That someone like this could have had a semi-credible campaign for the presidency in my lifetime is embarrassing. The fact that he still gets listened to by people in this country is embarrassing.

It says a lot about the Republican Party, to be honest.

Disgusting.

phat

but a strong media presence on MSNBC and before that CNN to spew his vile racist drivel.

“Right now we are in one of those moments when white America can’t stand to hear the truth about itself.”

Heh. More than a moment. More like a continuum. The current recycling of excuses for Iraq, that it really was a good idea but the execution was poor, soon to be replaced by “Those damn Arabs, never were any good” which will allow us to leave without ever admitting that it was wrong to start the war in the fist place, is just the latest form of denial. On and on and on….

You do recognize, just to be fair, that the Irish and Scots you cite became who they were, exploitive and violent and cruel, as the end product of more than a millenia of enslavement and brutalization at the hands of Romans and the English. Dysfunctionality perpetuates societally just as it does in families, with the children of abuse too often becoming abusers themselves.

It is poverty and lack of equal opportunity that are the great enslavers, and poor whites have more in common with poor blacks and poor Hispanics and poor Asians than any of us do with the rich of any color. If we could just stop fighting amongst ourselves for a while and battle with the real exploiters, the ones with all the money, we might get something done.

White/black/brown is not the color divide; it is green, or the lack thereof.

Oh, and Pat Buchanan is a horse’s ass. (Apologies to horses everywhere.)

Seriously, I won’t spend a lot of time on this bull but, the cotton, timber, oil, steel, textiles, ships, corn, cattle, gold, tobacco, sugar and rice that made America the global power it is today was processed and harvested by a pool of free or nearly free labor extracted predominantly from the lives of Africans in America.

Really? Go ahead and break this down for me, especially the “predominately from the lives of Africans” part as regards to oil, steel, and ships.

it has less to do with race, and more to do with class.

America has no problem exploiting any group.

Karl Marx on line 1.

Karl on line 1.

BIO and willyjsimmons while I am very much a part of the “we are the world, proletariat unite!,” faction. It ain’t all about the Benjamins. There is a deep seated visceral phobia about the darker race. Yes it is a class issue but, right now it’s racial, so buried in the subconscious of the individual psyche that most don’t even know it’s there. America and now the world has an increasing fear of Black folk, a pathological projection of the West’s brutality onto the rest of the world. Like King said, America needs a revolution of values. And it has to begin with the end of white supremacy. Which means that white folk have to do some soul searching and come to grips with their own barbarism. We can deal with the class issue but not until we deal with racial phobia.

cotton, timber, oil, steel, textiles, ships, corn, cattle, gold, tobacco, sugar and rice. These are the commodities, goods, that made America a world economic power, the rise of cotton, the rise, of America as a ship building nation, timber from the south, and north harvested by slaves, shipwrights who were slaves until the successive waves of abolition, and then shipwrights who worked for slave wages. America until 1975 was, in terms of labor and manufacturing, the China of the day. We could produce any of these commodities or goods cheaper and faster than any nation on earth because we could suppress labor costs; first through terror and racial discrimination and second through labor dilution – there were always a ready pool of black labor to keep the wages of white labor within a manageable range. Blacks worked for less than whites, it’s the argument we use against the Mexicans today. “We can’t live on less than minimum wage and no labor protections (so we say).” Black folk have been doing it since we arrived here. Black men still make between 75 and 85 cents for every dollar a white man makes. We won’t even get started about black women! So my point is that the surplus value that made American commodities market dominant and created the wealth of the country is due in no small part to the life essence extracted from the Africans and their descendents in her midst.

We can deal with the class issue but not until we deal with racial phobia.

That greed supports moral relativism of every kind.

And greed certainly isn’t exclusive to whites, or white americans.

for all of us, we won’t have justice for any of us.

By the way, Xenophon: What was your reaction to Cory Booker on Bill Moyers’ Journal this week on PBS?

Moyers did an entire hour on the 40th anniversary of the Kerner report — half with the Oklahoma Senator who is one of the few survivors of the Kerner commission, and the other half with Newark’s mayor, Cory Booker.

rather than in some meeting of skinheads planning violence, and does it publicly—than have stuff disappear down the memory hole when it gets inconvenient, like is happening with the Wright/church stuff now — http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/…

I think this kind of shit shouldn’t be whispered or behind-the-scenes if people really believe it—whether it’s racist swill or nationalist swill or sexist swill,etc.

Altho i hate that airing this stuff legitimizes it—and makes it “acceptable discourse” simply because it’s appearing on tv from people in suits.

