Candidates of color ...
I found it very interesting to see that candidates of color made history in last Tuesday's elections. Even in staid, old Boston where Michelle Wu, daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, was elected Mayor and broke the 199 year streak of WHITE MA LE city leaders.
Clearly there is a revolution brewing and the Republicans are grabbing hold. It is not just Trump that is spurring this on. The party is appealing to the working class voter with their concentration on WHITE IDENTITY. I am amazed that this actually means more to them than all the perks that the Democrats are promising with their “Build Back Better” agenda...a list of items that would greatly improve these working class voter's daily lives!
What scares me most is that so much of what we hear from the Republicans are statements based on lies or misconceptions and these voters seem to be buying it. Their fear of “the browning of America” is so strong that they can't see beyond the next election. They seem to forget that we are a nation built on immigrants and, if they are honest, they will check out their heritage and realize that they were never #1.
Wake up America … your egos will be the death of democracy for our country.
posted by Goldendaze-Ginnie at 1:00 PM
6 Comments:
The news coming out of the U.S. these days is scary to this Canadian, watching from a distance. There is a similar element in this country as well though not as large a group maybe.
Congrats to Boston. Couldn't agree more. I guess the most frightening thing is the effect the "white is right" seem to wield. We are truly a nation divided.
I fear that another Trump presidency could spell the end of democracy in America.
I live in Texas and remember walking into a group of friends we'd joined when all of us retired to this small community about 2007-2009. One of the group, a man, walked up to me and pronounced that he'd just read that by some not-too-far-in-the-future, whites would no longer be in the majority in the U.S. When I greeted his pronouncement by telling him a story of how much I'd loved my early morning bus rides from a remote parking spot to the main campus of the University of Houston, where writer Alan Cheuse was a writer-in-residence that semester in their writer's program. When I was riding on that bus each morning, I'd been delighted by all the different languages that swirled around me. I'd loved the rhythm of it, the vibrancy, the "we're all together" feeling of it. The man, now a former friend, edged away from me with a puzzled look on his face. Later, most of our crowd promoted Tea Party ideals and one member shouted down our congressman when he came to the local opera house to explain the benefits of Obama's proposed health care program. Soon there was a big schism among the group, and we found ourselves squeezed out. We remain close friends with another squeezed-out couple, but the others refuse to associate with us. While I don't exclude people based on their political feelings, I wasn't going to go courting them or mourn them. But one of the men had been my husband's best friend, and it hit hard.
It's fear. These were relatively affluent or at least comfortable people, but for those in the Deep South who would most be helped and who have lived in and with poverty, lack of educational opportunities, and deep distrust of those who "make good," their only pride is in their Southern identities and longing for a South that never existed. They feel it slipping away, this belief and longing for the ante-bellum days of the Deep South. I'm originally from Louisiana, where my father witnessed a lynching when he was 11, where an uncle served as a town deputy concurrent with his membership in the KKK, where a grandfather made a special trip to a downtown drugstore to knock a man off a stool at the counter during a 60's sit-in. Fear. And that's hard to combat.
I lived a few years in the South before integration — blatant segregation prevailed. We're at that point where white people are not the majority any more in Calif., also the U.S., too, I think. Would that all others than those of us in the choir would read your words and take them to heart.
Fear is a powerful motivator. Scary!
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