I don’t often comment on politics here, but I want to record my thoughts as I watch the extraordinary convulsions running through America at the moment.<\/p>\n
First: racism is a basic fact of American life. \u00a0It has been apparent to me since I moved here. \u00a0White America simply doesn’t want to be forced to engage with it, so it ignores all the plentiful evidence that it exists. \u00a0It is too painful and too difficult to deal with, no matter how sympathetic people are, so they want to avoid the topic. \u00a0They prefer, instead, to pretend that it is an historic artifact and not a current one. \u00a0Worse, when outrage hits the streets, as it has recently, a good proportion of the white population gets upset: they believe that there has been sufficient effort made to heal the breach, and that any current anger is a sign of disrespect for that effort. \u00a0They then accuse the black population of being ungrateful for, or of squandering, that effort.<\/p>\n
Second: American politics is massively shaped by race. \u00a0The entire shift to a more heavily polarized politics in America came about after the deliberate pursuit by the Republican Party under Nixon and Reagan to exploit Southern white racism. \u00a0Within years the entire political map was altered: the South became\u00a0a Republican redoubt built on white anger at the civil rights movement, sentimental recall of the Civil war, and persistent repression of its black population and, especially, its right to vote. \u00a0These all exist and flourish today. \u00a0Most people point to Nixon as the villain in this, but Reagan was just as bad. \u00a0Why else would a Californian governor announce his run for the presidency in the Deep South?<\/p>\n
Third: speaking of Reagan. \u00a0In the late 1960s a group or armed black men walked into the Californian legislative buildings. \u00a0There was no violence, but they were making a point. \u00a0They had learned that Californian law allowed someone to carry a gun in public. \u00a0They were asserting that right and using it as a way to be equal to their white fellow citizens. \u00a0Horrified at the thought of armed black men walking the streets, Reagan who was governor of California at the time, rushed through gun control legislation to eliminate that right. \u00a0So his Republican allies were all for gun control when it limited black access to arms. \u00a0Compare that with the Republican support of the recent invasion of the Michigan State House by a group of armed white people. \u00a0They were, we are\u00a0told, expressing their constitutional right to bear arms. \u00a0Reagan was racist and so, courtesy of the Nixon\/Reagan southern strategy, is most of the Republican Party.<\/p>\n
Fourth: as a consequence of this, the Republicans are now stuck, mostly willingly, as a party of white people. \u00a0Any effort it makes to become more diverse sinks under the weight of the Nixon\/Reagan bargain with the South. \u00a0This explains the complete silence in the face of Trump’s clear\u00a0racism, and his appeal to far right extremists. \u00a0The modern Republican party is incapable of solving any issue that might mean it has to part company with the far right or the disgruntled white underclass that has been taught to see the black community as a leech on its meager livelihood.<\/p>\n
Fifth: a\u00a0truly sad part of this is that, subsequent to the passing of the civil rights laws in the 1960s, a government commission warned about the reverberation of racism likely to echo in the aftermath of the new laws. \u00a0It warned of America falling into two parts. \u00a0One white and one black, apart and unequal. \u00a0Not just unequal in economic terms, although that is brutally obvious, but apart in terms of opportunity and justice. \u00a0If anything the neoliberal era of Reaganism and corporate excess has exacerbated the divide. \u00a0America has been falling apart for decades.<\/p>\n
Sixth: \u00a0it is specious to refer to the constitution in the context of racism and its resolution. \u00a0It is a piece of paper of no worth if it is ignored or perverted by Supreme Court opinion. \u00a0A good case in point is the 14th amendment meant to protect anyone from bias or infringement on their rights based upon discrimination. \u00a0That amendment has a long history of use and application in the Supreme Court. \u00a0But that use and application is weighted ten to one or more in order to protect the rights of corporations. \u00a0It is rarely used to protect the rights of the black population.<\/p>\n
Lastly: \u00a0the symbols of racism exist everywhere, but mostly are manifested in the proliferation of\u00a0reminders of the Civil War in the South. \u00a0Every single such reminder, mostly statues of Civil War soldiers or the Confederate flag, are symbols of the struggle to preserve the institutions of racism. \u00a0Not only are all those people, and that flag, emblems of traitor hood to the U.S. itself, they are a constant symbol of what that struggle was about: the continuation of slavery. \u00a0The current population of the South might wish this were not the case, and they might prefer that the trope of “states rights” was the real issue being fought over, but the reality is that it was slavery their ancestors wanted to defend. \u00a0It is hateful ti maintain any illusion otherwise. \u00a0These symbols must all go if there is to be any hope of a non-racist future.<\/p>\n
I am, sure that others could compile a better of more comprehensive list than this, but tases are the most salient things that come to my mind this morning.<\/p>\n
As you all know I am a democrat [with a small”d”] through and through. \u00a0It is painful to realize the reality that America is not truly democratic, and that what attachment it has to democracy is under such threat. \u00a0To me the fight to end racism is a fight to strengthen democracy. \u00a0Americans obsess over their “freedoms”, they tell themselves that they are “exceptional”, and that they live in the<\/em> land of the<\/em> free [not realizing that this is an insult to the rest of the free world], but they are not free in any significant way until they face and come to terms with the past.<\/p>\n Don’t brush history under the rug. \u00a0Deal with it. \u00a0 Learn from it.<\/p>\n I don’t often comment on politics here, but I want to record my thoughts as I watch the extraordinary convulsions running through America at the moment. First: racism is a basic fact of American life. \u00a0It has been apparent to me since I moved here. \u00a0White America simply doesn’t want to be forced to engage […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[94,625,35,624,107,14,514],"class_list":["post-3155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-democracy","tag-nixon","tag-plutocracy","tag-racism","tag-reagan","tag-republicans","tag-trump","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author",""],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radfordfreepress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radfordfreepress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radfordfreepress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radfordfreepress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radfordfreepress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3155"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radfordfreepress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3155\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3156,"href":"https:\/\/radfordfreepress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3155\/revisions\/3156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radfordfreepress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radfordfreepress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radfordfreepress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}