It’s Racism, Stupid: The Real Enemy of Democracy
Despite the so-called racial reckoning during the late spring and early summer, many folks still have trouble believing that racism exists much less that it is the cause of too many of our problems. They explain the continued support of a man who is literally killing us by approximately 40% of American voters as resulting from their anger at the liberal elite or their concern about the courts and abortion while the behavior of the Republicans in Congress and the governors of Florida, Georgia, and Texas is described as resulting from a fear of the Cyberbully-in-Chief and/or a desire for “raw power.” As the White Supremacist-in-Chief might say, “Wrong!” What we’re witnessing is raw racism. 80% of white evangelicals and either 47% or 53% (depending on the poll) of white women voted for a thrice-married man who was heard bragging about sexual assault a few weeks before the election because of racism. That obnoxious man, who mocked a disabled journalist and claimed that Vietnam War hero John McCain wasn’t a hero because he was captured, was able to defeat reputable establishment Republicans such as Jeb Bush, Graham, Kasich, Rubio, Christie, Paul, and Cruz easily because he claimed that the sitting half-black President wasn’t born in America, said he was going to build a wall on our southern border to keep out the brown immigrants and make Mexico pay for it, was going to ban all Muslims, and was going to outsmart Mexico and China in trade. He also said that Mexico sent us (as if the government of Mexico was telling its citizens to come here) rapists and drug dealers. After it was learned that Covid was more lethal for black, brown, and red Americans, Trump supporters in Michigan carried guns to the Capitol and demanded that the governor open the economy while Trump encouraged them with “Liberate Michigan” tweets. And meat packing plants where many people of color work were declared essential and kept open. The fact is a significant number of white people in America want to stop the browning of our population by any means necessary, including locking mostly brown children in cages, a cop shooting in the back seven times an unarmed black man who has produced six children before the age of thirty, and even exposing our mostly nonwhite grade school children to Covid, which occasionally does kill children. And if our democracy has to be destroyed to keep people of color from taking over, then these racist, unpatriotic Americans are willing to destroy it.
Until very recently, I assumed that the Republican hatred for Bill Clinton and his “nasty, persistent” wife Hillary was caused by his being the first Democrat to win the presidency in twelve years and the first to win two terms since FDR. Wrong! Clinton was the first candidate of either party to win the presidency without either winning, like Kennedy, LBJ and all of the Presidents before them, or tying with his opponent, like Carter, the white vote. I had already figured out that more than his half-blackness the white folks hated Obama’s ability to win the presidency decisively without winning the majority of the white vote. In fact, he won a smaller percentage of the white vote in 2012 than Gore and Kerry did in 2000 and 2004, yet he won that election easily. That’s why the conservatives immediately attacked ACORN, which among other services registered mostly people of color to vote, after Obama’s landslide victory in 2008. And that’s why the two judges whom Bush appointed joined with three of the judges who appointed him President in 2000 to gut the Voting Rights Act, thus allowing conservative legislatures and governors to start suppressing the black and brown vote.
Raise your hand if you believe Trump and GW Bush would have been allowed to enter the White House if they had somehow been able to lose the popular vote but win the electoral college without winning the majority of the white vote. Raise your hand if you believe we would still have the electoral college if it discriminated against rural and small-town white folks instead of against urban blacks and browns. Raise your hand if you believe we would still follow the two senators for each state, no matter how small or large the population of the state, outdated and undemocratic rule if Wyoming, Maine, Vermont, and Montana were at least 50% black, brown, and red while California, Texas, New York, and Florida were 80% white. If you raised your hand three times, you are a racism-denying, “colorblind” fool! The only reason we don’t have a true “all votes matter democracy“ or a more representative republic is because of racism.
