Last month (5.28.24 p. A5) the Kingsport Times-News harmfully misrepresented Black women writers and/or Biden supporters by printing a disgraceful piece of misunderstanding on the part of Cynthia Tucker.
Cynthia Tucker, perhaps wilfully, misunderstands White American voters in the same way most fiction writers misunderstand opposite-sex novelists: Grossly overestimating the amount of time people different from themselves spend thinking about, well, them.
What seemed to set her off was that a Virginia school board voted to restore the names of schools named after Confederate officers. This is not a "race" issue, either, though it could be made into one. Since it would make a long diversion here, let's just say that Tucker obviously didn't spend enough time with the life and letters of General Lee in school, nor has she given much thought to the level of strife among different ethnic groups in North America at this period, and she seems to have yet to read Thomas Sowell's history of how ethnic minority groups have been treated, worldwide. The Civil War was not about race or slavery, though slavery was a test issue. It was about local self-governance, as is the local school board's reclaiming the right to name the schools.
For poor self-obsessed Cynthia Tucker, reclaimng the names of those schools is "growing bolder in racism." It is not. Everything is not about Cynthia Tucker! And my concern is that, because Cynthia Tucker's self-focus reads like whiny narcissism and nobody likes whiny narcissism, giving articles like Cynthia Tucker's a public platform may actually be building a resurgence of racism.
Let's put it this way. The young people collectively known to cyberspace as The Nephews are a mixed lot; some look White, some really are nothing but White, some look Black. I love them impartially and don't care to try to understand how anyone else might be able not to see their wonderfulness, impartially. But what that means to me is that I expect everyone to appreciate that the Black ones are not whiny narcissists like Cynthia Tucker. If any of The Nephews, Black, White, or other, were saying "resurgence of racism," I'd expect the story to be about a business that refused to serve Black people and what they were doing to take it down.
Why is Trump judged less unfavorably than Biden? Tucker asks, and in her self-obsession she "has seen clearly" that it's all about racism.
Never mind that both Trump and Biden are White. Both are old men; as such, both grew up thinking and talking about non-White people in a different way than we do now. Biden may have been more genteel about it because of his background--but what that means in practice is that Biden had to think less about non-White people, because of his background. Nobody can be blamed for thinking a gentleman is nicer than a person-who-is-not-and-will-never-be-a-gentleman. That opinion has been echoed around the world for three hundred years. The fact is that, beyond appointing some non-White people to prominent positions (which Trump also did), Biden's policies have done more damage to non-White Americans than Trump's have. Politeness is good but Biden is the one who politely let Black people's parents' little Mom-and-Pop business be shut down. Non-wealthy people, even Black people who are really keeping it real, notice things like that.
This is why the Ds can't win the popular vote merely by replacing Biden with a younger D who endorses the same polices Biden did. They have a strong chance if they can reclaim Candidate Kennedy; if they nominate, e.g., Kamala Harris, they're dead. The party's current policies are just too dysfunctional to win votes. Kennedy's willingness to look at prickly issues that other Ds prefer to ignore enjoys wide bipartisan support and might claim enough swing votes to beat Trump. Party-liners who aren't strongly opposing censorship, reconsidering the United Nations' failures and its claim to any further support from us, and standing up to Bayer, Lilly, Merck, and Pfizer, can't beat Trump even if tey are not only young but also pretty. Ds need a candidate who will vigorously repudiate Biden's mistakes, not in a spirit of contempt for Biden or scoring off their "enemy," but in a spirit of correcting decisions that failed to serve anyone, anywhere, well enough to be continued.
Reclaiming the names of schools is about a pathetic token attempt to reclaim local control of the said schools. Choosing between the two old White men--the three old White men if we count the one who's most aware of the real issues of concern to Americans, and also most likely to live another four years--is not something sensible people can do as if choosing a real feminist or a real Black American, or anyone who really had the interests of women, Black people, lefthanded people, Catholics, celiacs, or any other special interest group in mind.
