1: A history lesson you did not learn in school. nor will your children or friends: How racism found it public way to Charlottesville
My friend Mark Kemp sent me this piece .. I have yo admit it was mostly new news to me .kwowledge is power ..so thank you, Jim, for writing this a nd thank you, Mark for sending it to me. picture: Mark Kemp and Tarrah Segal and James C Leach the author od this history lesson
ESSENTIAL HISTORY LESSON ON RACISM IN AMERICA
James C. Leach
Trump didn’t willingly offer an unequivocal condemnation of violent white supremacists during his campaign.
Trump didn’t willingly offer an unequivocal condemnation of violent white supremacists in Charlottesville.
Trump didn’t show moral leadership or political courage.
These are all serious omissions.
Now, an increasing number in his own party are, at long last, acknowledging the immense mistake they made in enthusiastically empowering his utterly immoral and unmoored worldview to take over the White House.
However, before turning up the volume on the simplistic narrative that Trump is the sole or even primary source of our nation’s fracturing, we might consider some other things Trump didn’t do:
•Trump didn’t enslave Africans and African Americans. That was twelve of our other presidents, over half of whom held enslaved people while in the White House.
•Trump didn’t write “The Abolition of Slavery must be gradual and accomplished with much caution and Circumspection. Violent means and measures would produce greater violations of Justice and Humanity, than the continuance of the practice.” That was President John Adams.
•Trump didn’t opine “I advance it, therefore, as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstance, are inferior to the whites in the endowment both of body and mind.” That was President Thomas Jefferson.
•Trump didn’t declare “To be consistent with existing and probably unalterable prejudices in the U.S. freed blacks ought to be permanently removed beyond the region occupied by or allotted to a White population.” That was President James Madison.
•Trump didn’t assert “there is a physical difference between the white and black races that will for ever forbid the two races from living together on terms of social and political equality.” That was President Abraham Lincoln.
•Trump didn’t contend “The problem is so to adjust the relations between two races of different ethnic type that the rights of neither be abridged nor jeoparded; that the backward race [blacks] be trained so that it may enter into the possession of true freedom while the forward race [whites] is enabled to preserve unharmed the high civilization wrought out by its forefathers.” That was President Theodore Roosevelt.
•Trump didn’t openly express the opinion to prominent black leaders “segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen.” That was President Woodrow Wilson.
•Trump didn’t go to a black college to announce to its graduating class “Your race is meant to be a race of farmers, first, last and for all times.” That was President William Howard Taft.
•Trump didn’t prevaricate explaining “If I come out for the anti-lynching bill now, they will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing. I just can’t take the risk.” That was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
•Trump didn’t offer the excuse that white southerners “are not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big overgrown Negroes.” That was President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
•Trump didn’t have an attorney general who approved an FBI wiretap on the home of Martin Luther King, Jr. That was President John F. Kennedy whose Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy made that call.
•Trump didn’t complain “These Negroes, they're getting pretty uppity these days and that's a problem for us since they've got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we've got to do something about this, we've got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference.” That was President, Lyndon Baines Johnson.
•Trump didn’t say, on tape “I have the greatest affection for them [Negroes] but I know they're not going to make it for 500 years. They aren't. You know it, too. The Mexicans are a different cup of tea. They have a heritage. At the present time they steal, they're dishonest, but they do have some concept of family life. They don't live like a bunch of dogs, which the Negroes do live like.” That was President Richard M. Nixon.
•Trump didn’t launch and then expand a Jim Crow “War on Drugs” and then double down on it in a way that increased state and federal incarceration at its most rapid rate in our history. That was Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
•Trump didn’t write “The Abolition of Slavery must be gradual and accomplished with much caution and Circumspection. Violent means and measures would produce greater violations of Justice and Humanity, than the continuance of the practice.” That was President John Adams.
•Trump didn’t opine “I advance it, therefore, as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstance, are inferior to the whites in the endowment both of body and mind.” That was President Thomas Jefferson.
•Trump didn’t declare “To be consistent with existing and probably unalterable prejudices in the U.S. freed blacks ought to be permanently removed beyond the region occupied by or allotted to a White population.” That was President James Madison.
•Trump didn’t assert “there is a physical difference between the white and black races that will for ever forbid the two races from living together on terms of social and political equality.” That was President Abraham Lincoln.
•Trump didn’t contend “The problem is so to adjust the relations between two races of different ethnic type that the rights of neither be abridged nor jeoparded; that the backward race [blacks] be trained so that it may enter into the possession of true freedom while the forward race [whites] is enabled to preserve unharmed the high civilization wrought out by its forefathers.” That was President Theodore Roosevelt.
•Trump didn’t openly express the opinion to prominent black leaders “segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen.” That was President Woodrow Wilson.
•Trump didn’t go to a black college to announce to its graduating class “Your race is meant to be a race of farmers, first, last and for all times.” That was President William Howard Taft.
