“It’s only a small problem now,” scolds Whitey McWhiteface while using MLK’s words and image to demonstrate how not-really-racist he is.
The fact that this made it into print is proof that no one at the Globe likes this guy.
Twitter responds:
.@Jeff_Jacoby: As MLK foresaw, racism in America has been largely overcome https://t.co/KJR7G4eO1S
— The Boston Globe (@BostonGlobe) January 18, 2019
Please share widely!
When we most needed it, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. offered America and the world a way out of madness.
An old angry white male racist tells his audience of old angry white male racists that racism is over — while Steve King, R-Iowa, remains seated in the House and Donald Trump remains in the Oval Office. Racism doesn’t just apply to blacks. The public support for Mr. Trump and the Trumpists is based on pure and unadulterated racism against Hispanic people. America is filled with white supremacists, and white supremacy is a racist premise whether or not Steve King admits it.
Illegal immigration is not a significant issue. Border security is not a significant issue. Each is nothing but a dog-whistle for bigots and bigotry.
When the Steve Kings and Donald Trumps of the world, together with their Collaborators, are forced back under the swampy rocks where they slither in darkness, then we can talk a “largely non-racist” society.
We’ve gone backwards it seems. For much of my life it seemed we had successfully managed to relegate what was left of racism to the darkness.
The election of Barack Obama may well prove to be the zenith of America’s classic civil rights movement. Led by Mitch McConnell and the GOP and beginning days of Mr. Obama’s inauguration, white supremacy has been resurgent for a decade.
We sanded off a few of the sharp edges of explicit racism towards blacks, and we reversed even those halting first steps when they started to actually make a difference.
We did nothing about the power structures, entitlement structures, and systemic bias that supports and expands white privilege.
Our President gives a bigoted tirade from the Oval Office, filled with offensive stereotypes about Hispanic immigrants (does anybody claim he was talking about illegal Irish immigrants?), and our mainstream news media are literally silent about the bigotry (aside from a few observations that the violent crime rate among immigrants is lower than among native-born Americans).
We are indeed regressing.
Indeed, just as Reconstruction ended and racism re-asserted itself in America, regressing our nation, the conservative Republicans and Trump are making America regress again.
1. It is worth it to click through and see how much evidence of current racism @ChipGoines throws at @BostonGlobe. We need to be reminded of this.
2. Jeff Jacoby has written some good columns pushing back on the Republicans anti-immigrant, “Build That Wall,” rhetoric. I learned from one of them about a huge mass lynching of Asian people in Los Angeles. The history courses and books I had as a youth left out a lot of important events that reveal how white supremacy is deeply embedded idea in America. But when Jeff Jacoby wrote those pro-immigration articles, I think he was motivated more by the dollar-value that immigrants could create for corporations than by a belief that every human being, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender identity, orientation, or creed, deserves dignity and respect by the government and society.
Jacoby’s money quote:
It was white racism that was the weak spot in the USA’s voter, the weak spot for Vladimir Putin’s agents to target with Facebook ads, to win Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin narrowly. White racism brought out voters in the Florida Panhandle, tipping that state away from Hillary Clinton. White racism helped make Trump President, and now Trump has weakened the alliances that made America strong and ruined many American businesses with his arbitrary tariffs.
Oh, and before Trump, white racism has created laws disenfranchising people of color.
White racism is a powerful force that still does significant damage today.
(And by the way, Jacoby’s use of the term “white racism’ shows how he is trying to paper over the historical evidence that racism in American has been about exalting white people over people of color. There’s no ‘black racism’ locking up white people in prisons with absurdly long sentences. Racism is a system, bigotry is an attitude.)
+10 burn!
Ask the self-satisfied Mr Jacoby if anti-Semitism is over sometime. Then compare and contrast.
This is a fairly common sentiment on the right, and so it should be unsurprising to read from columnists like Jacoby. Its persistence is another mark of the extraordinary inertia segregation has had. I bet white people who are married to African-Americans are much less likely to think racism has faded away..