The racism behind the Stop the Steal movement
After Barack Obama was elected president some people decided his election proved that racism was no longer an issue in America.
As I recall, those people were White.
If memory serves, there weren’t a whole bunch of Black Americans celebrating the end of racism and it didn’t take long to understand why: some people – and when I say “some people” I actually mean “some White people” – started saying we needed to “take back the White House.”
First time I heard that, I thought: “Take it back from who?” (And if it should have been from “whom” I apologize to you grammar freaks, but as I’ve said before, “whom cares?”)
Back to our story.
Were we supposed to take back the White House from a guy who actually won the popular vote twice and didn’t need a boost up from the Electoral College?
“Take back the White House” was a racist notion because what people who said it really meant was: “Take back the White House from the people who play Al Green at their parties instead of Charlie Daniels and can dance without mentally counting one… two…three…to stay on the beat and play pick-up basketball instead of bowling like a true, physically-uncoordinated American president should. C’mon…you know who we mean.”
Uh…you mean Black people?
So right there about an inch under the surface was the bedrock of American racism that still exists today and you don’t have to dig too far down before you hit it and now Donald Trump and the Stop the Steal movement are hitting it again.
White voters are OK, the rest of you…not so much
According to CNN, Vanita Gupta is president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and Gupta points out that Trump’s allegations of voter fraud focus on a few large, racially-diverse cities like Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee and Atlanta.
Trump seems to be pretty much OK with the votes cast in the White, affluent suburbs surrounding those cities. (CNN has started capitalizing the White in White people, so I guess I will, too.)
Here’s what Gupta had to say about that and I mean the votes and not the capitalization:
"They are directly attacking Black voters and voters of color that live in these cities. And I think the comparison of cities versus neighboring counties demonstrates the degree to which this is in a lot of ways reminiscent of Jim Crow voting exclusions, where they are seeking after the fact to undermine or discount Black voters."
After Trump’s attorneys challenged some ballots in Wisconsin and not others, Wisconsin Supreme Court judge, Jill Karofsky – another person with a suspiciously Un-American name – made the same point:
"In your lawsuit what you have done here is target the vote of 250,000 people — not statewide, but in two of our 72 counties that have diverse populations, because they are urban, and because they vote Democratic. This lawsuit ... smacks of racism."
So according to the Stop the Steal movement, the ballots cast by people who inspired Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale” are OK and the ballots cast by people who aren’t White need to be challenged.
Even Donald Trump knows he can’t use the N-word and get away with it – at least in public – but when his slogan is “Make America Great Again” he’s talking about a time when White people were completely in charge and didn’t have to worry about videos of White cops kneeling on Black men’s necks because that was pretty much business as usual and cell phone videos weren’t a thing yet.
Geez…can’t we go back to a time where it was OK to lynch certain people and women were barefoot and pregnant and your co-workers were all named Bob or Bill and not Sanjay and you could give your secretary a friendly pat on the ass without ending up on America’s Most Wanted?
Nope, we can’t.
Times have changed because the good ol’ days were not good for everyone and now Trump is telling his followers that they’re victims and they seem to like that idea.
They are not to blame for their lot in life; it’s the fault of immigrants and elites and (fill-in-the-blank) and all that anger led noted numbskull Rush Limbaugh to float the idea of Trump supporters seceding from the United States.
Here’s what Rush said:
“I actually think that we’re trending toward secession. I see more and more people asking what in the world do we have in common with the people who live in, say, New York? ... There cannot be a peaceful coexistence of two completely different theories of life, theories of government, theories of how we manage our affairs. We can’t be in this dire a conflict without something giving somewhere along the way.”
Actually, yeah we can peacefully coexist with completely different theories about how we should live and we’ve been doing it a long time and it works out OK as long as we all respect the rights of others to have different beliefs, which is pretty much the idea America was founded on.
It’s right there in the First Amendment.
When Rush was called on his secession bullshit, he did what he always does: claims he’s just an entertainer or – in this case – he was just expressing the sentiments of others. Rush wants to have it both ways; he wants to say crazy shit that appeals to morons and still be respected by people who aren’t morons and trying to keep one foot on the dock and the other foot in the boat is a great way to end up all wet which is the best thing you can say about most of Rush Limbaugh’s theories.
Anyway…
The idea that maybe some White conservatives should secede and form their own country is what led to the cartoon you see above.
Now here’s why xenophobia is a bad idea and all we have to do is look at dogs, which considering their general attitudes on life, might be higher on the evolutionary scale than a significant number of humans.
The mongrel dog theory
Back when they used to have dog acts on The Ed Sullivan Show in which dogs jumped through hoops, wore hats, stood on their hind legs while pushing baby carriages and changed the spark plugs on a V8 engine – all of which probably involved some hideously cruel type of training except for the spark plug thing which I made up – I read that dog trainers preferred mixed breeds because they were smarter.
Turns out purebreds were often inbreds and apparently that made them dumber which goes a long way in explaining Britain’s Royal Family and our own George W. Bush.
Too much of the same bloodline and pretty soon you get those guys with their eyes too close together and tendency to have a mental vapor lock when quoting the “fool me once” proverb and here’s what happened to Dubya when he gave it a try:
“There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”
Now there’s a guy who isn’t hitting on all eight cylinders.
So I think we should view the influence of other cultures as an American strength, not an American weakness – plus the food options are way better because without immigrants from a variety of countries we’d all be eating boiled sheep’s liver or haggis or “Spotted Dick” which is a real thing made from the fat that collects around the kidneys of cows and sheep.
AND IT’S A DESSERT!!!
Generally speaking seceding seems like a really bad idea unless we could get all the racists to limit themselves to one region which the rest of us could avoid for the rest of our lives because who wants to hang around with a bunch of ignoramuses.
And the food options would suck.
Well said! I thought I recognized some of the characters in the panel....