Ronald Reagan doesn’t live here anymore: Why it’s high time liberals stop tiptoeing around race

Salon ^ | May 16, 2015 | Elias Isquith, staff writer at Salon, focusing on politics.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

http://media.salon.com/2015/05/hillary_warren_de_blasio.jpg

Earlier this week, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, along with a gaggle of bored reporters and some boldfaced names in the progressive movement, unveiled a “Progressive Agenda to Combat Income Inequality.” Much like the media event that accompanied its unveiling, the agenda is supposed to be understood as a kind of 21st-century, liberal version of the storied “Contract with America,” the PR stunt that, as legend (erroneously) has it, rocketed Newt Gingrich and the Republican Party to power after the 1994 midterm elections. As my colleague Joan Walsh reported on Thursday, this backward-looking attempt to lay out a forward-looking platform for the Democratic Party did not go entirely according to plan.

Which is not to say it was a failure. In fact, for a photo-op held during a non-election year in May and headlined by a relatively unknown local politician, the unveiling of the agenda probably got more attention than it deserved. Even so, as Joan relayed from the scene, there was some tension at the event — and not only because President Obama’s hard sell of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is driving some liberals to distraction while making others defensive. Sure, the agenda does call on lawmakers to “[o]ppose trade deals that hand more power to corporations at the expense of American jobs, workers’ rights, and the environment,” which is basically how the TPP is described by its foes. But that discord was for the most part kept under the surface.

The real reason de Blasio’s stab at playing the role of Progressive Moses was a bit awkward (despite going much better for him than it did for Ed Miliband) is knottier and harder to ignore. And it didn’t only trip up Hizzoner, but also marred a same-day Roosevelt Institute event on “rewriting the rules” of the economy, which was keynoted by no less a figure than Sen. Elizabeth Warren. It’s an issue that’s long dogged the American left, and the United States more generally, and it’s one that will not go away, no matter how fervently everyone may wish. It is, of course, the issue of race; and as these D.C. left-wing confabs showed, it will dash any hope of a liberal future unless the “professional left” gets deathly serious about it — and quick.

If you haven’t read Joan’s piece (which you really should), here’s a quick summary of how race wound up exposing the fault lines of the left at two events that were supposed to be about unity of purpose. Despite American politics becoming increasingly concentrated over the past two years on issues of mass incarceration and police brutality — which both have much to do with the legacy of white supremacy and the politics of race — neither de Blasio’s agenda nor the Roosevelt Institute’s report spend much time on reforming criminal justice. To their credit, folks from both camps have agreed that this was a mistake and have promised to redress it in the future. Still, it was quite an oversight — and a shame, too, because it justifiably distracted from an agenda and a report that were both chock-full of good ideas.

I wasn’t in the room when de Blasio’s agenda or the Roosevelt Institute’s report were created, but I feel quite confident in saying that the mistake here was not a result of prejudice or thoughtlessness or even conscious timidity. I suspect instead that ingrained habits and knee-jerk reflexes — born from coming of age, at least politically, in the Reagan era — are more likely to blame. Because while the radical left has been talking about and organizing around racial injustices for decades, mainstream American liberalism, the kind of liberalism that is comfortably within the Democratic Party mainstream, is much less familiar with explicitly integrating race into its broader vision.

Let me try to put some meat on those bones with a concrete example also taken from earlier in the week. On Tuesday, President Obama joined the Washington Post’s E. J. Dionne, the American Enterprise Institute’s Arthur Brooks, and Harvard’s Robert Putnam at Georgetown University for a public conversation about poverty. And while you’d expect race to come up — what with the African-American poverty rate being nearly three times that of whites, the African-American unemployment rate being more than two times that of whites, and the African-American median household income being barely more than half that of whites — you would be incorrect. As the Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates noted in response to this strange conversation, “the word ‘racism’ does not appear in the transcript once.”

Again, it strikes me as unlikely that simple bigotry is the reason. A more probable explanation is that mainstream American liberals like Obama and Dionne (Brooks is a conservative and Putnam is not explicitly political) have become so used to tiptoeing around white Americans’ racial anxieties that they cannot stop without a conscious effort. For the past 30-plus years, mainstream liberalism has tried to address racial injustice by focusing on the related but distinct phenomenon of economic injustice. The strategy, as Coates puts it, has been to “talk about class and hope no one notices” the elephant in the room, which is race. And for much of that time, one could at least make a case that the strategy worked.

