I have been a close observer and participant in American politics since I was about 12. It had been many years since I had heard the subject of busing brought up by an elected official or someone running for public office, so when Sen. Harris and Fmr. Vice President Biden had their back and forth about it at their recent debate, it brought back a memory that had been filed in the bowels of my political memory for around 35 years. Around 1983-4, when I was a young teenager, my brother brought home a flyer he had gotten from one of his “asshole buddies” entitled Boating, Not Busing. I googled, or in my case DuckDuckGo-ed the flyer to recall exactly what it said and the relevant time period (c.1972). The first link that came up was from the Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries Social Welfare History Project. It’s a little bit different than I remember, but the spirit of the words on the paper is exactly the same as it was all those years ago. And I don’t remember The National Socialist White Peoples Party of Arlington, VA (complete with snail mail address) being on the bottom of the flyer. The events of the subsequent three weeks or so have made the content of the flyer all the more relevant. I will quote some of the less “colorful” but still relevant parts of the flyer below the fold, as well as posting the Boating, Not Busing (Let’s get Blackie back to Africa) flyer in its entirety. Be forewarned, the language in the flyer itself is not only deeply racist and anti-Semitic, but very terse. But the spirit of it has not one iota of difference between it and what Trump has been fomenting his entire time in public life. Have a look… (Edit: I will not be quoting the flyer at all, because to quote less “colorful” parts of it will leave it devoid of important context. Just read it for yourself if you have the stomach for it. It’s important to understand how much closer we are politically and spiritually as a country to the realization of some of the key political program goals of the National Socialist White Peoples Party):
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images.socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/...
I’m not even going to embed the flyer itself in the diary. You may find it at the link if you wish to read it.
As the old saying goes: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Kudos to VCU for preserving this important artifact. It’s an important piece for a contextual understanding of why we are hearing “Send Her Back” and how normalized open racism has become in our society. This didn’t just happen. It’s been fomented and cultivated over a period of many decades. If you have ever been inclined to believe that the racism that Trump has consistently expressed in the open is merely codswallop to “gin up the base” as it were, you may want to reconsider that. This is who Trump is and what he does, and very deliberately. When Stephen Miller goes on the Sunday shows and talks about concepts like upholding “the principles of Western Civilization” this is EXACTLY what he means, and there are numerous examples of policies being implemented to that end. I remember my own reaction when I saw that flyer all those years ago: I thought to myself that no one really believes this shit anymore except in a few places like north Georgia and Mississippi. Having grown up in the suburbs of Detroit, I was much more used to the quiet, more subdued bigotry of “I’m not a racist, but...” that I had heard a thousand times by the time I was fifteen and have heard a million times since. I didn’t take it seriously enough then, and for this, I was wrong. But we all have to take it seriously now.