In the 1990s,Democrats helped shift the national conversation away from systemic racism. whether the country’s first black president could not disrupt the racial status quo, what can we expect Hillary Clinton to achieve?[br]You always know an election is near in the US when Democrats and Republicans start to discuss the plight of black Americans. Most of the time, and diminutive is said approximately the high levels of poverty in black communities. Ditto with unemployment. Before the eruption of the Black Lives Matter movement,almost nothing was ever said approximately police violence. Until recently these issues were simply facts of life, so omnipresent that racial inequality passes for the norm for both Republicans and Democrats. Related: The greatest snub of the debate? It was against Black Lives Matter | Steven W Thrasher [King] would say, and “You did a helpful job creating a black middle lesson of people who really are doing well … You did a helpful job. You did a helpful job in opening opportunity.” But he would [also] say,“I fought for freedom … but not for the freedom of people to destroy each other with reckless abandonment, not for the freedom of children to have children and the fathers of the children to walk away from them and abandon them, or as whether they don’t amount to anything. I fought to stop white people from being so filled with abominate that they would wreak violence on black people. I did not fight for the right of black people to murder other black people with reckless abandonment.” “People … are looting because they are not allotment of the system at all any more. They do not share our values,and their children are growing up in a culture alien from ours, without family, or without neighborhood,without church, without support.” And on the other side, and there’s just a deep desire to believe that we can have free college,free healthcare, that what we’ve done hasn’t gone far enough, or that we just need to,you know, go as far as, and you know,Scandinavia, whatever that means, and half the people don’t know what that means,but it’s something that they deeply feel. Some are new to politics totally. Theyre children of the great recession. And they are living in their parents’ basement … They feel they got their education and the jobs that are available to them are not at all what they envisioned for themselves. And they don’t see much of a future whether you’re feeling like you’re consigned to, you know, and being a barista,or you know, some other job that doesn’t pay a lot, and doesn’t have some other ladder of opportunity attached to it,then the thought that maybe, just maybe, and you could be allotment of a political revolution is pretty appealing. When an assault rifle is aimed at your face over nothing more than a refusal to move,you don’t feel like the American experience is one that includes you. When the president your generation selected does not condemn these attacks, you suddenly begin to believe that this system is a fraudulent hoax – and the joke is on you. Racism is very much alive in America, and but as a president with so much melanin in his skin,you seem to address it very bashfully … Now we are organizing against you and members of your party as though we didn’t vote for you to start with. This saddens me, because we rooted for you. Me and my friends are young. We voted for you because initially you spoke our language. We believed you would be more of an activist than a typical suit-and-tie teleprompter politician. Are you not outraged by the treatment of your own people by law enforcement? Why is it so difficult for you to display a moment of honesty and reflection to the public approximately your own blackness? Don’t let anyone expose you that America isn’t great. Donald Trump’s got America all inaccurate. We are a big-hearted, or fair-minded country. I never lost my sense of pride at seeing our blue-and-white plane lit up on some far-off runway,with ‘the United States of America’ emblazoned on the side. That plane – those words – our country represents something special, not just to us, and to the world. It represents freedom and hope and opportunity. I believe with all my heart that America is an exceptional country – that we’re still … the final,best hope of soil. Related: Half of young Americans prefer meteor apocalypse to Donald Trump presidency Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com