As I pointed out in an earlier post (7/22/18), the most recent attack on our democracy (there were racist attacks on our republic at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century) started in 2000 when the five conservatives on the Supreme Court, including the black man appointed by George W. Bush’s father (the last rogue, anti-democracy conservative left on the current court), ended the vote count in Florida, giving GW the state governed by his brother. Was that the moment when Trump began to dream of a lily white (except for the orange makeup) Trump dynasty running America? He’s talking about involving the Supreme Court in this election he expects to lose, a Supreme Court where three of the judges were appointed by him and two were appointed by the other rich white man who didn’t win the popular vote in his first election. Why not? If Thomas can cast the deciding vote for the son of the man who appointed him, what’s to stop Trump from asking his three judges to join Thomas and at least one of the other conservatives to appoint him even if he loses badly to Biden? It’s not Trump’s fault that he’s been able to appoint three judges during a single term when Carter didn’t appoint any while Clinton and Obama appointed only two during their eight-year terms. Of course, Obama actually appointed three justices, but McConnell blocked that third appointment just as he was blocking all of Obama’s judicial appointments even when Republicans were in the minority, leading Harry Reid to kill the filibuster for district judges, which gave McConnell the chance to kill it for Supreme Court justices once he became the Majority Leader. The decision by McConnell (who believes Trump is making these decisions?) to replace a liberal Jewish judge with a conservative (the dirty conservatives are trying to claim that Democrats are anti-Catholic as if Joe Biden and Speaker Nancy Pelosi weren’t Catholics, and there weren’t already five Catholics, including one appointed by Obama, on the Supreme Court) white woman just weeks before an election prove that the Gorsuch seat was stolen. But at least that seat was stolen from a moderate white male judge by a more conservative white man, not by a conservative white woman from a black woman. Biden has promised to appoint a black woman if he wins, and anyone who doesn’t believe that the cynical, hypocritical decision to push a Supreme Court justice through weeks before an election, even if it puts several Republican senators seeking reelection in jeopardy, isn’t at least partially motivated by racism needs to review what happened when Obama tried to appoint two black women to important Cabinet positions during his second term. Susan Rice was not given the position of Secretary of State; it went to John Kerry. But Obama smartly refused to fold on Loretta Lynch. McConnell and his racist colleagues in the Senate finally confirmed her because they hated the black male Attorney General Eric Holder even more than they did the idea of having a moderate black woman take his place.
Immediately after the majority of white people and the rigged electoral college elected an insane, corrupt, racist confessed sexual assaulter, I was angrier at the Democrats than I was at the Republicans because I heard Democrats (even Obama once) saying that the people voted for Trump. They didn’t say the “real Americans” the way the overt racists did, but they acted as if Trump won the popular vote because he won the white vote. When Senator Klobuchar kept talking during the primary debates about the need to “win big,“ I knew what she meant. She wasn’t saying we need to “win big” so that the Republicans can’t squeeze out an electoral college victory or steal several closely contested states. She meant we need to win the white vote so that we will be seen as legitimate. After all, Obama “won big” twice but still was delegitimized by racist birther lies promoted by the current racist Liar-in-Chief. Some of the white Democrats were also complaining after her electoral college loss that Hillary spent too much time on “identity politics.” In other words, Hillary talked about the issues that are important to the Democratic base—black women. It wasn’t until black women voters showed their power during the 2017 and 18 elections that Hillary-bashing jerks like Ohio Representative Tim Ryan changed their tune, but Senator Klobuchar still hadn’t gotten the message. She kept dismissing our base and focusing on the red districts and “suburban women” during the debates. It took the black women of South Carolina choosing our nominee and then the racial reckoning following Floyd’s murder to wake her up. I thanked her for dropping out of the race for Vice President. It was an insult that she was even considered after the dismissive way she treated black female voters.
It’s time everyone woke up to what the most formidable enemy of our democracy is. It’s not any single person—Trump, McConnell, Graham. And it’s not partisanship or raw power. It’s racism, stupid. We need to keep calling out racists and racism, keep battling them and it, to save our democracy. Our new slogans need to be: All Votes Matter Equally and The Only Good Democracy Is A Diverse Democracy! Let’s keep fighting and voting.
Until very recently, I assumed that the Republican hatred for Bill Clinton and his “nasty, persistent” wife Hillary was caused by his being the first Democrat to win the presidency in twelve years and the first to win two terms since FDR. Wrong! Clinton was the first candidate of either party to win the presidency without either winning, like Kennedy, LBJ and all of the Presidents before them, or tying with his opponent, like Carter, the white vote. I had already figured out that more than his half-blackness the white folks hated Obama’s ability to win the presidency decisively without winning the majority of the white vote. In fact, he won a smaller percentage of the white vote in 2012 than Gore and Kerry did in 2000 and 2004, yet he won that election easily. That’s why the conservatives immediately attacked ACORN, which among other services registered mostly people of color to vote, after Obama’s landslide victory in 2008. And that’s why the two judges whom Bush appointed joined with three of the judges who appointed him President in 2000 to gut the Voting Rights Act, thus allowing conservative legislatures and governors to start suppressing the black and brown vote.
