I have just finished watching Joe give a brief speech in the White House before signing the proclamation to create a national monument for Emmett Till. I had two thoughts as I listened to Joe’s moving remarks: (1). Joe’s about as demented as I’m demented; (2). the idea that Joe needs to worry about someone like Tim Scott siphoning off minority votes next year is almost as stupid as the idea that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.
What has happened with the politics of race over the past thirty years is that the GOP has learned to be polite. This wasn’t the case when Ronald Reagan used to laugh as he talked about the ‘welfare queen riding around in her Cadillac. It also wasn’t true when George H. W. Bush used a photo of Willie Horton to get himself elected President in 1988.
That was then, this is now. And now even Donald Trump GOP can’t use blackness as a stalking horse in the 2024 race, because if he does, he’ll once again wind up on the losing end of the stick.
How does a guy who went to Yale College and then Harvard Law School act as stupidly as DeSantis has acted by making a comment about how blacks learned trades like blacksmithing while they were slaves? I mean, what the f*** is wrong with this moron?
Donald Trump won the 2016 Presidential election because he won 3 swing states – MI, PA, WI – by .005% of the votes cast for him and Hillary in those states. In case you have trouble with decimal points, his winning margin was one-half of one percent.
Obama, incidentally, won those 3 states by just a shade under one million votes. In other words, Clinton was unable to hold onto 600,000 votes in 2016 that went for Obama in 2012. Had she kept just one percent of Obama’s 2012 vote that she lost in 2016, we wouldn’t have had to put up with Trump and all his MAGA bullshit over the last seven years.
Back in 2020, Joe got into some trouble during the campaign when he told a black radio-show host “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump then you ain’t black.” Not only was this comment about as right on as any comment about Trump could ever have been, but some liberal activists who were all hot bothered by Joe’s comment should have been ashamed of themselves.
By the way, I love how these same liberals felt that the Democrat(ic) Party needed to make amends for having taken the black vote for granted in the 2016 campaign. In case you were half asleep during that campaign, perhaps you need to be reminded that Hillary took everyone for granted, okay?
Anyway, back to Emmett Till.
Nine years after the lynching of Till, three civil rights workers were abducted, shot, and buried in an unmarked grave in Philadelphia, MS. Two of the victims were white, one was black. They were murdered by the Klan because they had been sent down to Mississippi by C.O.R.E. to register blacks who wanted to vote.
This kind of behavior seems like ancient history but when I saw one of those shitheads parading through the U.S. Capitol building waving a Confederate flag on January 6th, Joe’s comment today about how ‘hate exists but it stays underground’ rang true.
When I went to Paris as a graduate student in 1969, the first thing I noticed were the small plaques affixed to the walls of apartment houses stating that so-and-so was last seen on this spot before he or she was taken away by the Nazis during the war. It was also against the law in France to fly a Nazi flag.
What would be so bad about placing a small memorial stone on every spot where a black American was lynched in the South? These black victims of racism were all Americans, even the ones who were brought here before the 13th Amendment was passed in 1865.
To quote Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter, “history also has its claims.”
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