Tag: african americans
Are We All In This American Experiment Together?

Are We All In This American Experiment Together?

Who doesn’t love Cary Grant, the debonair British-born, American acting legend, who wooed leading ladies, including the Hepburns, Katharine and Audrey, as well as generations of moviegoers?

But he was not so charming when his submarine commander character in 1943’s “Destination Tokyo” said: “The Japs don’t understand the love we have for our women. They don’t even have a word for it in their language.”

Demonizing “the enemy” in wartime as “the other,” incapable of emotion and not quite human is not unusual. But someone always pay a hefty price. Loyal Japanese American families, rounded up and shipped to internment camps, waited until 1988 for President Ronald Reagan to issue an apology; survivors received meager compensation. Though that was expected to be that, the trauma to those Americans and the nation lingered.

And despite that World War II-era lesson, and ones before and after, America continues to make the same mistake, a notion important to contemplate during the Fourth of July festivities, when we celebrate the ideal.

This year, a Washington, D.C., military parade and fireworks display with a speech by Donald Trump that places a national holiday squarely in partisan territory was both a distraction from and a reminder of our current plight.

The situation at the southern border offers a glaring example of that gap between promise and reality, as some members of the border patrol tasked with an admittedly difficult job — maintaining order and safe conditions as asylum seekers attempt to cross into the United States — were revealed by a ProPublica investigation of letting off steam with cruel and dehumanizing remarks that make light of the deaths of children and the concern of visiting elected officials.

It starts at the top, of course, with a president who shows little empathy for desperate families — try imagining the fear and despair that would fuel the decision to start such a dangerous trek — as he leeches money away from aiding the countries they are fleeing and still insists a wall is the solution.

Though Republican and Democratic lawmakers contentiously came together to approve $4.59 billion in supplemental funding to improve border conditions, that comity as a path to progress on bipartisan immigration reform is fading fast. With Trump’s re-election plan to stir up resentments, villains are needed — asylum seekers fit the bill.

The post-Democratic debate reactions also reveal who in America is allowed to feel and express pain and who is expected to grin and bear it.

It’s no surprise that Donald Trump Jr. shared (then deleted) a tweet questioning the identity of California senator and Democratic presidential hopeful Kamala Harris. It’s a sadly unsurprising sign of a return to the birther lie Trump and company tried to pin on President Barack Obama.

What has been interesting, though, is how many Democrats are taking issue with Harris’ dust-up with former Vice President Joe Biden on his nostalgic statement about working with vicious pro-segregationist senators and his record of joining them in legislative efforts to fight busing to integrate schools.

The backlash from those who find the fact that she brought up the subject impolite offers a master class on who gets to be vulnerable, to make the political personal and to show preparedness and power in a venue — a debate — where that is actually the point.

You don’t have to support Harris to have been impressed with her debate performance. She did not raise her voice as she asked Biden to explain his long record (though being soft-spoken won’t protect a black woman from being called “angry”); Biden had a chance to respond, and he should have seen it coming. With years of experience and the same opportunity and obligation to prep, he was hardly a politician in distress. If he is the last candidate standing against Trump, Biden will face a far tougher grilling.

Yet, though her poll numbers show a bump, there have also been accusations that Harris took a cheap shot, landed a low blow, dealt the race card — name the cliché — as though race has not been a thread that is woven through every part of American life since the nation’s founding.

So many have dismissed her contention that Biden’s actions and associations hurt, deeming her upbringing too comfortable, her parents too educated, her academic and professional achievements too impressive for her to have ever felt any emotion that genuine.

New Jersey senator and fellow presidential hopeful Cory Booker faced a similar reaction when he said Biden’s recollections of convivial banter with segregationists hit him in the gut. How dare he actually bring into the conversation how Biden’s reminiscing made him and so many others feel?

If black folks in America let every slight or insult stop them from going about their business, they would never leave the house. That doesn’t mean we are impervious to the pain. Ask Barack and Michelle Obama if being leader of the free world and first lady of the United States — rising that high — makes you invulnerable from criticism or provides an impenetrable shield.

Now, note who does get the benefit of the doubt and a pat on the back.

