The republicans and racists of the right in America are still fighting the voting rights act of 1965. The southern strategy never dies it seems, but you have to give the republicans credit, the democrats have lost the white vote since civil rights.
Dog Whistle Politics
'Dog Whistle Politics As Strategic Racism' "Wallace, Goldwater, and Nixon constitute classic strategic racists. In the context of the times, they were all initially racial moderates. They may have harbored tainted beliefs, but racial animosity did not drive their actions. Instead, they concentrated hard, weighing and sifting, to figure out how they could most effectively gain votes. If a more promising route had been available, they would have taken it. But race seemed the most likely avenue, so each opted to harness racial divisions to their agenda of getting elected. This was not about racism, it was about winning. Also, they were not racially omniscient, moving instead within a settled framework of ideas about race that for the most part they took for granted. Even so, unlike most in society, these politicians thought long and deep about how to turn race to their advantage. We've previously defined strategic racism as purposeful efforts to use racial animosity as leverage to gain political power (or material wealth and social standing). By this definition, Wallace, Goldwater, and Nixon acted out of strategic racism. This last sentence sparks an important clarification. I write interchangeably of "dog whistle politics" and "dog whistle racism." The first is a less freighted term. But the truth is, racial dog whistle politics is dog whistle racism. It is a strategic manipulation of racial ideas in pursuit of political power and (especially once big money conservatives got behind the tactic) material wealth." p48 'Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class' by Ian Haney LĂłpez
"The United States was founded as a white nationalist country, and that legacy remains today. Things have improved from the radical promotion of white people at the expense of all others, which has persisted for most of our history, yet most of us have not accepted the extent to which white identity guides so much of what we still do. Sometimes it seems that the white nationalists are most honest about the very real foundation of white supremacy upon which our nation was built."
Opinion | What White Nationalism Gets Right About American History
"...One did not have to be very bright to realize how little one could do to change one’s situation; one did not have to be abnormally sensitive to be worn down to a cutting edge by the incessant and gratuitous humiliation and danger one encountered every working day, all day long. The humiliation did not apply merely to working days, or workers; I was thirteen and was crossing Fifth Avenue on my way to the Forty-second Street library, and the cop in the middle of the street muttered as I passed him, “Why don’t you nig-gers stay uptown where you belong?” When I was ten, and didn’t look, certainly, any older, two policemen amused themselves with me by frisking me, making comic (and terrifying) speculations concerning my ancestry and probable sexual prowess, and, for good measure, leaving me flat on my back in one of Harlem’s empty lots. Just before and then during the Second World War, many of my friends fled into the service, all to be changed there, and rarely for the better, many to be ruined, and many to die. Others fled to other states and cities—that is, to other ghettos. Some went on wine or whiskey or the needle, and are still on it. And others, like me, fled into the church." James Baldwin
Letter from a Region in My Mind
