At the grocery store
The wife of Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor alleges she was insulted with a racial slur while grocery shopping this week.
Alleges it but also documents it, so…
Gisele Barreto Fetterman, who is married to Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, told CNN the incident happened Sunday evening. In a two-second video Fetterman posted on her Twitter account, a White woman is seen lowering her mask and saying, “You’re a nigger” through Fetterman’s open car window and then walking away. Fetterman was born in Brazil.
“A woman walks past me and stops and looks at me, and then says, ‘Ugh, there’s that n-word that Fetterman married. And, she said you don’t belong here, and she called me a thief, and uttered some other ramblings. And, (she) kept walking, went to the other aisle, came back, said a few more things,” Fetterman said.
The woman then approached Fetterman while she was backing out of her parking space. Fetterman told CNN the woman came out of the store without groceries, just her purse, and started yelling.
“I was still kind of crying and shaken, and that’s when I was able to record the final few seconds of her tirade, as I drove off. So you can see in the video, my car is actually moving. I was trying to leave where I was,” she said.
Trump is to blame for some of this. A lot of it. It was already here, obviously, but he has amped it up a lot.
Fetterman is being awfully restrained in her language here. More restrained than I would be.
“Divided” is that kind of news media-approved euphemism that suggests maybe nobody’s in the wrong. Yeah, we’re “divided” alright, between people who think that racism is good and patriotic and people who don’t.
Under the circumstances, it comes off as noble for her to be so polite in her recounting, but the rest of us can call this what it is.
Indeed, which is why I spelled out what they had as N****R.
Oh Come On Guys
Gisele Barreto Fetterman arrived as an “undocumented immigrant”. Build the WALL!!
Gisele Barreto Fetterman is a succesful woman. Burn the Bitch!!!
What more do you need to know?
I know. Murrica. However, you don’t have the monopoly in racist arseholes, it just seems that way because you’re bigger than us.
And a lot noisier.
I was just talking with a friend who lives in the American South (she’s not from there; she chose to move there–I have been critical of her choice before, but she claimed it was a ‘good place to raise kids’–I think the kids, now adults, would beg to differ) about Arlie Hochschild’s latest book (I heard an interview with her the other day). It pissed me off, because it’s about ‘climbing the empathy wall’ to understand the ‘deplorables’. First, as an oldest child I’m not happy with the idea that it’s up to the ‘non-deplorables’ to make nice and understand and make an effort–they would never dream of doing the same for us. Second, I don’t think there’s anything to understand that we don’t already understand. We can sympathise with their plight, appreciate their disadvantages, difficulties and challenges, and cognitively grasp where they’re coming from; that doesn’t make them any less deplorable. Finally, my friend said she does her best to be on good terms with her neighbours and people she encounters, and has personal conversations with them, but every single time, with every single person, she sooner or later comes up against a lie. Every one of them fundamentally believes, and tells her, something that isn’t true.
Now, I’m sure I believe a lot of things that aren’t true–I probably correct my mental map of the world on a daily basis, about both trivial and important things–and of course people’s opinions about and interpretations of our perceptions of reality will be different based on our life experiences, personal connections, educations, etc….but I hope, and am pretty sure, that my fundamental understandings of politics, economics and humanity aren’t based on easily disprovable lies about actual things in the real world.
If you truly belonged here, lady, you’d be living in a teepee. Come to think of it, there could be one just your size going cheap right now on eBay.
Another eldest child here, and I wholeheartedly agree. In fact, I’d go further and say that giving them any latitude for their deplorability is a slap in the face to all who had the same upbringing and didn’t turn out selfish, racist arseholes.
Thanks Tigger–that is a really good point that I continually forget.
Quite right too. I hate those silly euphemisms. Everyone knows what they stand for, so why pretend that one doesn’t?
I read some of that Arlie Hochschild book but put it down in exasperation. It was so…NPR taking us to a coffee shop in Ohio to learn what the real people are saying. All the more annoying since she wrote the admirable The Second Shift.
I put up my hand here! My family is a large group of Trump supporters. And as a middle child, I have had it with trying to “understand” people like that. My older siblings were brutal and abusive, and I have no desire to “understand” them. They had things a lot better than the rest of us, because my mother had her boy and her girl, and the rest of us were supererogatory. My father idolized my older brother – his son. My mother idolized my older sister – her daughter. And they turned out to be racist “arseholes” (I use quotes because I don’t want to be accused of cultural appropriation ;-).
