A Very Brief Thought on the Language of White Supremacy & ICE Raids

NinaIllingworth February 11, 2017November 5, 2022 A Brief Thought, Amerikan Musik, blog, cruelty, FA1, Fantastic Lies, fascism, Fascism Ascendant in the USA, Hispanic Americans, ICE, ICE raids, illegal aliens, immigrants, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, JA5, Justice, Latino, law enforcement, liberal media, Meme, Mexican Americans, MLK, nationalism, News, Nina Illingworth, Police, police state, racial politics, racial profiling, Racism, splitting up families, TADMZ, Tales from the American DMZ, undocumented immigrants, white moderate, white supremacy

Editor’s note: occasionally, I find myself ruminating on a thought that I consider important enough to share someplace with more lasting value than my Twitter feed, while simultaneously lacking the time or ability to flesh out a more developed essay around that thought. In the past I’ve sadly left most of these ideas on the cutting room floor and looking back, I genuinely regret that I didn’t save them for posterity here on the website. In order to address this problem, I’ve begun to transpose what I consider the “worthy” ideas into meme format so that they can be posted and if necessary or desirable, shared from a central location – as opposed to scrolling back through thousands of less relevant tweets on my Twitter feed when I need to find them again.

In today’s meme I briefly explore the curious language ostensibly “liberal” media sources use to describe the behavior of law enforcement during ICE raids that “target illegal aliens.”

I honestly don’t have much more to add here at this time; there are far better sources than I available to you on both the impact of the ICE raids on immigrants in the Untied States and the subtle language employed to maintain white supremacy in said nation – I just got frustrated with “liberal” American media pretending to oppose discrimination while subconsciously enforcing it with their language when describing these fucking awful raids.

As always, please feel free to share this meme anywhere you like if you think it will help people understand the subconscious ways racism and discrimination remain a big part of everyday life; even if you aren’t quite noticing it all the time.

Edit: it has recently come to my attention that parts of the meme above have a strong similarity to a tweet written yesterday evening by Daniel Nichanian, who can be found @Taniel on Twitter. I don’t follow Daniel, but he seems like a pretty smart guy and although I don’t believe I saw his tweet until just now; it does predate the original tweet I based this meme on by several hours. I was actually responding to a number of prominent journalists repeating the language used in the Washington Post article Daniel references. While I genuinely believe the material posted above expands on this idea enough to be considered a work on its own – I’ve posted a link to the Nichanian’s original tweet and removed the solicitation buttons from the bottom of this post out of deference to his original posting.