Republicans Are Waging War Against Minority Political Rights

The following is a post by Symone D. Sanders Townsend at MS NOW: 

A nationwide campaign is underway to systematically dismantle Black political influence.

In Tennessee, Republicans are working to eliminate a congressional district that allows the majority-Black city of Memphis to choose its own representative. 

In Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed off on a new map that eliminates a South Florida district, which had a near-majority Black electorate. 

And in Louisiana, Republicans threw out thousands of votes that had already been cast so they could pass a new map that eliminates a congressional district that includes the majority-Black city of New Orleans.

Following the Supreme Court’s lead, Republican lawmakers have cast these as mere partisan exercises or even an attempt to be “race neutral.” But the pattern is not subtle, and Americans should not pretend otherwise.

At every turn, we are told this is not about race, that it’s just politics, that they’re just respecting the process. 

Please. This is not some theoretical exercise being debated in a classroom. This is a threat to the multiracial democracy that our ancestors built over the last 250 years, often at great cost to them and the country.

I don’t think Americans fully understand the emergency of this moment.

The Voting Rights Act, which the Supreme Court gutted last week, was not some symbolic achievement. People bled and died for that law. Entire generations organized, marched and fought in courtrooms and legislative chambers so Black Americans could fully participate in democracy and wield real electoral power.

Now we are watching that progress get chipped away in real time, while some who should be on the frontlines protesting continue to debate whether it’s actually happening.

Trust me, it’s happening. And what frustrates me most is that America has seen this movie before.

After Reconstruction ended, the 14th and 15th amendments to guarantee basic rights for formerly enslaved people were still in place. Black Americans were still citizens. On paper, Black men still had the right to vote.

But then states stopped enforcing those rights. Courts weakened them. Governors aided and abetted the rollback. Business leaders looked away. And slowly, methodically, rights that existed in theory stopped existing in practice.

That is the part of American history people love to skip over.

The collapse of Reconstruction was not just about Klan terror and white lynch mobs. It was about institutions. It was about statehouses. It was about courts. It was about people in power deciding they’d had enough of multiracial democracy.

And for nearly 88 years, between the end of Reconstruction and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Black Americans fought to claw back the electoral power that had been stripped away.

Eighty-eight years.

That should haunt all of us right now, because too many Americans have convinced themselves that democratic progress is permanent, that the arc of history, once it bends toward justice, cannot swing back.

But democracy is not a destination; it is a marathon with no finish line. 

Rights are only as strong as the institutions willing to enforce them — and the people willing to defend them.

Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act still exists today, on paper. But states have moved with extraordinary speed to dilute the voting strength of Black communities, redraw districts and weaken the electoral influence Black voters built over generations. And too often, the courts have responded by insisting Americans should ignore the obvious.

Again: trust your eyes.

I grew up a Black woman and a Democrat in Nebraska, a red state many people in national politics would probably write off entirely. But thanks to a quirk in state law, my congressional district delivered electors for Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the Electoral College. I know what can happen when voters are actually allowed to build coalitions and choose representatives responsive to them.

That is what democracy is supposed to do.

Voters deserve the opportunity to select representatives of their choice, even if the broader state leans one way or the other. Their voices should not be diluted because the people in power dislike the outcome.

Anyone who believes in multiracial democracy needs to understand where power is actually built in this country. State legislatures draw the maps. Governors sign the laws. State courts interpret voting rules. Secretaries of state oversee elections. America’s democracy is shaped in the states.

That is where this fight is being lost right now. And that is where it has to be won.

Because history tells us what happens when attacks on voting rights are treated like ordinary politics instead of what they actually are: an assault on who gets to wield power in America.

We have seen rights survive on paper while disappearing in practice before. We don’t have another 88 years to fix this.

Trust your eyes, then refuse to look away.

Recent Poll Shows Life Is Harder For Nonwhites In The U.S.

The charts above are from the NPR / Harvard School of Public Health Poll -- done between May 16th and June 13th of a nationwide sample of 4,192 adults. The margin of error at the 95% confidence interval is  2.8 percentage points for the total national results,  4.1 for White,  5.0 for Black,  5.1 for Latino,  6.7 for Asian, and  12.6 for Native American adults.

DOJ Says Texas Redistricting Was Unfair To Minorities

Texas gained enough population between 2010 and 2020 to give it two more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. About 95% of that population gain was due to minorities. Texas Republicans ignored this, and created two more white seats by dividing minority communities and putting them into majority white districts. This was racist and unfair, and the Department of Justice is suing the state to rectify the situation.

