I was trying not to use Democrats.

by Savage, Around Ye Olde Colonial College, Wednesday, October 31, 2018, 18:52 (2709 days ago) @ Bill

(Unfortunate that merely the names of the parties have become bogeymen, but that's what I was trying to prevent. And "liberals" has too many meanings -- largely "anyone to the left of me" in a somewhat negative connotation, but also "classical liberalism", which is something altogether different. Perhaps "progressives" works, but it's an awkward fit historically considering the long-running conflict within the Democratic party of the "Blue Dog Democrats", the more corporatist, the socialist fringes, etc., where it means a particular segment of their party (and some farther along who don't identify with their party), which is something very different than just "A member of the Blue team")

On this board, I've only recently been delving into the political threads, so I wouldn't be able to give a complete history. But there have been several posts that are very close to "all Republicans are racist" or "if you vote for Trump, you're a racist" or the like. (See, e.g. https://www.bluegraysky.com/forum/index.php?id=367312 and https://www.bluegraysky.com/forum/index.php?id=393963 . ) And those are just the explicit ones, as opposed to the general discourse as we've approached the election that, to use a favorite liberal word again in this thread (this time more seriously) certainly seem like dogwhistles.

I don't think that trans rights have been talked about too much on this board -- perhaps some during the bathroom bill kerfuffle, but that was a different issue altogether -- so I have no idea where people stand on the birth certificate rewriting. On the sociological stuff, I'm glad that "problematic" isn't a word used constantly in every conversation around here, and I suspect that folks here would support dressing kids up as whichever superhero their little hearts desire, because, well, they're kids!

In life, well, I went to a minority-majority HS. (Without putting too much emphasis on what kids in HS say,) I can't tell you the number of times I was told black-on-white racism isn't a thing, with either the P+P rationale or some more rudimentary form of "no, we're discriminated against, so we can't be racist, that's how it works". And I'm an academic, so I'm surrounded by those "well-meaning college kids" and sociology Ph.D.s and the like as mentioned down-thread. That probably colors my experiences a bit in overrepresenting them.