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Don’t be afraid... that’s thing that gets me so caught up teaching about the 4 Freedoms and WWII. I get emotional and can’t talk during this lecture. Every parent wants to go to bed knowing their kid is safe and still going to be there https://open.spotify.com/track/5GBHdemznBEivjuGaCwdZH?si=mWEB_57LQRWDiFj5hvtmqw
Every one wants to be able to tell their child, without feeling like they’re lying, that the world will still be here tomorrow and you’ll be alright. FDR began to articulate a politics of safety but we lost track of it
In the age of #COVID the way forward is for us to articulate a politics of care and safety. The right wing has always mobilized fear about safety to grotesque ends - and it's very easy to do. But we could tell a story about the Left like in this Rockwell painting. We can be safe.
Our iconography should be safety, comfort, solidarity, help. The ersatz right-wing kitsch will create its own racist version of this, just as it did in the time of Reagan or Hitler. But our version has to speak to those chords of desire for kindness that most people feel
I've been reading Foucault (hilarious, I know, since I've been dissing him) and he makes an amazing point - in biopolitics, the whole system is oriented toward recreating life, and you can only kill other life if you think that the existence of others (race) takes away from you
Racism is the illogical fanatical thing that gets people to kill other people, because they think life is a zero-sum game between people like us and people like them. The more they have, the less I have. The more they ARE, the less I AM. This is what Foucault figured out
