I'm still a bit young to have seen the cycles of these things, but I have a strong feeling and thinking about the history I do know this is largely a matter of an ebb and flow, and things are at a crest right now.
With how hard it can be to keep track of days lately I'm not sure if it was a couple days ago or more, but my mom just recently had this bizarre vivid nightmare that ended with her shooting a racist a-hole in the forehead. This is the woman that raised me to be nonviolent and pacifist. It was shocking to hear her describe it because it was the last turn I expected the dream to take when she related it to me.
What makes me hopeful despite the carnage and how things probably, like they usually do, will get worse before they get better, is that the pace of things really seems to have moved up on people being fed up, racists losing their jobs and being more and more widely decried when they reveal themselves on viral media. I've been discussing it quite a bit, hence the bad dreams all around here lately, but the consensus reached is that a tipping point, a critical mass, has been reached again.
Wishful thinking maybe, but what it reminds me of in my experience is how the ground suddenly shifted in the U.S. and a lot of the world on gay marriage. A younger generation that didn't get why it shouldn't be, more people having someone they knew to relate to if that is what it took to get them to empathize, it just clicked and while a backwash still yells loudly, things lurched forward until the next set of snags slowed it back up.
I really hope, and hope you can to, believe maybe we are experiencing the same thing on race.
It could be that the last desperate dying gasp of a movement of hate is feeling cornered and will go the way of the whigs.
= new reply since forum marked as read
