense is seen as oppressive.
So just like the crazy Trumpist conspiracy theorists, they’ve evolved a system that is evidence-free and one in which they’re always right (even when they totally contradict themselves).
Just a simple attack ad
“Tamer wants to demonstrate that the differences between her and Hicks is as stark as the difference between black and white. Sure, White woman Tamer kept herself in color and darkened Black woman Hicks’s photo, but that was just to emphasize that the difference between the two is like the difference between black and white. Who could make a racial inference from that?
I can’t imagine where people get the idea that using black and white photography is being used to contrast racial differences between a Black and candidate and a White candidate. Am I the only rational person here? Why are you ‘works’ so unreasonable?”
I'm not seeing it
Seems to me it's pretty common to put the photo of your opponent in black and white, to blur it a bit, to choose a moderately unflattering photo, etc. All the while the photo of you is color, crisp, showing the appropriate emotion, etc.
Look at the photos Mass GOP uses against every state rep and senator when they go on their goofy rants about baby killing or whatever. They use crappy black and white photos for all Democrats of all races...
I don't like Wu either
But instead of flyering my neighbors, I went to the bar and drank a beer and tried to get laid instead.
I didn't succeed at the latter, but it was still a far more pleasant use of my time than flyering my neighbors. What a voluntarily miserable schmuck.
Goes back to a parade
The Easter Eggs started showing up at the Roslindale Day Parade according to posts in social media, i.e. Facebook. They were tossed into people's yards to be found when-ever.
That was the story, but ...
It seems, nobody was actually tossing them from the AEG truck parade-within-a-parade as far as I was able to figure out; somebody did find one in her yard near the parade route.
The one shown above was found a few days ago on Augustus Avenue.