Now this is as racist as anyone can be.

FROM THE LEFT:

By Leonard Pitts Jr.

Trump framing election as a referendum on white people

By Leonard Pitts Jr., Tribune Content Agency on Jul 31, 2019

If you are a regular here, you may have heard this story before. But it bears repeating.

In 1958, George Wallace (a Democrat) ran for governor of Alabama against John Patterson, a fire-breathing segregationist. Wallace, though also a segregationist, was considered enough of a racial moderate to be endorsed by the NAACP. So naturally, he was trounced. Sometime afterward, as recounted by biographer Marshall Frady, a rueful Wallace made a defining declaration to a room full of politicos: “John Patterson out-nigguhed me. And boys, I’m not goin’ to be out-nigguhed again.”

As history shows, he never was. Which is to say Wallace, who became governor in 1963, was never again found deficient in stoking racial animosity for political gain. He understood its power to drive white voters to the polls.

As is beyond obvious by now, Donald Trump does, too. His Twitter attack on Baltimore over the weekend — “a disgusting, rat and rodent-infested mess,” “a very dangerous & filthy place” — was but the latest in a long line of racist invective designed to gin up white support.

The tweets — they came in a rebuke of Rep. Elijah Cummings, a Trump critic whose district includes much of the city — set in motion a sequence both predictable and unavoidable: condemnation from those still possessed of working souls, rationalization from those who are not. Baltimore is a troubled place, said his enablers. How is it racist to say that?

(I do declare, I think Pitts missed the fact that Cummings was given $18 million grant to correct the conditions in Baltimore.  Where did the money go?  Also the troubled cities that Pitts is talking about are all run by Democrat mayors.  He doesn’t seem to mention that either.)

But America is full of troubled places. The Fifth District of Kentucky, for instance, has the nation’s second-highest rate of opioid use, its second-lowest median income, its highest poverty rate and its lowest life expectancy. But unlike majority-black Baltimore, the Fifth is one of the whitest (over 96 percent) places in the country, its congressional delegation uniformly white and Republican.

(Why doesn’t Pitts mention that Obama was the Prez who allowed all of the Hezbollah drugs to filter thru Mexico.  Now that is an interesting investigation that was stopped by Obama.)

So you’ll never hear Trump disparage that region in terms that otherize and dehumanize its people. Its desperate condition notwithstanding, he’ll never call it a place “where no human being would want to live.” No, that kind of abuse is reserved for black and brown places with black and brown leaders.

(The truth will hurt until it is fixed with $18 million that somebody has stashed away.  Let’s find that “fix” money and then everyone will be made right.  Wonder why it doesn’t hurt Pitts for his people to continually get the short end of the stick?)

That said, Trump himself is not what should trouble us most. After all, we’ve seen his type before. He is a throwback, retro as a Jordan jersey, latest iteration of a long line of racist blowhards stretching back to Wallace and beyond..

(Yes, and Pitts is a throwback that wants to keep the black people in the same state.  Bet – Pitts doesn’t live in that same state with rats, etc.)

No, what should trouble us — what should leave white people in particular offended — is Trump’s implicit bet that what worked for Patterson in 1958, what worked for Wallace in 1962, what worked for Nixon in 1968, what worked for Bush in 1988, will work for him, now. As low an opinion as Trump holds of black and brown people, his opinion of white people is nothing to write home about.

He is wagering his presidency, after all, that they share his patronizing disdain for people of color, his atavistic fear of the coming America, his slimy bigotry. He is betting that if you use every hateful word but the one that begins with “n,” if you thereby give them room to rationalize and equivocate, you’ll find that white people are essentially the same now as 60 years ago.

Is he right?

That’s the question upon which the future teeters. It’s been said that Trump is framing this election as a referendum on race. What he’s really doing, albeit unintentionally, is framing it as a referendum on white people, on how they have changed — or have not — in the past 60 years. Trump is betting on the latter. He thinks white people are an ignorant rabble, readily roused by appeals to their basest, most racist selves.”

(Looks like the “pot is calling the kettle black” and Pitts falls into the “racist pit.”

Fifteen months from now, we’ll see how many prove him right.

(Looks like Pitts wants to go backward with the green deal.  If that happens he will have to use a pencil to write a story.

kommonsentsjane