Progressives (Liberals)

As you will

The generalization that the dems have moral high ground on the repubs in issues dealing with race (on a broad level and not applicable for individuals) is not a stretch.

I wish people would try to look objectively at the sentiment of the last paragraph.

Just break free.

I feel like black Americans would’ve ushered Clinton into office if they’d been satisfied with Democrats’ commitment to and representation of their needs.

I’d never say the GOP was superior in any way—that’d be a joke. But, what have the Dems done for black Americans? What did Obama do for black Americans??

My impression is that Obama didn’t want to even talk about ‘black’ issues, and that they sustained losses during his tenure.

A pretty good case can be made for the proposition that the policies first initiated by LBJ and a Democrat Congress have had unanticipated, but serious and destructive effects on Black Family structures that had remained remarkably strong and intact for a long time and through very difficult, often hostile circumstances. Among other things we subsidized absent fathers, single dependent parents, and the belief that any setbacks in life were necessarily someone else's fault. That's a combination that would undermine any group of people.

Pandering is not supporting.

Politics is by definition patronizing and insincere. Notwithstanding that, the relationship the modern Dem party has with women and persons of color is exponentially superior to that of the party of Trump.

This is a measurable difference using any countable metric, be it numbers of persons of color the party “supports” and runs for all levels of office or the number of issues of interest to disenfranchised communities the party touts and “supports”. Or several other things.

It is a measurable difference, and self-evident to anyone with eyes, a modicum of common sense and a shred of integrity.

So it’s not surprising if you can’t comprehend it.

Outlawing the Democratic Party in America will put an end to these witch hunts.

Reminiscing about what the D party was before the Civil Rights Act—the immense exodus that happened because of the Act—LBJ’s calculation that ‘he’d own the black vote forever’ because of it, (although his specific word choice was quite different)—and now the party has come full circle. Just a collection of hangers-on with no special respect for minorities or immigrants, but see them as a means to an end.

I hope they’re beginning to see the truth of their situation.

https://www.google.com/amp/www.msnbc.com/msnbc/lyndon-johnson-civil-rights-racism/amp

Lyndon Johnson was a civil rights hero. But also a racist.
04/11/14 01:39PM — UPDATED 04/12/14 11:06AM

Editor's note: Readers may find some language included to be offensive.

Lyndon Johnson said the word "nigger" a lot.

In Senate cloakrooms and staff meetings, Johnson was practically a connoisseur of the word. According to Johnson biographer Robert Caro, Johnson would calibrate his pronunciations by region, using "nigra" with some southern legislators and "negra" with others. Discussing civil rights legislation with men like Mississippi Democrat James Eastland, who committed most of his life to defending white supremacy, he'd simply call it "the nigger bill."

Then in 1957, Johnson would help get the "nigger bill" passed, known to most as the Civil Rights Act of 1957. With the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the segregationists would go to their graves knowing the cause they'd given their lives to had been betrayed, Frank Underwood style, by a man they believed to be one of their own. When Caro asked segregationist Georgia Democrat Herman Talmadge how he felt when Johnson, signing the Civil Rights Act, said "we shall overcome," Talmadge said "sick."

The Civil Rights Act made it possible for Johnson to smash Jim Crow. The Voting Rights Act made the U.S. government accountable to its black citizens and a true democracy for the first time. Johnson lifted racist immigration restrictions designed to preserve a white majority -- and by extension white supremacy. He forced FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, then more concerned with "communists" and civil rights activists, to turn his attention to crushing the Ku Klux Klan. Though the Fair Housing Act never fulfilled its promise to end residential segregation, it was another part of a massive effort to live up to the ideals America's founders only halfheartedly believed in -- a record surpassed only by Abraham Lincoln.

So it would be tempting, on the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, as Johnson is being celebrated by no less than four living presidents, to dismiss Johnson's racism as mere code-switching -- a clever ploy from an uncompromising racial egalitarian whose idealism was matched only by his political ruthlessness.
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I hope the current Dems use different language now, but I think the motive remains the same.