Here is part of how Steve Vladeck describes the Texas unfair redistricting at MSNBC.com:

The Justice Department sued Texas on Monday, challenging its newly drawn electoral maps at both the state and congressional levels. At its core, the lawsuit claims that Texas’ new maps discriminate against the state’s “growing minority electorate.” And clearly, they do. The problem with the lawsuit is not its factual premise; it is the significant steps the Supreme Court has taken in the last eight years to make it easier for conservative states to get away with exactly such anti-democratic (and anti-Democratic) manipulation.

And although Congress could fix much of the damage the Supreme Court has caused, its efforts to do so remain mired in Senate Democrats’ inability to overcome or eliminate the filibuster. Simply put, the latest front in the battle between the Biden administration and Texas reinforces just how fragile our democracy is becoming — and how directly the Supreme Court is responsible.

Texas fared well in the 2020 census: The second-largest state added 4 million residents between 2010 and last year’s count. Most of that growth came from minority groups, which now constitute a majority of the state’s population. Indeed, the statewide population of “Anglos” (non-Latino white Texans) was responsible for only 5 percent of that growth. Among other things, this population boom netted Texas two new seats in the U.S. House — it will now elect members from 38 districts, second only to California.

When the Texas Legislature met to redraw both the U.S. and state house districts in response to the new data, it adopted maps that, put most charitably, do not reflect the actual sources of population growth. As the Justice Department’s lawsuit explains, the two new congressional seats both have Anglo majorities; a West Texas district with a large Latino population was redrawn to turn a Latino majority into a minority, and minority communities in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex were, in the Justice Department’s words, “surgically excised” by being attached to different districts with Anglo majorities — some stretching over a hundred miles from Dallas-Fort Worth. And the redrawn lines in the state House are even more, shall we say, aggressive.

The unabashed goal of this gerrymandering was to entrench as large a Republican majority as the Legislature could. The FiveThirtyEight redistricting tracker predicts that, with these maps, Republicans would control 24 of the 38 U.S. House seats, or 63 percent of the delegation, and have a good shot at a 25th in a state former President Donald Trump won last year by only 52 percent to 46 percent. That’s achieved by expanding the voting power of non-Latino white voters, who are about 40 percent of the state’s total population but now control 3 of every 5 districts.

As Ari Berman has documented, Latinos, in contrast, make up 39 percent of the population but control only 20 percent of the districts. And only 2 percent of the districts have Black majorities, even though Black Texans are one-eighth of the state’s population. More fundamentally, the maps completely ignore the source of Texas’ explosive population growth, reducing the voting power of the very minority groups who are responsible for virtually all of the state’s gains in size.

Before 2013, Texas’ map would never have made it into force. Texas was a “covered jurisdiction” under the federal Voting Rights Act, meaning changes to its districts would need to get “preclearance” from the federal Justice Department. But in 2013, the Supreme Court, in its 5-4 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, neutered the preclearance requirement by invalidating the formula Congress used to decide which jurisdictions it applied to.

Although the court’s analysis focused on the claim that the formula was outdated (and therefore was unduly harsh to jurisdictions that no longer had demonstrated patterns of discrimination), as the Justice Department lawsuit points out, “in every redistricting cycle since 1970, courts have found that one or more of Texas’s statewide redistricting plans violated the United States Constitution or the Voting Rights Act.”. . .

The Biden administration’s new suit against Texas may be a bellwether. If the Voting Rights Act can no longer prevent a state that gained seats in Congress almost entirely because of minority population growth from redistricting to reduce the voting power of those minority groups, it will be a powerful testament to how much the Supreme Court has denuded that landmark civil rights statute.

That the case has to be filed at all shows how imperative it is for Congress to fix it, even if eliminating the filibuster is the only way to accomplish such reform. So long as these maps remain in effect, they will provide only further evidence of the fragility of our democracy — and how increasingly unrepresentative our “representatives” are.

The Population Is Changing And The GOP Can't Accept That

According to the 2020 census, the United States is more diverse today than it has ever been. The white population has shrunk once again, and in fact, all of the nation's growth was among its non-white inhabitants. This is scaring Republicans, whose party is mostly white and whose policies are anti-minority and racist. They could just change their policies to be more inclusive, but they have chosen a different path -- to suppress the votes of non-whites and gerrymander districts to hold on to power. If those methods work for them, it won't be for very long. The demographic changes being seen in the population is not going to go away, and by mid-century whites will no longer be a majority. Sadly though, their party has been taken over by the racists and bigots, so they will just continue to pursue white privileges -- and this will only hurt their party in the future.

Here's how Jennifer Rubin describes the situation in The Washington Post:

The 2020 Census shows that while Whites remain the largest ethnicity group in the United States, the demographic decreased by 8.6 percent over the past decade. Those identifying as multiracial, by contrast, grew by a stunning 276 percent. Hispanic, Black and Asian American populations all grew at a rapid rate, too. Now, the country is nearly 19 percent Hispanic, 12 percent Black and 6 percent Asian American.

The country grew at a slower pace than in any decade since the Depression. It is also aging. Nearly all the growth took place in urban centers (up nearly 9 percent) as rural populations shrank. The Hill reports: “Fewer than half of the 3,143 counties in the United States added population over the last decade, the new census data shows. The share of Americans who live in nonmetropolitan rural areas dropped by 2.8 percentage points, the Bureau said Thursday.”

The results speak to a truism that millions of Republicans would like to ignore: America is never static. It is — and has always been — in a state of flux, whether it comes to race, religious affiliation (or lack thereof), the divide between native-born and immigrant, or the geographic spread of the population (e.g., the Great Migration of Blacks from the South in the early 20th century or the rise of the Sun Belt population over the last few decades). Indeed, that is the essence of America — a country not defined by racial or religious identity.

That reality has, of course, freaked out a significant share of White Christians who do not see “their America” as predominate. It was never “theirs” to begin with, and the assumption that something is amiss if White Christians are not in charge is the essence of white supremacy and Christian nationalism. It is also fundamentally un-American; our country is defined, as President Biden rightly says, by an “idea.”

It is easy, then, to understand why a political party based increasingly on its appeal to White Christians has adopted so many anti-American traits. The sanctity of elections has given way to a sentiment that violence is sometimes necessary (for Whites to retain power). The decline in their numbers has led to worship of totalitarian thugs around the world and disdain for a free society. The desperation for a make-believe world of yesteryear has led tens of millions down the rabbit hole of right-wing media propaganda, where their worst fears and darkest impulses are amplified.

Less remarked upon, but equally important, is that the growth of urban areas (generally more productive, more tolerant and more diverse) leaves rural Whites increasingly at odds with the national ethos. The latter are also poorer, sicker, less educated and have shorter life-spans than their metropolitan counterparts.

A rational, pro-democracy party would recognize it needs a broader base of support and move to adjust its policies to appeal to a more diverse, more secular and more urban America. That’s not the GOP game plan.

The GOP is so dependent on the right-wing media generator of White angst and resentment, and so fearful they will lose their grip among Whites, that they have chosen instead to try to hold back the demographic and cultural tide washing over them. They resort to voter suppression, assault objective reality, disdain majority rule and weaponize apolitical institutions, such as the courts or the Justice Department. Moreover, given their White, wealthy donor base, they can offer only rhetorical populism while pursuing plutocratic economic policies (going so far as to refuse to increase funding for the Internal Revenue Service to enforce tax laws).

There is no single solution to solve the growing urban-rural divide. However, unless and until Americans in rural areas demand responsible governance, embrace the true “idea” of America and reject the temptation of racism and authoritarianism, little will change.

In the meantime, urban Americans, who constitute a greater share of the population than ever before, will lose patience with anti-democratic techniques (e.g., the filibuster, voter suppression) designed to give rural Whites disproportionate power. Demography may not be destiny, but it brings the weaknesses of American democracy into focus.

2020 Census - All U.S. Growth Is Due To Non-White Minorities

This has to scare Republicans (whose policies favor whites over other groups). The number of whites in the population has actually shrunk, and for the first time is expected to fall below 60% of the population.

The following is from The Washington Post:

For the first time in the history of the country’s census taking, the number of White people in the United States is widely expected to show a decline when the first racial breakdowns from the 2020 Census are reported this week.

For five years now, the U.S. Census Bureau’s annual updates of the 2010 Census have estimated that the nation’s White population is shrinking, and all population growth has been from people of color.

The new census data, planned for release on Aug. 12, will show definitively how the ethnic, racial and voting-age makeup of neighborhoods shifted over the past decade, based on the national house-to-house canvass last year. It is the data most state legislatures and local governments use to redraw political districts for the next 10 years.

If the White decline is confirmed by the new data, that benchmark will have come about eight years earlier than previously projected, said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution.

“Twenty years ago if you told people this was going to be the case, they wouldn’t have believed you,” he said, adding that the opioid epidemic and lower-than-anticipated birthrates among millennials after the Great Recession accelerated the White population’s decline. “The country is changing dramatically.”