In a not-quite-as-publicized moment on last week’s debate stage, South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg was given high marks for merely owning up to his failure in two terms to diversify the city’s police department and to bridge a glaring wealth gap in his hurting city. This when he is asking the American people to elect him to lead a country, not a small Midwestern city.

When a black man was shot by a white South Bend police officer with a troubled racial history, Buttigieg faced questions from his community and  California Rep. Eric Swalwell  a 2020 rival, that he could not answer. (He has since unveiled a racial justice and minority investment program he said he would pursue as president.) But his less-than-adequate answer has been held up as a model for how Biden should have responded.

Harris had better be prepared to defend her own past as a California prosecutor and attorney general when it surely comes up; rather than seeing those attacks as a cheap shot, a lot of folks will surely say she had it coming.

The example of Buttigieg’s media celebrity and golden boy glow contrasts with how Julián Castro, the former mayor of San Antonio and Housing and Urban Development secretary in the Obama Cabinet, was covered until his own standout debate performance.

When Castro, who has put forward a plan promoting police reform, listed just a few of the people of color killed in interactions with police — “What about Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Laquan McDonald, Sandra Bland, Pamela Turner, Antonio Arce” — it was startling just hearing out loud the names of Americans who seldom get even that measure of consideration and respect.

It’s so easy to listen to propaganda from a long-ago movie, cringe and move on. Just give Cary a pass. But as America has seen again and again, it doesn’t take a war for that ugly tactic of dehumanization and disregard to surface.

It could be a struggle over who matters and who does not, who deserves a slice of the all-American pie and who gets the crumbs, or lately, who falls on which side of political difference.

Are we all in this American experiment together? As the country pauses to mark this year’s Fourth of July holiday, it is a question that is as relevant as ever.

Mary C. Curtis has worked at The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Charlotte Observer, as national correspondent for Politics Daily, and is a senior facilitator with The OpEd Project. Follow her on Twitter @mcurtisnc3.

IMAGE: U.S. Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA).

 

Danziger: They Never Had It So Good

Danziger: They Never Had It So Good

Jeff Danziger lives in New York City. He is represented by CWS Syndicate and the Washington Post Writers Group. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons and one novel. Visit him at DanzigerCartoons.com.

Why The GOP Deserves Trump As Much As Trump Deserves The GOP

Why The GOP Deserves Trump As Much As Trump Deserves The GOP

First Donald Trump came for President Obama’s birth certificate.

And most Republicans said nothing because they knew much of the GOP base had been waiting for a famous guy to demand papers from the first black president.

Sure, “mainstream” Republicans didn’t embrace his birtherism explicitly. But they stood on stage with him, accepted his endorsements and his foundation’s cash, even when they were supposed to be investigating him for fraud.

Then Trump came for the immigrants, the Muslim-Americans, the refugees, Ted Cruz’s birth certificate, Ted Cruz’s family, Judge Gonzalo Curiel, the Khan family, Alicia Machado…

Along the way he shook off his history of dehumanizing women — to the glee of the crowd at the first GOP debate — and inspired a flood of online racism, anti-semitism, and hate from his supporters that the candidate did just about nothing to contain.

It’s obvious that Trump deserves the impending electoral drubbing he’d already earned even before a leaked tape exposed the GOP nominee bragging about how his fame let him “do anything” to women. He was already headed to the bad end of an electoral college landslide, punctuated by what will likely be the worst performance with minority voters for any Republican since 1964.

But just as Trump deserves to be scarred with the filth of his words and conduct forever, the GOP deserves any damage the Trump does to its stature.

Just last week Paul Ryan promised he would use a Trump victory to “steamroll” huge tax breaks for the rich while revoking the health insurance of 20 million Americans before winter’s end.

As Trump goes up in flames, so does that dream of transferring trillions in dollars in wealth to the richest, who have never been richer. With it goes a once-in-a-generation chance to dominate all three branches of the government.

In exchange, the GOP gets two new swing states to defend — Arizona and Georgia — with the possibility of a third, Texas, which if and when it turns blue could end the GOP’s hopes of ever winning the White House again.

Yes, Texas is likely safe for the GOP, for now and the next decade. And the reason for this reveals why the GOP deserves Trump even more than the Trump deserves the GOP.