I believe we make too much out of the use of now "incorrect" or forbidden words, and the casual things people do or say. These, of course, can be indicators of underlying hatred or intolerance, but they are not, and certainly sixty years ago were not, guarantors of these faults. It's what people do and how they treat others that really count in this area. In LBJ's case the fact that he, as President encouraged and led the end of the legal basis for the Jim Crow system that had for a century unjustly held back black Americans is in my mind sufficient reason to hold him in high regard. He wasn't perfect: no one is. However he did, at some risk to his own success, take needed action to correct a very bad, unjust situation. That counts for more than his casual conversation.

Our common human nature is full of contradictions, and many of the remedies applied in the effort to achieve equal outcomes for both Black and White had unanticipated adverse side effects on both. Much involved the continuation of old prejudgments by both. In some whites this took the form of continued intolerance, now with the belief that they had no continuing obligation to accept people of all skin colors based on their individual merits. Some Blacks fell victim to the still popular belief that any difference in outcomes of various superficially defined groups was necessarily a result of wrongful intolerance, and not in any way of their own doing. Both blame the "others" for faults that largely exist within themselves. That too is very human.

^ Excellent post.

I can easily say that someone had to end Jim Crow, and whoever did that deserves appreciation for that. Did he do it under some sort of explosive racial duress? To gather to his party all black votes? Why? We’ll never know, I guess.

Regardless, I’ve heard enough — not just the words, but the sentiment behind them in these personal accounts of people he was with on a daily basis—to despise that man. An uncanny ‘politician’.

In that vein, Democrats who actually wore hoods and held positions of authority in the KKK were lauded by modern day democrats. Very hard for me to understand. That celebration of Robert Byrd and others seemed like a slap in the faces of so many black democrats.

Setting democrats on some pedestal regarding race relations, to me, is to fall for a thin veneer.

We can never really know the inner thoughts and motivations of others. Sometimes the things they do or say are fairly reliable indicators, but even there a moments consideration of one's own good, bad, ugly, and often conflicting, inner motives should tell us to be wary.

Setting anyone on a pedestal is a prescription for disappointment, and I'll agree with you that Democrats often don't deserve the virtue they claim with respect to race relations here.

Marin County, North of the Golden Gate is, as you know, a citadel of liberal, Democrat thought and politics. (I have a sister and brother who live there with their families.) The schools in Marin are full of "white privilege and guilt" and their elected politicians (former Senator Barbara Boxer was first elected to Congress from there.) all proclaim the currently fashionable Democrat group values and thinking, and all call for equal outcomes for all "protected" groups. However there are almost no blacks anywhere in Marin, in any capacity. It is a lily white enclave of self-satisfied hypocrites, blissfully unaware of their own contradictions. They are not alone in this, and their Black counterparts (generally not as well off economically), can be found across the Bay in Oakland.

Thank you.

I had to laugh, remembering my first days on the Bay. I kept having this weird surreal-type feeling I couldn’t place.

It took me a while to figure out that it was because everyone in the streets and shops was white. It was days before I saw a black person.

One other distinct change: I’m sure you remember me chafing at the power of the teachers’ union in CA. I’m actually helping form one in my state. Quite a different set of circumstances in CA ...and everywhere else.😀

Well I've had some interesting experiencer with Labor unions. Many of their concerns with respect to benefits and working conditions were beneficial and valid. However all attempted to gradually define, and freeze, just what their members will do, or not do on the job - a very unrealistic and unproductive policy in a world that requires innovation and adaptability, and which judges organizations on the results they achieve, as opposed to their supposed good intentions. Government bureaucracies, however, are no better in these areas. We survive and thrive based on the efforts of those who are willing to innovate and do what it takes to achieve chosen goals.

And you know me so well?

Oh nonsense.

I am forced to agree with Ollie. Not all republicans hate blacks. Only 90% of them feel that way.

Oralloy and Branco at their usual racist post spasms, implying none too subtly that black voters are so dumb they'd be taken in by the old carrot on a stick trick. They aren't. They're fully aware the GOP offers them nothing, and Trump is racist thru and thru. Which is why they overwhelmingly keep on rejecting the gop's blandishments and vote Dem. As do women. Hell, Shelby Steele, the black ex-chairman of the RNC, told Repubs that ten years or so gfo, and they were too dense to listen. And that was from one of their own. They're still too dense, as is branco.