But as I’ve been hammering on lately in pieces about Hillary Clinton, the ’90s are over. What made political sense in 1996 doesn’t make nearly as much sense today. Like the Democratic Party coalition, the country is not as white as it used to be. And the young Americans whose backing liberals will need to push the Democrats and the country to the left are the primary reason. If it was always true that the progressive movement could not afford to take the support of non-white Americans for granted, it’s exponentially more true now, when the energy and vitality of the progressive movement is so overwhelmingly the product of social movements — like the Fight for $15 or #BlackLivesMatter — driven by people of color.

As Hillary Clinton seems to understand, a key component of smart politics is to meet your voters and your activists where they are, rather than where history or the conventional wisdom tells you they should be. For the broader progressive movement, that means shaking off the learned habits of the recent past — and, more specifically, overcoming the fear that talking forthrightly about unavoidably racial problems, like mass incarceration, will scare away too many white voters to win. Economic and racial injustice have always been seamlessly interconnected in America; but as leading progressives learned this week, the time when liberals could talk about class but whisper about race is coming to an end.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

But as I’ve been hammering on lately in pieces about Hillary Clinton, the ’90s are over. What made political sense in 1996 doesn’t make nearly as much sense today. Like the Democratic Party coalition, the country is not as white as it used to be. And the young Americans whose backing liberals will need to push the Democrats and the country to the left are the primary reason. If it was always true that the progressive movement could not afford to take the support of non-white Americans for granted, it’s exponentially more true now, when the energy and vitality of the progressive movement is so overwhelmingly the product of social movements — like the Fight for $15 or #BlackLivesMatter — driven by people of color.

The "primary reason" link in the Salon piece goes to a Pew Research Center article on Millennials - the ones (not what they want to highlight that dismal fact) who will be paying the tab.

Millennias are up for grabs and the optics look better for them on the right - if they actually THINK and understand what their future looks like with Democrats in power, they will abandon their crippling progressive ideology.

So I offer this good piece on Millennials - the voting block that the Left has been indoctrinating - grooming for to vote for LIBERAL policies, the generation that this Salon writer sees as potentially slipping away (so the race card must be played early and often).

Kevin D. Williamson (National Review)- It is WELL WORTH a full read [visually broken into 3 small sections - so be sure to keep reading; total length no longer than a 2 page printed article]. Who are they? How do they compare to Baby Boomers, Gen Xers? What is their outlook, their options?

"Generation Vexed: The downwardly mobile Millennials may be waking up at last"

"...............Conservatives will never out-snark, out-mock, or out-tweet the popular culture that embraced Barack Obama as a semi-religious icon. But Millennials are right at the beginning of what promises to be an unpleasant, extended encounter with the facts of life, and it may be that they will soon figure out that there is more to understanding those facts than snark and emojis. Mocking them would be easy, while persuading them will prove difficult and frustrating, because conservatism, unromantic disposition that it is, is in the end an exercise in calculating a balance of human imperfections. The Millennials do not understand that — not quite yet."

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Young Conservative: Scott Walker Imposes Drug Testing for Government Aid, Liberals Lose Their Minds

".........Most people agree that there should be some form of an economic social safety net for those who’re in need. But there should also be standards set and enforced for those seeking benefits. Proving one isn’t on drugs is an obvious one. That so-called religious leaders are trying to thwart the implementation of Gov. Walker’s legislation is in my opinion a clear case of what low regard progressives (political or religious) have for the very people they claim to help. What these religious fakes are actually saying is that by simply being in an economic underclass- for however long- trumps one’s ability to resist the temptation of using drugs. In other words- they’re poor and can’t help it.

For progressives it’s always about class and never about the intrinsic value of the people in the varying economic classes they hold in contempt. So much for ‘justice.’"

[Cincinatus' Wife]

January 2015: Walker budget to bar drug users from food stamps, Medicaid

"Madison — With federal approval in doubt, Gov. Scott Walker is moving ahead with his campaign pledge to ensure that drug users aren't getting public health care, food stamp or jobless benefits..........

"We know employers in Wisconsin have jobs available, but they don't have enough qualified employees to fill those positions," Walker said. "With this budget, we are addressing some of the barriers keeping people from achieving true freedom and prosperity and the independence that comes with having a good job and doing it well."