Today — in 2016 — it is more difficult to register voters in Texas than it was in Mississippi during 1964’s historic Freedom Summer.

Texas treats voter registration like a criminal offense and makes it as difficult as possible to do,” writes The Nation‘s Ari Berman.

The state’s laws make it costly and risky to launch the kind of voter registration drive necessary to get 2.2 million unregistered Latinos and 750,000 unregistered African-Americans on the voting rolls. And you can see why: Mitt Romney won the state in 2012 by about 1.3 million votes.

Texas’ investment in keeping likely Democratic voters away from ballots is decades old, but the GOP’s decision to make an assault on voting rights a national priority is more recent.

In 2000, the Bush Administration — which had lost the popular vote and only won the state of Florida thanks the Supreme Court and a voter purge that took place under Governor Jeb Bush — launched “a dramatic effort to restrict voting rights,” Berman reports.

A five-year effort found no significant evidence of voting fraud. But the real fraud was the idea that they were troubled by voting fraud. The plague the GOP was obviously determined to root out was the “wrong people” voting.

To stop “them,” the administration approved the first voter-ID law, an unnecessary burden meant to address a problem that doesn’t exist. Only 31 cases of voting impersonation were identified in over a billion votes while countless thousands, or maybe even millions by now, have been barred from the polls by laws designed to shrink the electorate.

The notion that black Americans voting is implicitly fraudulent is as old as black Americans voting. And the GOP hyped that trope up to eleven after President Obama was elected, laying the groundwork for a flurry of restrictions on voting in red states unlike anything we’d seen since the 1960s.

Most of the worst of these egregious attacks on voting were blocked in time for the 2012 election. Still, despite evidence we were in the midst of a coordinated effort to deny the vote to Americans who’d suffered historical discrimination, a conservative Congressional majority fulfilled a conservative dream of gutting the Voting Rights Act in 2013.

What followed was an explosion of new laws that barely bothered to hide their real purpose. North Carolina’s “monster” anti-voting law targeted black voters with “almost surgical precision,” a federal judge found.

Legislatively, the GOP’s assault on President Obama’s legitimacy was unlike anything America had ever seen before.

From the night of his inauguration, conservatives vowed to block anything he was for, even though the country was at the nadir of recession that the GOP had led us into and Obama made a historic effort to embrace Republican ideas, including Mitt Romney’s framework for health care reform.

Even before they’d built a historically large House majority out of districts that were 95 percent majority-white, Republican opposition was relentless. It nearly led us into debt default that would have crashed the global economy. And it actually led us into a government shutdown based on the premise that Obama, who had just been reelected, should give up the signature accomplishment of his first term.

By 2016, the contempt for Obama had become institutionalized as the GOP refused consider a president’s budget and the GOP would not even grant a hearing for the president’s appointment to fill a Supreme Court vacancy, leaving the seat open for the longest period of time in American history to be filled by… Donald Trump.

While the GOP toyed with ways of stopping Trump, the collective action problem of the primary became a full-on embrace of the nominee by fall, with RNC chairman Reince Priebus threatening to punish any Republican who didn’t back Trump.

Then came the “grab them by the p**sy” tape and Republicans were finally threatened with the loss of something they valued — the votes of white women voters.

Rats began to flee the sinking Trump ship, but the deck was already mostly underwater.

Evidence suggests that thanks to the party’s co-dependent relationship with Donald Trump, the GOP may be on the verge of permanently losing two of the fastest growing groups of new voters — Latinos and Asian-Americans. Support from these two groups is dipping toward a percentage in the single digits, suggesting that the GOP could lose their support in the way they’ve lost the African-American vote since the 1964 election, the point that marked the GOP’s surrender to — or willing embrace of — its fate as the party of white America.

In 1968, the GOP’s pivot to the white was incredibly well timed. Fueled by a historic corporate investment in moving the country to the right, Republicans rode a demographic wave to a conservative revolution that undermined many of the policies that built the middle class.

In 2016, betting on white may help you keep an immaculately gerrymandered House of Representatives.It’s a recipe for electoral disaster that may be buffered by a heartless restriction of voting rights as well shameless obstruction — but not for long.

