To me the oddest part about Morning Joe's Interview with Rob Reiner (in which Mr. Reiner dare to suggest that race is a major factor with Trump supporter) is how shocked every other member of the panel gets.
You really need to see it to believe how shocked and surprised they are to think the race is a big issue in this election.
We live in a weird time where we don’t want to acknowledge racism. The best I can figure out is that we aren’t to blame. If a fish lived at the bottom of the ocean it’s whole life, could you blame the fish for not having the conception that it lives in the ocean? How could the fish even conceive of dry land? There is just the ocean and that’s it. My theory is that in America, most of us are just so inside the world of racism we just don’t even see it.
There is another amazing video going around in which a KKK imperial wizard says Trump is the man for the job, but he spends a lot of time saying that, YES!, the KKK IS NOT RACIST! IS ANYBODY RACIST ANYMORE?
Some things the KKK Imperial Wizard Guy says…
* “No were are not a hate group”
* “[on non-white people] We don’t like what they do but we don’t hate them”
* “Society today is more racial than we are”
* “We are not the big bad hate group people think we are”
I’m not a historian so hey I could be totally wrong here, but it seems to me that you can look at American history from a lot of different perspectives. But one perspective sure explains a whole lot: Poor whites have been given a higher status than brown folks and in turn poor whites support those in power.
Maybe this theory is wrong but it sure explains A LOT. Here’s my understanding of U.S. History…
1. 1676 — Whites and blacks rose up against the rich folks in Bacon’s Rebellion.
2. 1705- Virginia slave codes established giving white people a little more status
en.wikipedia.org/...
- “Established new property rights for slave owners
- Allowed for the legal, free trade of slaves with protections granted by the courts
- Established separate courts of trial
- Prohibited blacks, regardless of free status, from owning arms [weapons].
- Blacks could not strike a white for any reason
- Whites could not be employed by Blacks
- Allowed for the apprehension of suspected runaways”
3. Slavery — I don’t think I need to explain this one.
W.E.B. DuBois: “Status and privileges conferred by race could be used to make up for alienating and exploitative class relationships, North and South. White workers could, and did, define and accept their class positions by fashioning identities as ‘not slaves’ and as ‘not Blacks.’”
historymatters.appstate.edu/…
4. Jim Crowe- After the civil war to the 1960’s things were separate and not that equal.
Martin Luther King: “And all you are living on is the satisfaction of your skin being white, and the drum major instinct of thinking that you are somebody big because you are white. And you're so poor you can't send your children to school. You ought to be out here marching with every one of us every time we have a march."
Now that's a fact. That the poor white has been put into this position, where through blindness and prejudice, (Make it plain) he is forced to support his oppressors. And the only thing he has going for him is the false feeling that he’s superior because his skin is white—and can't hardly eat and make his ends meet week in and week out.”
kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/...
5. Southern Strategy years — 1960’s to present
Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."
^ Rick Perlstein (13 November 2012). "Exclusive: Lee Atwater’s Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy". The Nation.
And now that equality is hitting, what is going on with poor whites? Well they aren’t doing so good:
www.nytimes.com/...
“Something startling is happening to middle-aged white Americans. Unlike every other age group, unlike every other racial and ethnic group, unlike their counterparts in other rich countries, death rates in this group have been rising, not falling.”
“they concluded that rising annual death rates among this group are being driven not by the big killers like heart disease and diabetes but by an epidemic of suicides and afflictions stemming from substance abuse: alcoholic liver disease and overdoses of heroin and prescription opioids.”
Whether it’s racial equality and that we are more and more being treated as expendable fodder for corporations, working white people are angry. They want America Great Again.
If we are going to be fish at the bottom of the ocean let’s at least be self aware. Let’s talk about the ocean we grew up in and live in now. Let’s not be shocked or pretend.