Home / General / I didn’t mean *that* Midwest, I meant the *real* Midwest

I didn’t mean *that* Midwest, I meant the *real* Midwest

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This is one of those stories that seems like some sort of extreme over the top parody, but Zizek assures me it’s completely factual in a postmodern way:

Last night, spokesperson for Justice Democrats Waleed Shahid responded on Twitter to Claire McCaskill, a former Senator who lost her race in the Midwest, who said that “free stuff from the government does not play well in the Midwest.” Shahid pointed out that Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib are also from the Midwest—an important point, since referring blithely to “the Midwest” as a place defined by its more conservative rural residents is inaccurate and reinforces the notion that only conservative whites matter.

Good point, Mr. Person With a Suspiciously Arab Name!

Or maybe not so good, because as Deputy Washington editor of the New York Times Jonathan Weisman points out, saying Omar and Tlaib are from the Midwest is like saying John Lewis is from the Deep South or Lloyd Doggett is from Texas.

Here’s the early biography of well-known outside agitator John Lewis:

John Lewis was born in Troy, Alabama, the third son of Willie Mae (née Carter) and Eddie Lewis.[1] His parents were sharecroppers.[2] Lewis grew up in Pike County, Alabama. He has several siblings, including brothers Edward, Grant, Freddie, Sammy, Adolph, and William, and sisters Ethel, Rosa, and Ora. At the age of six, Lewis had seen only two white people in his life.[3] He was educated at the Pike County Training High School, Brundidge, Alabama, . . .

John Lewis was the youngest of the “Big Six” leaders as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) from 1963 to 1966, some of the most tumultuous years of the Civil Rights Movement. During his tenure, SNCC opened Freedom Schools, launched the Mississippi Freedom Summer, and organized some of the voter registration efforts during the 1965 Selma voting rights campaign. . . .

In 1964, Lewis coordinated SNCC’s efforts for “Mississippi Freedom Summer,” a campaign to register black voters across the South. The Freedom Summer was an attempt to expose college students from around the country to the perils of African-American life in the South. Lewis traveled the country encouraging students to spend their summer break trying to help people in Mississippi, the most recalcitrant state in the union, to register and vote. Lewis became nationally known during his prominent role in the Selma to Montgomery marches when, on March 7, 1965 – a day that would become known as “Bloody Sunday” – Lewis and fellow activist Hosea Williams led over 600 marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. At the end of the bridge, they were met by Alabama State Troopers who ordered them to disperse. When the marchers stopped to pray, the police discharged tear gas and mounted troopers charged the demonstrators, beating them with night sticks. Lewis’s skull was fractured, but he escaped across the bridge to Brown Chapel, the movement’s headquarter church in Selma. Before Lewis could be taken to the hospital, he appeared before the television cameras calling on President Johnson to intervene in Alabama. Lewis bears scars from the incident on his head that are still visible today.

I’m having some trouble following your logic here Jonathan.

Let’s check out pseudo-Texan Lloyd Doggett:

Doggett was born in Austin, the son of Alyce Paulin (Freydenfeldt) and Lloyd Alton Doggett. His maternal grandparents were Swedish.[1] Doggett received both a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration and a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Texas at Austin, where he served as student body president his senior year. . .

His electoral career began in 1973, when he was elected to the Texas State Senate, a position which he filled until 1985. In 1984, he was the Democratic nominee for the United States Senate seat vacated by the perennial RepublicanJohn Tower, but he lost to the Republican candidate, Phil Gramm. Doggett authored the bill creating the Texas Commission on Human Rights, as well as a law outlawing “cop killer” bullets and a “sunset law” requiring periodic review of government agencies. He gained attention in 1979, as a member of the “Killer Bees” — a group of 12 Democratic state senators who opposed a plan to move the state’s presidential primary to March 11. The intent was to give former governor John Connally a leg up on the 1980 Republican nomination. The Killer Bees wanted a closed primary. When this proposal was rejected, they walked out of the chamber and left the Senate two members short of a quorum. The bill was withdrawn five days later.


In 1989, he became both a justice of the Texas Supreme Court and an adjunct professor at the University of Texas School of Law, his alma mater, serving until his election to Congress.

Described as an “endangered species”, Doggett was one of only three white male Democratic House members from Texas in the 113th Congress (the others being Gene Green and Beto O’Rourke) in a state with mostly Republicans and minority members of the Democratic Party.[

This really isn’t helping at all.

I think we all know what Jonathan Weisman was trying to say: When journalists like him talk about “the Midwest” they mean conservative white people, preferably rural or exurban. And when those journalists talk about “Texas” they mean the same people.

As the notorious AOC points out, this is all about the erasure of people like her, because they have un-American names and skin tones etc. Know what I mean (((Jonathan)))?

. . . I think this is fairly safe prediction:

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