We have a choice among White men who are all about themselves and, if anything, their heirs. I pity anyone who imagines that Trump is motivated to do anything on behalf of anyone whose name is not Trump, but in that he's a few points ahead of the other two. Kennedy may have good intentions toward, but has not been able to unify, people whose name is Kennedy. Biden has been credibly accused of unspeakable crimes toward one other person whose name is Biden, and of criminal conspiracy with another Biden.
I'm blessed with one candidate who represents me on one issue, which happens to be my top-priority issue. Many people are less fortunate in this year's election. If they're voting their interests as part of a large demographic bloc, they're voting on which candidate has done and is likely to do the least harm to their bloc.
"Elites"? Who are they, and who cares? I'm afraid that, if you're reading this on a computer, you are "an elite." I make that judgment call based on the number of things I don't have to explain to you that I would have to explain, at great length, to the people who use the Internet just to watch videos and the people who don't use it at all. I don't believe voters are terribly concerned about "the elites" but they are concerned about Biden's willingness to let the United Nations dictate that the United States should be like the backward nations of the Old World and regress toward tyranny. They don't want censorship. They don't want to be told to spend a month celebrating a Deadly Sin. They don't want to be told what to eat, drive, say, watch, read, or think.
"Skepticism over Biden's handling of the economy" is not necessarily too tactful a phrase, given that the larger portion of responsibility for the economy belongs to Jerome Powell. Let's just say that the voters can tell that the economy is not doing well. They're out of work. The locally owned businesses in their neighborhood are shutting down. The prices of things are higher every time they go to the store. These conditions have never helped an incumbent candidate. Or party.
Concerns about the ages and conditions of all three candidates are valid but, of the three, Biden has had the most conspicuous lapses in public. All three men's voices are weak points. Kennedy's is permanently fried. Trump's tenor, almost treble, voice and negative-status-indicator accent sound the strongest of the three, on the whole, but they're far from being assets. But Biden, not necessarily through any fault of his own, looks by far the most likely of the three to collapse, during any given public appearance. It's not that any specific number of birthdays makes a person "too old" for anything the person may want to do. It's that Biden looks as if any day now, any day now, his soul shall be released. This did a lot to temper the criticism of him in even the opposition papers, but it can't be kept from working against him in the election.
Biden's vice-president's no help. Many Americans are still prejudiced, even bigoted--only not in the obvious way Cynthia Tucker imagines. It's not simply about "race" or color.
Voters have, on the whole, kept our opinions of Kamala Harris to ourselves. That does not mean they are favorable opinions. Still, whether voters merely think Harris wouldn't be a good President or actually hate her or fall somewhere in between, their prejudices--preconceived notions--about Vice-President Harris are very different from their prejudices against (a) Kanye West, (b) Sarah Palin, (c) a blue-eyed blonde English-speaking woman who wants to immigrate to the US without following the standard procedure, (d) a more typical looking Tex-Mex student at a community college, and (e) a Black single mother who is juggling different part-time jobs and still relying on handouts to pay the inflated expenses of living in a city these days.
Prejudice about money, against those who have either much more or much less than oneself, are much harsher and are taken much more seriously than prejudices about physical looks. Many White Americans are sincere admirers of various Black American celebrities. They are awestruck--and uncritical--about Clarence Thomas; they wish they or their wives looked like Halle Berry; they'd be absolutely delighted if Tiger Woods moved into their block or Karine Jean-Pierre sat down beside them at the beauty parlor. They would not trust any of those people, because their prejudice tells them not to trust rich people, but they would admire and emulate any or all of those people's achievements and would want to cultivate them as acquaintances.
On the other hand, those voters still clutch their purses when they see an ordinary young man across the street, and some of them may clutch tighter if the young man is Black. They still make the assumption that even young children from poor families or neighborhoods are dirtier, rougher, slower to learn and more likely to steal than rich kids are, though in fact most children are dirty, rough, and likely to steal and some rich children are very slow learners. If they hear that someone is or has been unemployed for more than a year, they want to believe that the person is unemployable, even if they know the real reasons why the person is unemployed.
