The Dream is Still Alive

Does the Democratic Party ignore African Americans?  

History suggests not.  Most Americans do not even realize the fairly recent history of the two major parties in the United States.  In short, the party of Lincoln, thanks to Nixon’s Southern Strategy, has become the Party of white supremacy.  The Dixiecrats, that plagued the Democratic Party of a hundred years plus (including the Civil War) migrated in mass to the Republican Party after the Civil Rights and Voter Rights Acts were passed.  All of the work and sacrifice of Robert Kennedy and more so Martin Luther King, was discarded by the Republican Party, who cynically adopted lifelong white segregationists hiding as states right advocates; this lie was also used to justify the civil war by the way.

And the Democratic Party adopted the racial minorities of the nation; including the immigrants.

Look at its leadership.  Women and people of color are everywhere.

Now we get, “you haven’t done enough”, when the you is we.  California is a good example.  California’s Democratic Party is the most diverse on the planet.  Yet, it isn’t doing enough for people of color.  It isn’t, because the job is huge and will take time until conservatives are eradicated from the voting public.  

Why?  Look at the DACA fight right now.  The Republicans hold all three branches of federal government, so white supremacy is in power yet again; every bit as bad as Woodrow Wilson (a Dixiecrat Democrat) in 1918 (one hundred years ago.  And the Republicans, who everyday betray the legacy of Lincoln, refuse to do the right thing; opposing immigration, opposing human rights, renewing the war on drugs and African Americans; etc.

In short, they are attempting to roll history back to 1972.  

Voting rights have taken a hit, human rights have taken a hit, and recently a totally unfair and bigoted income tax cut was passed that attacks people of color.

And some, not many but some, people of color get sucked into this vortex of hate and actually vote Republican.

It is not hard to be hypnotized by the allure of Republicans with their free market mantra.  The problem is the economic system presently is set up to discriminate against people of color.  There are decades old systems in place to under educate millions of young people and doom them to a lifetime of poverty.  And if they commit a crime, the criminal justice system is set up to overly punish and incarcerate in a Jim Crowe system.

So where does that leave Martin Luther King’s legacy?  

The enemy is stronger now than ever.  That is because the Republican Party still is the bastion of big money, corporate power, that is controlled by white people who don’t want to share.  The Democratic Party is outspent constantly by the Republicans who have benefited by a conservative judiciary who fixed the system, leaving the Republicans to dominate in fund raising.

And gerrymandering and voter identification efforts have turned former progressive states like Wisconsin into seas of red where white supremacy reigns.

So what do we do?  How do we fight this?  

The answer is in the diversity that lies in California.  The slow but steady mixing of races (yes that term) that literally marries white supremacy away.  

It is very difficult to hate your grand daughter.  It is really difficult to discriminate against the family that sits right next to you in church.  

Martin Luther King envisioned this.  He didn’t talk about it much because the mixing of races was very bad thing in 1968.  In fact, interracial marriage was not approved by the Supreme Court until 1947!

But it is coming. California is now a Caucasian (whatever that is) minority state.  People of color dominate demographically.  

And the Democratic Party has responded, opened its doors and embraced this diversity.  

But many are still left behind.  And that is not the Democratic Party’s fault anymore.  The corporate class, that is still hard right Republican, work tirelessly to preserve white supremacy; fighting through election spending to create a huge red mass in the the rural states and regions of America.  In states like Pennsylvania for example, Republicans have convicted poor whites that the reason they are poor is not because corporations have sent their jobs overseas or to robots, but because of the Democrats who allow immigrants into the country.

There is not a drop of evidence that this is true, in fact the country right now has a shortage of skilled labor that is about to drag down the economy.  It isn’t the immigrants.

But Donald Trump got elected with America First in areas of high unemployment because white uneducated middle class people are taught by the Republicans that the party of the New Deal has abandoned them.

In some ways that is true, racially the Democratic Party has abandoned them, by becoming the most diverse party on earth.  But economically not so; the differences between big money support of the Republicans and the small donor base of the Democrats is stark.

But Donald Trump is President and both houses of Congress have white supremacist majorities.  So the devil is still alive and well in America.

What to do:  persevere, never quit, keep voting, keep organizing and finally if you have a white friend who is a bigot (or a person of color for that matter) unfriend them.  That’s right, stop being around them.  They are sick with a illness of white supremacy and fascism that frankly is terminal.  They simply have to die off, which they are by the way.  Sadly many of them are/were my friends.  But as they age, they get harder in their racism; so we have to wait for them to die.

Sound harsh?  It is.  But for the young, the millennial generation, its up to you to get political, to vote, to register Democratic and work within the Party to get the things done you deem necessary to kill white supremacy forever.

Dr. King truly believed you can change people’s hearts.  To some degree, with people who are capable of it, this is possible; but for most, they are sick forever.

The only way to beat them is like we have done in California, bury them in votes.