IMAGE: Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus speaks at the Republican National Convention winter meetings in San Diego, California January 16, 2015.  REUTERS/Mike Blake

Can Bernie Sanders Win The African-American Vote?

Can Bernie Sanders Win The African-American Vote?

Bill Clinton, so the saying goes, was America’s first black president.

Novelist Toni Morrison dubbed him so, noting that he displayed “almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.”

The analogy stuck because people saw Clinton’s rapport of kinship and familiarity that crossed racial lines.

His wife is not blessed with the same attributes. This became starkly apparent in 2008 when she faced a formable political challenger for the Democratic presidential nomination and lost as African-American voters flocked to him.

This go-around, it’s not an upstart biracial senator from Illinois who is challenging Hillary Clinton for the coveted prize in this election cycle. It’s a 74-year-old white guy with a Mister Rogers appeal.

Bernie Sanders is the exclamation point on bad news for Clinton. In the Iowa caucuses, Sanders’ virtual tie in votes showed that Clinton can’t rest on her substantial resume.

Clinton cannot take black voters for granted. Sanders may not win enough African-American support to snag the Democratic nomination away, but he’ll give her a considerable run for it, even in Southern states like South Carolina, whose Democratic primary will take place at the end of the month.

Sanders’ appeal is that he acknowledges something that African-Americans know viscerally: There is no post-racial America. He has also offered a forthright critique of wealth and income equality in America, along with measures to rectify it. All he has to do is package his message right.

The election of Barack Obama did not substantially alter the lives of most black Americans. True, it was a collective emotional achievement for much of America, and especially for black America. Yet it’s ludicrous to believe that one man in the highest office of the land, even serving two terms, was going to undo the entrenched realities of race in America.

African-Americans, segregated and humiliated first by slavery and then by segregation, and further still by subtler forms of bias and discrimination that are still with us, are lagging behind other people of other races and ethnicities in employment and economic and educational attainment.

By the time the recovery began from the most recent recession, African-Americans had lost the most ground and now have to make harder strides to catch up.

Those without wealth invested in stocks and those whose work skills are less in demand — especially people whose families are less firmly entrenched in middle class — are struggling. And Sanders speaks well to these voters, especially to a new generation that is worried that they won’t be able to achieve, not due to personal failings but because systems of government such as taxation and justice are rigged against them.

In Iowa, Sanders swept Clinton with voters under 30, winning by a 70-point margin. He also won resoundingly with voters aged 30 to 44.

Iowa, some shrug, is overwhelmingly white. True.

But what if younger African-American voters aren’t as beholden to the idea that they must stick with the Clinton team, even if Hillary is a surrogate of Obama? Some evidence of this is appearing.

In recent weeks former Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner has become a vocal advocate, along with the attorney who represented the Walter Scott family. Some rappers have begun advocating for him, plying their networks on social media. And the revered scholar Cornel West has been actively campaigning and took to Facebook with a post that begins, “Why I endorse Brother Bernie….”

It reads, in part: “I do so because he is a long-distance runner with integrity in the struggle for justice for over 50 years. Now is the time for his prophetic voice to be heard across our crisis-ridden country, even as we push him with integrity toward a more comprehensive vision of freedom for all.”

All Sanders has to do is speak ferociously for the underdogs of society, for the masses of people who have been left behind. And he is very adept at connecting these dots.

A good example is Sanders’ platform on racial justice. It seeks to address what he defines as “the five central types of violence waged against black, brown and indigenous Americans: physical, political, legal, economic and environmental.”

And he fully defines each, with grim examples of the harm they have caused. Then he offers his solutions.

Black Americans know these realities in ways that are starkly personal.

The question is: What must Sanders do to convince black voters that he can and will address them?

(Mary Sanchez is an opinion-page columnist for The Kansas City Star. Readers may write to her at: Kansas City Star, 1729 Grand Blvd., Kansas City, Mo. 64108-1413, or via e-mail at msanchez@kcstar.com.)

(c) 2016, THE KANSAS CITY STAR. DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC

Photo: U.S. Democratic presidential candiate Bernie Sanders arrives to watch U.S. President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress in Washington, January 12, 2016. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts