America has a racial demagogue for a president - By Michael Gerson

[DonViejo]

By Michael Gerson Opinion writer September 25 at 7:57 PM

It is often difficult to determine if President Trump’s offenses against national unity and presidential dignity are motivated by ignorance or malice. His current crusade against sideline activism at professional football games features both.

Protests by players during the singing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” are misdirected, but their motivations are understandable. African Americans have a naturally complex relationship with a country in which 1 out of 7 seven human beings was once owned as property and robbed of his or her labor. A country with a founding promise that bypassed them. In 1852, Frederick Douglass asked how the American slave should respond to the Fourth of July holiday. “To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless. .?.?. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States.”

Tough words, at least as challenging as a knee to the ground at a sporting event. And the end of slavery was hardly the end of oppression. We are a country where the reimposition of white supremacy following the Civil War involved not just segregation but also widespread violence. A country in which mass incarceration and heavy-handed police tactics now create a sense that some neighborhoods are occupied by a foreign force. A country in which wealth and opportunity remain, in significant part, segregated by race.

If white Americans can’t feel even a hint of this alienation and outrage, it is a fundamental failure of empathy and historical memory.

Trump seems ignorant of, or indifferent to, the unfolding drama of the civil rights movement — of President Abraham Lincoln’s firm hand signing the Emancipation Proclamation, of African American military heroism in defending the Union, of the stubborn courage displayed by protesters in the front of buses and at segregated lunch counters, of Bloody Sunday on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, repeated in many bloody versions. When the president looks at protesters, he cannot see what they are trying to be.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/america-has-a-racial-demagogue-for-a-president/2017/09/25/07af83da-a223-11e7-b14f-f41773cd5a14_story.html

[Solly Mack]

1. K&R

[genxlib]

2. +1000

I think this is important. Having a traditional Conservative say this is meaningful.

Lord knows he has done plenty of flag waving in his days as the Bush speechwriter. For him to call out the BS on this one is significant.

It is just a shame it is behind a paywall. I fully support that WaPo gets paid for their content. I just wish it could be more widely seen.