In a bizarre press release, Republican Glenn Grothman wrote:
Of course, almost no black people today care about Kwanzaa - just white left-wingers who try to shove this down black people’s throats in an effort to divide Americans. Irresponsible public school districts such as Green Bay and Madison (and who knows how many others…) try to tell a new generation that blacks have a separate holiday than Christians. […]
But why do they do it? They don’t like America and seek to destroy it by pretending that its values as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution, don’t apply to everyone.
He then warns people to “be on the lookout” for teachers who will try to “tell your children and grandchildren it’s a real holiday.”
Glenn Grothman is the same troll who said unplanned pregnancies are mostly “the choice of the women,” sponsored legislation that repealed Wisconsin’s equal pay law because “money is more important to men,” and wrote a bill to label single parenthood as a contributing factor in cases of child abuse.
White Citizens Councils, the political wing of the Klu Klux Klan, detested federal taxes because they were used to promote economic fairness for blacks in the South. Government spending on economic opportunity had upset the pre-existing racialized economic order. So in speech after speech, Reagan promised to “turn back the clock” and won in a landslide.
Once in office, Reagan did as promised. He re-constructed a system which took money from the employed poor and working class—who are disproportionately black and brown—and gave it to a mostly white minority who were already wealthy.
The result of Reagan’s policies—which were turbocharged under George W. Bush—is that the top 1 percent have a greater share of national income than at any point in American history. And 97 percent of the top 1 percent are white. Yet poverty is stuck at decades-high levels. One out of three blacks and one out of four Latinos is poor.
Reagan’s policies, largely followed by his predecessors in both parties, have left us a country where a child born in poverty in any other advanced economy on the planet has a better chance of becoming rich than one born in the United States.
This is blatantly wrong to the vast majority of Americans, regardless of race. They would not allow this injustice to stand, if spoken to plainly about it.
But since Reagan’s success in winning office off of white supremacist notions, the U.S. has struggled to be honest with itself about the racial impact of its economic choices. The trouble is that you can’t solve a problem that you don’t admit exists.
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We Can’t Fix Our Economy Without Confronting White Supremacy (via jayaprada) Where is my “slow clap” gif? (via generalbriefing) |
Black voters have been turning out in record numbers not only in Tampa, but throughout the state. There are reports of people standing in line up to seven hours, many of them elderly and disabled—and at one Orlando site there was a bomb scare. So NAACP members have been passing out water to help people deal with the heat. A Republican poll watcher reported this activity at the C. Blythe Andrews Jr. polling site in Tampa, a predominantly African American district, and had the poll clerk stop the water distribution. According to NAACP political action chair Yvette Lewis, the Republican poll watcher accused the teams of bribing voters with the water, much like a challenge filed by a Republican poll watcher Sunday when helpers passed out fried fish.
In remarks that may prompt accusations of racial insensitivity, one suggested that Mr Romney was better placed to understand the depth of ties between the two countries than Mr Obama, whose father was from Africa.
“We are part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage, and he feels that the special relationship is special,” the adviser said of Mr Romney, adding: “The White House didn’t fully appreciate the shared history we have.”