At no time in history have human beings ever had particularly warm and fuzzy feelings about people perceived as pushing or sneaking into a place far from their home in the hope of making more money there than they could at home. At a few times in history governments have encouraged immigration; even then, the masses have not exactly welcomed immigrants. Prejudice against immigrants may be moderated by factors like the perception that Scandinavian immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were going to raise wheat on the prairies (i.e. stay well away from the established resident population, unless individually invited to visit) and offer some security against indigenous populations' understandable rancor. Prejudice aainst immigrants is heightened by factors like inflation, a high cost of living, crowded cities, and a perception that one's children are likely to be poorer than one's younger self was; thus it doesn't really matter who's crossing our southern border now. Blond, English-speaking immigrants from former Soviet Socialist Republics maybe less conspicuous than Black, French-dialect-speaking immigrants from Haiti, but people who don't welcome immigrants (who are in a clear majority) don't care what immigrants look like, actually; they just want them to stay at home.
Trump's exploitation of prejudice against immigrants is gratuitous; he could beat Biden without it. It is ugly; it may even be based in Trump's view of his own parents and grandparents. It is offensive to Americans who see themselves as belonging to old families and/or well off and/or liberal and/or well educated and/or members of subcultures that value hospitality. It is other bad things as well as these, but it is not racist. People who identify as Black, Brown, and Red see themselves as threatened by undesirable immigrants, some of whom are White. People who have immigrated legally, or whose parents or grandparents have done, are among the loudest opponents of illegal immigration--and Trump is one of them.
If Cynthia Tucker had frankly indulged n the normal sort of pearl-clutching "Trump is so tacky" comments the upper middle class make about Trump generally, and specifically mentioned his exploitation of people's justified concerns about immigration, that would have been both reasonable and natural and, at the same time, a novelty in this country's history. It would be an instance of a well-off daughter of an established, upper-middle-class if not positively landed, family deploring the vulgarity of a loud, working-class son of immigrants...except that Tucker happens to be Black and Trump happens to be White. That might even have been interesting.
But no, Little Miss All-About-Me had to claim that Trump's campaign is all about immigration, that his position on immigration equals racism, and that people support Trump because they are racists. If Cynthia Tucker's goal had been to demonstrate that Black women aren't worth educating because what they and anything they write will always be so stupid, she'd be throwing herself up against a solid wall of evidence, but this article would have done as good a job as can be done.
Opposition to immigration is coming from people whose parents immigrated from the same places the current immigrants are leaving. It is being expressed toward people of the same physical type, the same ethnic type, the same language group, as the people against which it is directed. When the demographic types of immigrants are mentioned as a basis for opposition to immigration, the image that arouses the most opposition is of groups of young White men. There probably are people who oppose immigration by one physical type more than they oppose immigration by another physical type, but the majority of anti-immigration feeling is directed toward all immigrants impartially.'
Trump does not particularly need the pointa his campaign scores by engaging with actual issues rather than whining "Anyone who disagrees with us is a racist." For the sake of maintaining a two-party system the Ds need to show some initiative in facing issues of concertn to today's voters, like upholding individuals' rights to privacy, choice, and freedom of speech.
During the Clinton Administration one of the smartest women in the D Party, Arianna Huffington, blew the whistle on corporate censorship regarding the role of Lilly's moxt profitable product in homicide-suicides. Earlier this week one of the smartest men in the Clinton Administration, Robert Reich, made the claim that the proliferation of bureaucratic agencies under D aministrations was necessary to protect America from tyranny by rich businessmen. Very well; let the Ds rally around the candidate who's been willing to stand up to Bayer, Lilly, Merck, and Pfizer, and let those agencies justify their existence by cracking down on those corporations' bids for censorship and global tyranny.
If the Ds were able to unite around Candidate Kennedy they still have a hope of being able to offer a positive alternative to Trump...instead of doing all the bad things Ds claim to fear that Trump will do, only less competently than Trump would do them.