I don’t think it is necessary to make the choice that one must come before the other. Rather, we should strive for eradicating both bigotry in all its forms as well as poverty and all kinds of subjugation. What concerns me is that in setting priorities we run the risk of holding up advancement on other fronts should progress be slower in the chosen path than had been anticipated.

While your point that blacks have been unfairly treated and white people have benefited from that is well taken, it is also true that women have been similarly exploited. Equal pay for equal work and obstacles to advancement are burdens of gender as well as color, and have been since rich white men set up our government to establish their political and economic power and avoid paying taxes. They were brutal in doing so then as they are today.

There are more whites living in poverty today than blacks. The vast majority of poor people are children, regardless of color. We have a responsibility to see to our children, to their welfare and their future, which transcends all other obligations. By making that commitment paramount we can perhaps rise above the divisiveness that inevitably comes from trying to make remediation specific to one or another group in a way that is off-putting to those who see themselves disadvantaged thereby.

I’m not sure what you see as justifying ”now the world has an increasing fear of Black folk” as it appears to me that the younger generation in this country is much less bigoted than any before. It may be that the older rich of this country sense their time is short, and so they are trying to shore up their defenses as much as they can. What now appears as selective racial oppression really is the tattered edge of a generalized last gasp at classist repression – or so I hope.

It isn’t all about the Benjamins, but a pocket full of Dead Presidents will ease many other pains.

“I don’t think it is necessary to make the choice that one must come before the other.”

I do poverty, in America, is secondary to racism. The apparatus of race creates the very inequality that creates poverty. Race is integral to our notion of property.

“we should strive for eradicating both bigotry in all its forms as well as poverty.”

Just so we’re clear. I’m not really concerned with bigotry. I’m concerned about racism. If you don’t want to play with me fine. If you are living off my back … we have a problem.

“your point that blacks have been unfairly treated and white people have benefited from that”

The point I was trying to make is that white people have extracted their wealth and created their civilization and identity around the brutal, repressive, exploitation of black and brown people.

“it is also true that women have been similarly exploited”

Yes, but some more than others. And not all exploiters were men.

“Equal pay for equal work and obstacles to advancement”

This argument is not about a job or money. It is about the allocation of resources and the ethics of a society.

“now the world has an increasing fear of Black folk”

Do you have any idea how absurd it is for Jeremiah Wright to be constructed as a radical or a purveyor of hate speech? The disconnect is huuuuuge!

“a pocket full of Dead Presidents will ease many other pains.”

True.

Finally, I hope that the younger generation will be able to pull out of this tail spin. But I fear that the cost of peace will be blacks who don’t complain, don’t play their music too loud, don’t frighten, aren’t angry, never talk about slavery (it makes me uncomfortable), prefer theirs to ours, and agree all suffering is equal, and most of all stay silent. America owes a debt for its prosperity that can’t be paid in money. It requires the active change of the American way of life it requires the end of race and a reckoning with the history of this country.

Sarah,
What was your reaction to Cory Booker

I tend not to trust carpet baggers or Rhodes Scholars. I’ll have to pull up the Moyers piece.

But, Yeah. I think Booker is the Obama tracer round.

I do tend to see the strongest lever for social change as being economic rather than psychological. I’d like to think that we can make progress first down emotional and intellectual lines of regret and recompense, but in my limited experience this will not be very speedy; there is IMHO a real generational shift headed in the direction of indifference to race/color/creed/gender/etc but neither you nor I will live to see the day.

Meantime, we both of us agree a revolution is in order. I’m trying to talk about how to raise the biggest army possible to do that, and while you may certainly insist on keeping poor whites and women in their own identity-marked divisions I suggest that it would be foolish to not want them fighting on your side. I think separatist approaches to integration will be difficult to sustain.

Finally, I do disagree that bigotry and racism are severable, and neither are jobs and advancement distinguishable from allocation of resources and societal ethics. I see them as integral parts of a whole, with some openings for change more addressable than others.

Finally regards to Rev Wright, the negative reaction has been I think largely overdone by the same establishment Rich White Males and followers as always, and otherwise has been ignored. A lot of noise but little change in the polls, so a big deal to the usual suspects but not to average people. I see this reaction as a good sign, rather than the bad thing you perceive. Half-a-glass perception, maybe?

Thanks for this topic change, a huge relief to get away from the HRCBHO slathering, and this is the sort of issue with legs enough that it will still matter 50 years from now when the individual players will just be names in a book.