MAGA world is willfully blind to systemic racism

Earlier today, I took time to read the latest editorial about President Joe Biden's commencement address from National Review, a news site that's considered the dean of conservative punditry. 

When I saw the above headline, while I knew that the editors would be critical of Mr. Biden's speech because praise of progressives and progressivism is hard to come by on its pages, when I saw that they chose to attack the one part of the Morehouse speech that I found most compelling, well, I knew that I would have to rebut the same in real time!

Last Sunday morning, after a series of pleasantries, praise of Morehouse College's role as a beacon of change in American history, and detailing how the assassination of the College's most famous graduate, Nobel laureate Dr. Martin Luther King, impacted him as a young law student from Delaware, President Biden launched into a series of questions that invoked the old "call and response" rhetorical device that experienced orators use to emphasize key points. 

Specifically, Biden asked:

"What is democracy if Black men are being killed in the street?” 

“What is democracy if a trail of broken promises still leave black communities behind?"

"What is democracy if you have to be ten times better than anyone else to get a fair shot? And most of all, what does it mean, as we’ve heard before, to be a black man who loves his country even if it doesn’t love him back in equal measure?”

At the time of their utterance, each of these questions found me nodding my head and ready to yell out "well" in spiritual agreement, like the old deacons used to do at New Salem Missionary Baptist Church when I was a boy. 

But the editors at National Review didn't like those questions one bit, as they collectively called them "anachronisms," a fancy way of saying that they are from a time long ago—and a galaxy far, far away. 

Those editors are wrong, mind you, but their self righteous belief that they are right is par for the course in MAGA world, one in which racism just magically disappeared somewhere between Dr. King's assassination in 1968—and Barack Obama's presidential election in 2008. 

Now, only extreme cynics and the blissfully ignorant believe that anti-Black racism no longer exists in America, but those two categories encompass many millions of MAGA voters whose perceptions about race are devoid of any sense of caring about the perspectives of many millions of Blacks, including a few Black conservatives who realize that anti-Black racism is still REALLY real—even if they disagree about the best methods to address it. 

For those who missed the speech, President Biden answered his three rhetorical questions not with his feelings, but with hard core facts in the form of calling out the Republican Party's pernicious push to:

1. Eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in academia and the corporate world;

2. Ban books that conservative groups like the "Moms for Liberty" disapprove;

3. Creating hardships for early voting that run contrary to the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Again, Deacon Hobbs not only says "well," but I'll add an "Amen, Mr. President,” because he was absolutely right!

Florida, which is my home state, former President Donald Trump's adopted state, and home to Trump's mentee, turned presidential primary foe, turned political friend again, Gov. Ron Desantis, is ground zero for race based bigotry masquerading as race neutral public policy. 

Over the past four years, the MAGA Republican dominated Florida legislature, at the behest of MAGA Gov. Desantis, has passed laws that punished people for peacefully protesting George Floyd's murder at the hands of Minneapolis police; banned books from revered Black writers ranging from James Baldwin and Toni Morrison to the late Major League Baseball star Roberto Clemente; limited Black History to stories that “do not make white children feel guilty about their ancestors' roles as enslavers;” eliminated diversity, equity, and inclusion at Florida's public universities while actively seeking to prevent University professors from testifying in courts of law about systemic racial bigotry; reduced early voting hours and mail-in balloting in hopes of frustrating Democratic voters who use such means to great effect in Florida and across the Red Republican South!

But for the Florida based federal judiciary that has struck down almost all of the above MAGA laws as wholly unconstitutional, the MAGA's in Florida would be winning a culture war that seeks to force Black people to focus less on our unique ethnic customs in favor of only identifying as "Americans."

But the folly in such a notion is that Black people have been "others" since the first enslaved Africans arrived on American shores in 1619; that's never been by "our" Black design, but designed by racists who used racism to their financial and political benefits from the founding of these United States—and to the collective detriment of Black people.

To be clear, I do believe that race relations in America have improved in MANY ways since Dr. King was killed in 1968, particularly the Black middle and upper classes that have benefitted financially and politically in ways that our enslaved ancestors couldn't have imagined. 

But if King was resurrected right now, he would find much to be very familiar, particularly the ever widening gap between the rich and poor, the legacy of substandard housing in Black neighborhoods, the "re-segregation" of public school systems in the South, and the reality that no matter how many degrees Black people have earned, no matter how much money or equity we have in our homes, no matter how nice the cars that we drive may be, that we ALL fear that we are just one improper lane change or expired tag away from being killed by a reckless police officer—and left on the side of the road like carrion.

Now, most of the MAGA folks who need to read my words or access YouTube to hear Mr. Biden's similar assessment at Morehouse will not because their minds are closed and they believe that whites are the real victims of racism in 2024. Variations of these simplistic sentiments have been expressed by Republican presidents from Richard Nixon on through Ronald Reagan and yes, culminating with the once (and potentially future) president Donald Trump…I doubt, very seriously, that the Republican Party will ever change from this vile perspective. 

And while I fully understand that a great MANY progressive voters take issue with Mr. Biden on topics like inflation, including the high costs of food and goods, and the war in Gaza, I still maintain that I could never align myself with a candidate or coalition that's actively placing anti-Black racism into their platforms and policy considerations.

Lest we forget...