•Trump didn’t prevaricate explaining “If I come out for the anti-lynching bill now, they will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing. I just can’t take the risk.” That was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
•Trump didn’t offer the excuse that white southerners “are not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big overgrown Negroes.” That was President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
•Trump didn’t have an attorney general who approved an FBI wiretap on the home of Martin Luther King, Jr. That was President John F. Kennedy whose Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy made that call.
•Trump didn’t complain “These Negroes, they're getting pretty uppity these days and that's a problem for us since they've got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we've got to do something about this, we've got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference.” That was President, Lyndon Baines Johnson.
•Trump didn’t say, on tape “I have the greatest affection for them [Negroes] but I know they're not going to make it for 500 years. They aren't. You know it, too. The Mexicans are a different cup of tea. They have a heritage. At the present time they steal, they're dishonest, but they do have some concept of family life. They don't live like a bunch of dogs, which the Negroes do live like.” That was President Richard M. Nixon.
•Trump didn’t launch and then expand a Jim Crow “War on Drugs” and then double down on it in a way that increased state and federal incarceration at its most rapid rate in our history. That was Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
These brief excerpts are, of course, far from comprehensive. They in no way excuse the way Trump has encouraged the virulent rise of a more public and aggressive form of white supremacy. They do offer context.
Making this simply or even primarily about Trump ignores centuries of presidential racism and an even longer history of structural white supremacy here. Making this simply or even primarily about Trump excuses all of the ways we continue to participate in, benefit from, and implicitly (and even explicitly) defend a system that was put in place with the core assertion that a black person isn’t even a full person, much less someone whose life might actually matter. This isn’t, as some are now trying to claim “what we’ve become.” This is who we are because, in fact, this is who we have always been.
We must translate our outrage, our heartbreak, our fear and our dismay into something more than making Trump the identified patient in our national sickness. As we are now learning, those violent white supremacists marching through a Virginia town with a long, long history of white supremacy weren’t nearly all the easily stereotyped poor, uneducated, rural, southern Trump voters we’ve been counseled to try to understand. Implying that any of us live at great distance from this kind of lethal racism no longer seems defensible.
I wish I knew a resolutely hopeful course forward. I do not. In no way do I excuse Trump and other extremists. But, I am more focused these days on my own introspection, my own need to reflect on my own thoughts and actions and inaction, my own need to examine my privilege and the ways it shapes what I see and what I overlook, my own need to listen and learn, my own challenge to call out the more subtle and regular forms of racism that mark everyday life among white people, my own role in speaking truth to power. I am more aware than ever that only by unequivocally disavowing and working to dismantle four centuries of white supremacy can we even begin to find a way forward.
Because of all of this, I was among those deeply disappointed when a Charlotte Vigil last night began not with an acknowledgment of shared sorrow, nor with an expression of collective contrition, but with a partisan implication that we had all come together so that we could listen to white men call out Trump for refusing to denounce white supremacy. I was distressed to hear an utterly appalling concluding claim that, because some stood on a hillside shining a flashlight, there was no racism or division among those who gathered in Marshall Park last night. I was dismayed in between to hear certain benignly generalized statements about Charlotte backed by no expressions of courage or creative thinking from some who’ve continued to ignore the serious issues fracturing this city.
There’s no doubt: Trump didn’t offer the faintest hint of moral or just leadership at a time of national crisis. Sadly, that’s not our only, and just may not be our most serious problem at this distressing time.
2: Listen and be challenged: National Book Award winner and Editor at large at Atlantic Magazene TA NEHISI Coates puts context into collective shock on Democracy Now .... ESSENTIAL
https://www.democracynow.org/2017/8/15/full_interview_ta_nehisi_coates_onacj t
Now : Join me and about a 1500 people on the streets to UNWELCOME trump to NYC ... trust me it will make you feel good .. I engaged in live stream with some folks in the street .. Hey .. let me say right up front: being LIVE at an event is much much much better than watching a LIVE STREAM...that said enjoy
click and join us on the street in front of TRUMP TOWER and waiting for Trump.
click
LIVE waiting to tell 45 NEW YORK HATES YOU me and a 1000 people.
Please let me know your response .. change is possible is we start with a reality check
https://www.democracynow.org/2017/8/15/full_interview_ta_nehisi_coates_onacj t
Now : Join me and about a 1500 people on the streets to UNWELCOME trump to NYC ... trust me it will make you feel good .. I engaged in live stream with some folks in the street .. Hey .. let me say right up front: being LIVE at an event is much much much better than watching a LIVE STREAM...that said enjoy
click and join us on the street in front of TRUMP TOWER and waiting for Trump.
click
LIVE waiting to tell 45 NEW YORK HATES YOU me and a 1000 people.
Please let me know your response .. change is possible is we start with a reality check
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