The curious thing about race today is that it keeps the ****** focused while the oligarchs and plutocrats outsource, rob, steal and laugh at how easy it is to keep them occupied. Our middle class is dying not from racial issues it is dying because the dummies elect corporate tools who play them like an old banjo. Imagine congress earning minimum wage for just a moment.
White apologists and other assorted racists use colorblindness as a way to salve their conscience when it comes to 300 years and growing discrimination in housing, jobs, schools, healthcare etc etc etc. You can't bring up history as then you are playing the 'race card,' it is a wonderful rhetorical device to keep the racist and even non-racist content that all is well in the world if only.... You can fill in the 'if only'. Best read you can have in this new year is quoted below.
"The predictable results can be summarized in poverty statistics. From 1960 to 1970, as the New Deal expanded into the Great Society, the number of Americans in poverty declined from 40 million to under 2S million. During the 1970s, after the rise of dog whistle politics but before its full hijacking by rightwing oligarchs, the numbers in poverty remained steady. During the 1980s, as Reagan and then George H.W. Bush reigned, those in poverty soared to 3S million. At the end of Clinton's second term in 2000, those mired in poverty had fallen to just above 30 million. But following the Great Recession that marked the end George W. Bush's presidency, over 46 million Americans were in poverty." That's an additional 16 million good folks pushed into the material and emotional hardship of destitution in just one decade.
This book's subtitle suggests that race-baiting wrecks the middle class, as indeed it does. This is not, however, to claim that the purpose behind racial demagoguery is to destroy average Americans-it is not. The point, for politicians such as Wallace and Nixon, was to get elected and re-elected. Simultaneously, big money came to see dog whistling as a way to promote policies that favored society's sultans. These policies are, roughly, the same policies advocated by the malefactors of great wealth during the era of the robber baron: low taxes, a minimal or non-existent social safety net, and corporate control over the regulation of industry. These were, of course, policies that voters had repudiated during the New Deal as well as in the sweeping defeat of Barry Goldwater. Through their newly muscled think tanks and aided by Ronald Reagan, however, the modern plutocrats reintroduced these prescriptions to the American public as a response to the excesses of the civil rights era. Their aim was not to wreck the middle class, but to convince average Americans to support policies that transferred wealth and power to the already extremely wealthy and powerful. Like the nonwhites injured by dog whistle racism, the middle class was not a target-just collateral damage." p74,75 'Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class' by Ian Haney López
PS I found it funny that Trump used the Woman Card ploy, America's public is so naive that placing the word 'card' after anything answers the question. Too funny if it didn't express how blind to reality the electorate has become. Has Fox and other right wing media created senility or are Americans senile on purpose?
