Coal miner: I cant believe trump has fone nothing for us, without this job my family will starve, but if i continue in this job I woll die from lung cancer.

Yall who have never had to face any of that: Die bitch.

Seriously. Rural jobs, especially that with mining, are extremely dangerous to do as well as dangerous to health. It bothers me that they equate them as being bad people, when they’re very hard-working and usually very good people. Bad people are the ones making posts like this.

“usually good people”

I feel bad for coal miners and their economic anxieties. I feel bad for anyone struggling with money/medical bills/college debt, etc.

I don’t, however, feel bad for the ones who happily voted for an obvious racist and fascist, though.

Even if they didn’t hate PoC, they were utterly indifferent to how Trump was going to hurt them. 

That’s awful.

^^they nailed it

Same. 

Look, I sympathize with their fears– it’s a changing world, they’re in an unenviable situation and the US does not have the welfare system or the innovative technologies to catch them or give them other productive industries. But they actively voted for someone who made no bones about wanting to tear down what little social welfare system and innovative industries we have– specifically because they thought the destruction would hit PoC and queer folx and NOT THEM.

Maybe they’re not bad people, but they put themselves (and the rest of the country) into this dangerous situation and I can’t help but feel very #congratulationsyouplayedyourself about it.

My dad grew up in a mining town. You know what I know about mining towns and mining? It’s dangerous AND FULL OF RACISTS.

Look it’s difficult as a POC to balance these conflicting issues – 1.) I want solidarity and support for the most vulnerable classes and jobs, especially healthcare in high risk occupations (like mining) and government oversight (large vehicles beep when they back up because of regulations that happened after a miner died when some machinery backed up OVER him). And 2.) UNfortunately a massive chunk of that same population are white people who wish I was dead, and historically has been…keen to terrorize non-white folks.

I’m sorry, but this isn’t just “oh the majority of them are nice, really,” and the issue is over. It’s not that easy. Mining and farming ESPECIALLY have been sites of long term institutionalized racial violence. I don’t just mean wealthy plantation owners having slaves (though obviously that’s a legacy that is included in this issue), I also mean the rural poor.

White farmers drove natives/Mexican-Americans/Tejanos/black folks from their lands. They instituted laws against us - largely against Mexicans, black folks, and natives (although anti-Chinese and Filipino sentiment certainly picked up in the second half of the 19th century.) Across the west coast and southwest, mining towns were often the site of massive racial violence. In the SW, the worst affected were Mexicans – beatings, lynchings, being paid less than their Anglo counterparts, being harassed by local law enforcement, slave labor…I could go on. Mob killings.

Famously, Mexican American families living in the mining towns of Morenci Arizona (where my dad grew up) and its neighbor, Clifton, attempted to adopt Irish orphan children (both cultures are predominately Catholic) and give them homes. Mexican women had arranged to adopt some 40 children. You wanna know what white people did? They KIDNAPPED them, because they felt it was “child abuse” to allow brown families to raise white children. (But not before reading aloud the wages of Mexican families in order to humiliate them and prove them unqualified!) A mob ran the catholic priest from the town, families were separated at gun-point, and white women - who had NEVER thought to adopt on their own time - picked and chose the orphans they wanted to “keep”. This went up to the state Supreme Court, which declared the Mexican-Americans to be totally “unfit” for parenting white children. That was 1904, and those kids were “The Irish” when they left east coast orphanages, but “white” when they made it to Arizona. https://m.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/the-irish-orphan-abduction/Content?oid=1087070

This didn’t go away after 1904, you know? The so-called “Wild West” wasn’t just wild because it was a big open space or because people had cool hats and a pistol. It was wild in large part because of systematic segregation, uneven and racist law enforcement (when it existed) and because a lot of “vigilante justice” was about murdering brown folks.

The 40’s-50’s were massively segregated in the southwest. Mining towns were often several “small towns” (this one neighborhood for the Latinos, that one for the Anglos). The bracero program was essentially agricultural slave labor, followed by Operation W-tback and round ups of Mexican-Americans (even citizens!) culminated in forced deportations. What happens when the rural Anglo folks need extra hands on their farms? They pay migrant latinx day laborers in pennies. Hell the United Farm Workers had to fight to prevent immigrant children from forced labor and for farm workers to obtain basic rights (largely latinx, but also commonly Filipino & Asian immigrants). Unfortunately there is still widespread abuse of migrant labor, and farm workers. When Morenci dealt with strikes in the 80’s, they called in the National Guard, and imprisoned, fired, or replaced workers. Mexican Americans in the mining town of Hayden weren’t “allowed” to buy houses in the “white part of town” until the 1960’s.

You wanna know how discrimination affects and affected miners? Let’s talk about the 1990 report on “The Hispanic Factor”:

“Acting on a confidential warning issued by Asarco’s retiring physician, Craig began an investigation into what became known as “the Hispanic factor.” The investigation revealed that ASARCO at Hayden was systematically altering the lung function results of Hispanic workers that were mandated by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Craig wrote,

If a Hispanic employee has a pulmonary function of 85% of capacity, when using the Company’s method, this employee is still rated as having 100% of pulmonary function because of the 15% margin the Company has in fact self-imposed upon all Hispanics being tested at the time.

Alarmed by the danger to its members posed by the company’s medical policy, the United Steelworkers contacted Dr. David Parkinson, a respected union physician from New York. Dr. Parkinson’s correspondence with ASARCO’s medical director is included in Craig’s report. In a letter to Hine, Dr. Parkinson confirmed that, “the predicated values in Hispanics were being reduced by 15%.”

http://www.theirminesourstories.org/?p=1107

People systematically altered the data reporting the effects of ASARCO/Arsenic on the Mexican Americans at the mine, in order to deny the health damage done to them.

Basically: I want to feel bad in general for people in risky occupations but also as a Mexican American, fuck racist white miners. They deserve basic care and human rights but when they do shit like this, shit rooted racism, I don’t feel the need to personally expend my limited resources of emotional empathy-labor to them.

I’m sorry that we live in a society that doesn’t provide enough lifeboats for all its citizens.

However, given that we don’t, I’m not sorry that the assholes who tried to throw all the marginalized people overboard so that they could have the remaining lifeboats for themselves are now finding that their rafts all have holes drilled in the bottom.

Y'all can tread freezing water with the rest of us while Trump rows away to safety with his rich conservative Chrito-fascist buddies, and I’ll save my pity for the people who didn’t try to sacrifice the well-being of others to save their own skins.

BLESS. THIS. POST!!!!