I actually do understand them. Most of those I know or have known are actually in a lot better shape than most of their neighbors, and they want to make sure they stay that way. They are not interested in sharing any goodies, and that is exactly what they are about, not disadvantages (some of them are, I admit, but Trump voters had a much higher overall income than Hillary voters).
I’m tired of being told that it is my job to understand and get along with people who have abhorrent ideas. They might be giants had it right.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFGQdvYIJ0M
That is another point I continually forget, which is just as important–we don’t need Arlie to go play anthropologist in the Louisiana swamps for us. Nearly all of us have relatives, childhood friends, in-laws who are ‘deplorables’–we have plenty of opportunity to deal with them directly.
It is a pity–like Rebecca Solnit, Arlie Hochschild has done some really valuable and worthwhile work. I wonder what happened to them between then and now (and worry that it might happen to me).
Ikn @11 “…I have no desire to understand them”. I think we understand them well enough, knowing how they behave, but the ability to relate to them is what’s beyond me. As a youngster I felt like an alien because I never understood what gratification the mean little bastards got out of being abusive to others. Some of them grow out of it, but some don’t, they remain closed minded, ignorant shits for their whole miserable lives. Over indulgence and lack of discipline have a lot to do with it, but some people, despite their potential to be good people, just aren’t. They are only kept in check by external laws and boundaries, and they seem to have no internal regulating mechanisms. I don’t know what in their lives reinforced this, but I personally never found them amusing or tolerable. Like zombies I guess, no inner life.
twiliter, good point. I guess I meant to be understanding more than to understand. I understand them all too well. I wish I could live in the state of blissful ignorance so many pundits seem to inhabit, a state where they think they know more about this “heartland” than those of us who live there. After all, they’ve flown through, talked to people, maybe even stayed a few days. The people are nice, I tell you, NICE! Yeah. Depends on your definition of nice. My definition is not “friendly to a stranger who drops into my diner and wants to write an article about what this place is really like”. Stephen Fry, in his tour of America, fell into that trap when he visited a southern mansion, complete with black servants who loved their job and their family. The next day, he visited a parole hearing…and his view shifted.
I’m not understanding what being an oldest child, or a middle child, adds to the conversation.
As an oldest child one grows up hearing ‘it’s incumbent on you to put up with the bad behaviour of your sibling(s), you’re the older one, you know better, you need to humour them/take responsibility for them/make the first move/be the bigger person/forgive and forget’. The tolerance, acceptance and forgiveness is only expected to go one way. I’m making the analogy between the way oldest children are required to indulge and accept the bad behaviour of younger siblings, because they’re younger and don’t know any better, and you’re older and expected to be more mature, and the way ‘liberals’ are urged to indulge and accept the bad behaviour of the ‘deplorables’, because they suffer from deprivation and disadvantage and don’t know any better. As I mentioned in my original comment, the educated ‘liberal elites’ are constantly urged to acknowledge, understand and accept the justifiable reasons behind the behaviour of the ‘disenfranchised’ non-college-educated white Southern male, but it would be ridiculous to expect the non-college-educated white Southern male to exercise any effort toward empathy or understanding of people who aren’t him.
guest @16 You paint a dismal picture of non-college-educated Southern whites. In my experience, and while I have encountered a few who fit this description, I have encountered many more who don’t fit the hillbilly or redneck stereotype at all. I have met plenty of responsible, kind, intelligent, but not college educated rural folks in the South, and I have also encountered many college educated dipshits, I mean the worst kind of self entitled stupid assholes I have ever run across, so your perspective seems somewhat overgeneralized based on stereotypes to me.
This was the topic of the conversation I was describing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strangers_in_Their_Own_Land
guest, I might agree with you on the futility of the bleeding heart approach to the uneducatable, unwilling and non reciprocatory people you describe, but I do think the numbers are less than generally believed, due probably to the media focus on the worst ones, which reinforces the stereotype.
twilighter @#13:
As humans, our self-esteem is important. There are two ways to get it: 1. the hard way, by accomplishing something worthwhile and being congratulated for it by significant others and 2. the easy way, by putting others down. This second way also necessarily involves a lot of self-praise, chest-beating and general bullshit.
I would put people like the quite famous Albert Einstein and my own grandmother into the first category. But as for the second, I am at a loss right now to think of anyone. Perhaps if I sleep on it a name will possibly come to me, though I make no guarantees, mind. It’s a hard one alright.
Omar, it will come to you. A reminder will pop up on twitter in a few minutes, look no further. :)
But I don’t do twitter. I stay well clear of it. Damn.
Who said virtue is its own reward? Must have been some drunk.