Raise your hand if you believe Trump and GW Bush would have been allowed to enter the White House if they had somehow been able to lose the popular vote but win the electoral college without winning the majority of the white vote. Raise your hand if you believe we would still have the electoral college if it discriminated against rural and small-town white folks instead of against urban blacks and browns. Raise your hand if you believe we would still follow the two senators for each state, no matter how small or large the population of the state, outdated and undemocratic rule if Wyoming, Maine, Vermont, and Montana were at least 50% black, brown, and red while California, Texas, New York, and Florida were 80% white. If you raised your hand three times, you are a racism-denying, “colorblind” fool! The only reason we don’t have a true “all votes matter democracy“ or a more representative republic is because of racism.
As I pointed out in an earlier post (7/22/18), the most recent attack on our democracy (there were racist attacks on our republic at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century) started in 2000 when the five conservatives on the Supreme Court, including the black man appointed by George W. Bush’s father (the last rogue, anti-democracy conservative left on the current court), ended the vote count in Florida, giving GW the state governed by his brother. Was that the moment when Trump began to dream of a lily white (except for the orange makeup) Trump dynasty running America? He’s talking about involving the Supreme Court in this election he expects to lose, a Supreme Court where three of the judges were appointed by him and two were appointed by the other rich white man who didn’t win the popular vote in his first election. Why not? If Thomas can cast the deciding vote for the son of the man who appointed him, what’s to stop Trump from asking his three judges to join Thomas and at least one of the other conservatives to appoint him even if he loses badly to Biden? It’s not Trump’s fault that he’s been able to appoint three judges during a single term when Carter didn’t appoint any while Clinton and Obama appointed only two during their eight-year terms. Of course, Obama actually appointed three justices, but McConnell blocked that third appointment just as he was blocking all of Obama’s judicial appointments even when Republicans were in the minority, leading Harry Reid to kill the filibuster for district judges, which gave McConnell the chance to kill it for Supreme Court justices once he became the Majority Leader. The decision by McConnell (who believes Trump is making these decisions?) to replace a liberal Jewish judge with a conservative (the dirty conservatives are trying to claim that Democrats are anti-Catholic as if Joe Biden and Speaker Nancy Pelosi weren’t Catholics, and there weren’t already five Catholics, including one appointed by Obama, on the Supreme Court) white woman just weeks before an election prove that the Gorsuch seat was stolen. But at least that seat was stolen from a moderate white male judge by a more conservative white man, not by a conservative white woman from a black woman. Biden has promised to appoint a black woman if he wins, and anyone who doesn’t believe that the cynical, hypocritical decision to push a Supreme Court justice through weeks before an election, even if it puts several Republican senators seeking reelection in jeopardy, isn’t at least partially motivated by racism needs to review what happened when Obama tried to appoint two black women to important Cabinet positions during his second term. Susan Rice was not given the position of Secretary of State; it went to John Kerry. But Obama smartly refused to fold on Loretta Lynch. McConnell and his racist colleagues in the Senate finally confirmed her because they hated the black male Attorney General Eric Holder even more than they did the idea of having a moderate black woman take his place.
Immediately after the majority of white people and the rigged electoral college elected an insane, corrupt, racist confessed sexual assaulter, I was angrier at the Democrats than I was at the Republicans because I heard Democrats (even Obama once) saying that the people voted for Trump. They didn’t say the “real Americans” the way the overt racists did, but they acted as if Trump won the popular vote because he won the white vote. When Senator Klobuchar kept talking during the primary debates about the need to “win big,“ I knew what she meant. She wasn’t saying we need to “win big” so that the Republicans can’t squeeze out an electoral college victory or steal several closely contested states. She meant we need to win the white vote so that we will be seen as legitimate. After all, Obama “won big” twice but still was delegitimized by racist birther lies promoted by the current racist Liar-in-Chief. Some of the white Democrats were also complaining after her electoral college loss that Hillary spent too much time on “identity politics.” In other words, Hillary talked about the issues that are important to the Democratic base—black women. It wasn’t until black women voters showed their power during the 2017 and 18 elections that Hillary-bashing jerks like Ohio Representative Tim Ryan changed their tune, but Senator Klobuchar still hadn’t gotten the message. She kept dismissing our base and focusing on the red districts and “suburban women” during the debates. It took the black women of South Carolina choosing our nominee and then the racial reckoning following Floyd’s murder to wake her up. I thanked her for dropping out of the race for Vice President. It was an insult that she was even considered after the dismissive way she treated black female voters.
It’s time everyone woke up to what the most formidable enemy of our democracy is. It’s not any single person—Trump, McConnell, Graham. And it’s not partisanship or raw power. It’s racism, stupid. We need to keep calling out racists and racism, keep battling them and it, to save our democracy. Our new slogans need to be: All Votes Matter Equally and The Only Good Democracy Is A Diverse Democracy! Let’s keep fighting and voting.
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