ZDL Mod ,
@ZDL@ttrpg.network avatar
  • Lynching.
  • Jim Crow laws.
  • Any "tough on crime" bills that seem to always wind up aimed mostly at black and Hispanic people. (Quite by "coincidence" I'm sure!)
  • Any anti-terrorism laws that always seem to sweep up "terrorist speech" of minorities (esp. "Muslims") yet somehow completely misses the terrorist speech of actual white terrorists who then proceed to do mass shootings (of minorities, natch!) or who blow up federal buildings.
  • "War on Drugs" laws that seem to always go after the crack users, but hardly ever apply to the coke heads in Wall Street (or in fucking Congress for that matter!); laws that throw black and Hispanic people into jail (often for life after the "tough on crime" bills nail them for "three strikes") while barely slapping the hand of middle-class suburban white dudes who are doing exactly the same thing: smoking a bit of weed.

Oh, and, naturally, of course:

  • every single fucking time an old white dude decides to legislate a woman's uterus.

"By their fruits shall ye know them," as the Bible says. You can claim that every one of this (very small sample) list of policies and laws has a "real point" ... yet that real point is almost always held to the throat of an out group. Women are too uppity for the modern conservative, so practical biological enslavement is introduced. Not to stop termination of unwanted pregnancies (sex education has been proven time and time and time again to be far more effective at this!, not to mention that the support for the life of the child ends the moment the baby pops out of the mother…), but to keep women where "they belong": under the thumb of powerful white men. You can claim that all the crime and drug bills are aimed at reducing crime, but the numbers show that these are quite thoroughly debunked as a way of actually reducing crime, and they also show that they're disproportionately aimed at minorities that, get this, conservative assholes hate, even if the laws' wording is "neutral". We've seen the "real point" of all these laws and many more, and it points not to "law and order" as the real goal, but rather the control of out-group people through terror. The cruelty is, in fact, the actual point.

It's all very nice for a white dude to sit there, look at the wording, and treat this as an intellectual exercise. White brodudes hardly ever feel the consequences of these nice intellectual puzzles, after all. Their skin isn't in the game. "The law's wording doesn't reference hatred of minorities or of women, so it must have another point." But those of us who get that point shoved deep into our body politic while watching it completely bypass white folk and especially white men get the intended message: "fear us and don't step out of line".

The cruelty is the point.

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