The governor said the drug-testing proposal would apply only to able-bodied adults, not the elderly or children, and would include transitional jobs initiatives. Walker wants to test all FoodShare and BadgerCare applicants but limit the drug testing for unemployment benefits to certain applicants.

The idea expands on another requirement passed by Walker and Republicans in 2013 to make able-bodied FoodShare recipients receive job training.".....

[jocon307]

Our gentle author might have some ideas, ideas I would no doubt disagree with, but his writing style is so convoluted and overdone that he basically makes himself unreadable.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

He likes riots and racial pokes in the eye - like Obama and Holder have been promoting.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Michelle Obama and Saida Grundy "get it."

What Happens to Black Women Who Boldly Speak Truth About Racial Inequality "Two remarkable black women made news this week. Michelle Obama, the most scrutinized African-American woman in the 21st century, did so by acknowledging unspoken truths about race, class and gender in public during a landmark commencement speech at Tuskegee University in Alabama.

The other, Saida Grundy, a newly minted Ph.D. from Michigan scheduled to begin a new job as an assistant professor of sociology and African-American studies at Boston University, did so through provocation, speaking loudly and impolitely about race, privilege and power in tweets that caused a national firestorm.

The controversies surrounding the first lady’s speech and Professor Grundy’s tweets remind us of the way in which brilliant, intellectually provocative and bold black women are forced to navigate the public sphere.

In her candid remarks, Michelle Obama discussed the major and minor assaults that she has endured since her husband, Barack Obama, ran for president. From being described as practicing a “terrorist fist bump” while celebrating a primary win with her husband and being depicted on the cover of the New Yorker in an Afro holding a machine gun, to being falsely accused of hating white people and America, Michelle Obama has emerged as the metaphorical black female body: under constant assault, surveillance and violence, but heroically able to transcend what tried to destroy her.

Describing racism’s impact on President Obama and herself, she went into poignant detail: “We’ve both felt the sting of those daily slights throughout our entire lives—the folks who crossed the street in fear of their safety; the clerks who kept a close eye on us in all those department stores; the people at formal events who assumed we were the ‘help’— and those who have questioned our intelligence, our honesty, even our love of this country.

Conservatives have predictably responded by accusing the first lady of playing the infamous, and fictive, race card, but she should be applauded for speaking her truth—one shared by millions of black women—so loudly and proudly. If Michelle Obama’s Tuskegee speech resembled a complex jazz symphony, replete with highs and lows that took the Class of 2015 on a personal and political journey, Saida Grundy’s tweets about racism and white supremacy played out, in Twitter, as staccato outbursts of rage, humor and indignation.

Some of her tweets—such as “Why is white America reluctant to identify white college males as a problem population?”—called out white male privilege on college campuses (especially in light of the epidemic of unreported sexual assaults against women), while others, quite humorously, rued her inability to boycott white-owned stores during the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. Professor Grundy, who has since apologized for her tweets and will start at BU on July 1 despite efforts to fire her, tweeted words of fire that, although admittedly lacking in nuance, expressed a provocatively fierce freedom of expression not often seen from black women in the mainstream.

Michelle Obama’s painful discussion of America’s racial inequality and deep misogyny exists, for many, on the same spectrum as Grundy’s blunt remarks about race, power and privilege. Where the first lady used her commencement speech at one of the nation’s premier HBCUs to deliver a seminar on institutional racism and our nation’s anti-black culture, Grundy’s social media commentary dispensed with complexity to deliver screams, sometimes angry, other times humorous, that reflect equally important truths about contemporary race relations, black women’s activism and the limits of freedom of expression in the 21st century.

The piercing anger behind Grundy’s tweets is rooted in recent events in Baltimore and Ferguson, Mo., a mixture of protests, demonstrations and violence that have, as she reminds us, made race an unavoidable topic. On social media, Grundy removed the academic hat for the identity that black women, including Michelle Obama, are always accused of donning—that of an angry black woman.

Neither Michelle Obama’s eloquence nor Saida Grundy’s passion can ultimately insulate them from the onslaught of criticism that, at its core, is based more on antipathy toward the messenger than on the meaning of her words. Allegations of reverse racism, hatred for America and a lack of patriotism are routinely wielded against America’s first lady, so it should come as no surprise that conservatives have now targeted Grundy for punishment.

