“I used to think you could defeat bigotry. But it only hides. And when you give it oxygen … it, in fact, brings out the worst in — it sort of condones activity that is across the board, totally inappropriate. And we must speak out.” Joe Biden
I’ve witnessed and experienced forms of bigotry all my life as the grandson of Italian immigrants, an outspoken early critic/protester of the Vietnam War in 1967, a lifelong progressive Democratic party organizer and gay rights activist.
But in all that time, most overt bigotry lived under rocks and rarely showed it’s ugly face in the white, middle class suburban community I grew up in. I rarely, if ever, heard people use the “n” word.
What’s different about bigotry today is that with the rise of Trump those rocks have been turned over and that vicious hate is spewing out in the open like raw sewage from a firehose.
Trump not only turned over the rocks; he is encouraging people to throw them.
VOTE as if your life depends on it because it does!
That has certainly been a hard lesson to learn in the last few years. I grew up during a time when homophobia was out in the open, but was allowed to believe that with the very occasional exception racial bigotry was a thing of the past.
Systemic, institutional racism has been a cancer on our democracy for 400 years.
Racism is the central issue of American life. Both the left and the right try to pretend it is not. This was extremely obvious this year in the Democratic primary – including here on this site.
Yes, and some here supported anti-racist candidates and policies, and others . . .
As far as I can tell we all have, and I’m confused by Terry’s comment about pretending racism is not present in the primary or on this site.
Both the media and this site completely ignored the reality that Joe Biden enjoys overwhelming support among black voters. That was obvious in polling data long before primary voting began, and never changed.
I suspect that Terry is referring to the way the media and this site wrote off the Joe Biden campaign before any black voices were even heard. Mr. Biden came perilously close to having to fold his entire campaign — and the hopes and dreams of his many millions of black supporters — because the Democratic Party establishment has enshrined two lily-white bastions of white privilege as the first events of each primary season.
There were some black candidates in the early slate. None of them ever came close to the support that Joe Biden has in black communities. Those black candidates were jettisoned in quick succession — by white candidates playing to white audiences.
I’m not sure who doubleman is referring to. The record of Joe Biden on racial issues is just as good or better than any of the other candidates, and to pretend otherwise is — well — incorrect.
White cops continue to kill black men without fear of reprisal. This happens in “blue” states just as often as “red” states. It doesn’t help Amy Klobuchar that she was still Attorney General in 2006 when Derrick Chauvin, the cop who killed George Floyd, was one of six cops involved in the killing of another black man:
It is unfair to assert that Ms. Klobuchar was responsible for the decision to not charge Mr. Chauvin in that incident. It most certainly IS fair to observe that she was part of a power structure in Minnesota that was just as racist then as it is today.
The Democratic Party very nearly steam-rolled the first choice of an overwhelming majority of black Democratic voters out of the primary. That is strong evidence of systemic racism in the Democratic Party. I don’t know if that’s what Terry was referring to, but I’ve been making the same observation here for some time now.,
An equally racist lie is the narrative of MSNBC and CNN that Joe Biden “masterminded” some kind of “miraculous” “come-from-behind” primary victory. He did not.
The truth is that the voice of black Democratic voters was belatedly heard. Whether intentional or not, the effect of mainstream media coverage was to suppress those black voices for as long as possible.