In the 1990s,Democrats helped shift the national conversation absent from systemic racism. whether the country’s first black president could not disrupt the racial status quo, what can we expect Clinton to achieve?
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 little is said approximately the tall levels of poverty in black communities. Ditto with unemployment. Before the eruption of the Black Lives Matter movement,nearly 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, or “You did a safe job creating a black middle class of people who really are doing well … You did a safe job. You did a safe job in opening opportunity.” But he would [also] say,I fought for freedom … but not for the freedom of people to kill each other with reckless abandonment, not for the freedom of children to have children and the fathers of the children to walk absent 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 disapprove that they would wreak violence on black people. I did not fight for the legal of black people to murder other black people with reckless abandonment.” “People … are looting because they are not piece of the system at all any more. They enact 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, and 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. They’re children of the distinguished 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 plan that maybe, just maybe, or you could be piece 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, or 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 begin 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 tell you that America isnt distinguished. Donald Trump’s got America all wrong. We are a sizable-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 last,best hope of soil. Related: Half of young Americans prefer meteor apocalypse to Donald Trump presidency Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com