The irony here is that some in America remain violently frightened of intelligent black women who achieve greatly, act boldly and move forward courageously in a world that continues, no matter how great their achievements, to find them unworthy of being allowed to succeed or fail on their own terms."

[Lumper20]

I figured the same. Seems these progressives have their money tied up on community organizers. I cannot figure out how begging on the street corners has become acceptable as most with their hand out will admit they are no prospect for really getting help. I am told most use the money for drugs.

[DH]

“professor of sociology and African-American studies”

WoW! Now there is an example of totally useless college courses.

Why don’t they just name them “Hate Whitey studies?” And...why don’t they have English-American studies, Irish-American studies, German-American studies, Japanese-American studies, Chinese-American studies...and the list goes on and on and on.

Notice I did not list Hispanic-American studies because they already have that one. It’s another “hate whitey” course.

College (other than technical colleges) has simply become another extended form of elementary school.

[gattaca]

bmp later

[Yosemitest]

"... liberals stop tiptoeing around race"

That will NEVER HAPPEN !

Too many of them ARE GETTING FILTHY RICH OFF OF the "Race Issue" !

These stinking LIARS always divert from the truth that Obama is EVIL and is a FASCIST.
They don't DARE debate the FACTS that their leader is a LIAR !
Booker T. Washington nailed the truth about them long ago.

Take a look at Booker T. Washington on Black Victimhood.
This is a very important fact THAT IS NOT BEING TAUGHT TODAY !

A number of black “leaders” (e.g., Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton) have made their living by promoting black victimhood and white guilt.
Jesse Jackson has been shaking down corporations with the scam for decades.
Booker T. Washington (1865–1915) warned of such people within the black community in his 1911 book My Larger Education.
He described them as “problem profiteers”:

“There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs and the hardships of the Negro race before the public.
Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs
– partly because they want sympathy
and partly because it pays.
Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances,
because they do not want to lose their jobs.”
(p. 118)



My Larger Education: Being Chapters from My Experience
(Dover Thrift Editions)

[randita]

If you ever roam through western VA, there are many good stopping places: The Roanoke Transportation Museum, The D Day Memorial, Appomattox Courthouse, Poplar Forest, and the Booker T. Washington Monument. All are located within an hour or two of each other.

I walk often at the Booker T. Monument - there is a very pleasant loop trail around the property. The display has been recently redone to be interactive and there are two old, but informative videos to watch.

It’s not the Smithsonian by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a nice tribute to a man who, by sheer determination and persistence, rose from being the son of a slave to being one of the leading black educators and thinkers of his day.

[Yosemitest]

Thanks for the point-outs of those places to visit.

[WashingtonSource]

When logic and reason is not on your side than the writing is going to be convoluted and difficult to penetrate and lacking in clarity. This whole piece is pure hogwash.

[wastoute]

White males on college campii have become so rare they are nearly extinct...

[ronnie raygun]

On another note many blakcs thru affirmative action have been given positions because of what they are instead of who they are. I have seen in my many years inexperienced unqualified people in positions with no or little experience for that position relying on thier color to frighten any advisary who speaks out

[VRW Conspirator]

...the African-American unemployment rate being more than two times that of whites...

Hey Elias Isquith, that was while Obama has been President, moron. It's Obama's fault. With the astronomical debt incurred under this proven liar president and do not for get the stimulus, It's still Obama's fault, idjit.

[eclecticEel]

That’s the problem with the left, they just aren’t fixated enough race.

[dp0622]

I can’t get through more than a few lines of any salon article. Life’s too short to get myself so upset.

[palmer]

I've listened to black leftists on the radio off and on for many years. Over those years they would talk about racism and white privilege some, but first and foremost they were leftists. While they decried mainly white capitalism, they correctly identified capitalists as their enemy and not whites. Attacking whites and playing the race card are losing strategies.

They may believe that a coalition of smelly white occupiers and militant blacks is a solid basis for a political movement. It was with millions of moronic white guilt voters, a large number of white and black freebie voters, and the ability of black urban areas to direct votes exclusively to Democrats. But the strategy that worked with Obama will probably not work with Clinton. She may win regardless since the GOP will arrange that, but that she won't have a large coattail.

[Flash Bazbeaux]

“Our gentle author might have some ideas, ideas I would no doubt disagree with, but his writing style is so convoluted and overdone that he basically makes himself unreadable.”

I read about the first five paragraphs of what was posted here, and I was unable to discern the author’s point, that is assuming he had one.