The United States is also expected to have passed two other milestones on its way to becoming a majority-minority society in a few decades: For the first time ever, the portion of White people could dip below 60 percent and the under-18 population is likely to be majority non-White.

No Voter Should Have To Wait Over 30 Minutes To Vote

Much has been made of Republican attempts to pass new laws to suppress the votes of those who might vote against them (minorities, young people, etc.).

But little has been said recently about a voter suppression effort by Republicans that is already in place, and affected many voters in the 2020 election -- having to wait in line for hours to vote.

This primarily affected minorities. In White precincts, there were lots of voting machines and no one had to wait very long to vote. But in minority areas, there were few precincts and few voting machines, and people were forced into lengthy waits to be able to vote.

This mostly happened in states where Republicans controlled the voting process, and although they deny it, seems to be an obvious effort to suppress the votes of minorities. This needs to be rectified. A federal law should be passed to mandate that no voter have to wait in line over 30 minutes to vote -- and any state violating that law should be severely punished (and required to fix the problem before the next election happens).

Here is some of what Jennifer Rubin had to say on this subject in The Washington Post:

The Democracy Fund’s Voter Study Group completed a voluminous study of the 2020 election. Among its most stunning findings: “Sixty-two percent of white, 47 percent of Black, and 51 percent of Hispanic voters waited 10 minutes or less to vote; 7 percent of white, 13 percent of Black, and 8 percent of Hispanic voters waited an hour or more.” Put differently, “Almost twice as many Black (31 percent) as white (18 percent) or Hispanic voters (17 percent) reported waiting 31 minutes or more.”

The Brennan Center for Justice’s study of the 2018 midterms also showed: “Latino and Black voters were more likely than white voters to wait in the longest of lines on Election Day: some 6.6 percent of Latino voters and 7.0 percent of Black voters reported waiting 30 minutes or longer to vote. ... More generally, Latino voters waited on average 46 percent longer than white voters, and Black voters waited on average 45 percent longer than white voters.”

Similarly, a Georgia study of the June 2020 primary found that “the average wait time after 7 p.m. across Georgia was 51 minutes in polling places that were 90% or more non-White, but only 6 minutes in polling places that were 90% white.”

The 30-minute mark is critical. The bipartisan Presidential Commission on Election Administration declared in a 2014 report that no voter should have to endure more than a 30-minute wait. The causes for the excessive wait times in Black precincts include fewer polling places, misallocation of resources and older machines.

Several measures might address the problem. The Justice Department could start filing suit against states with significant disparities in waiting times between White and Black voters. Congress could pass a law requiring states to adhere to the 30-minute rule. Voting rights litigator Marc Elias explains how this might work in a post for Democracy Docket: “If the state or a locality fails to meet this time limit, it must pay the affected voter for the time the voter spent waiting in line in excess of 30 minutes. Voters could seek the actual cost to them of waiting in line (lost wages, childcare, etc.) or accept an hourly minimum that each state could set by law.” Alternatively, states could be mandated in subsequent elections to increase the number of polling places or increase early voting and mail-in options.

Reduction of wait times should theoretically be agreeable to both parties and all voters. It has nothing to do with “voter security,” and everything to do with eliminating barriers to voting. If Senate Republicans will not agree to even reduction-in-waiting-time measures, perhaps Manchin will finally lose patience and agree to prioritize voting rights over Senate procedures.

Low-Wage Workers Hit The Hardest By Pandemic Recession

The charts above are from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). They show that the industry impacted the most by the pandemic recession was the Leisure & Hospitality industry. And this industry hires a lot of low-wage workers (especially women and minorities) -- making those workers the hardest hit.

Here is part of what the EPI had to say:

In February 2021, a year into the pandemic recession, the U.S. economy remained down 9.5 million jobs from February 2020, the last month before the economic effect of COVID-19 began. Repairing employment levels requires more than regaining those 9.5 million lost jobs; we must also consider how many jobs would have been created since February 2020. During the 12 months prior to the pandemic recession, job growth averaged 202,000 new jobs per month. Absent the COVID-19-driven recession, an estimated 2.4 million additional jobs could have been created. Adding these to the actual job losses since February 2020 implies that the U.S. labor market in February 2021 was short 11.9 million jobs. . . .

• Between February 2020 and February 2021, employment losses were largest among workers in the leisure and hospitality, government, and education and health services industries. Even with a partial bounceback last summer after losing more than 8 million jobs last spring, the leisure and hospitality sector still faces the largest shortfall, with nearly 3.5 million fewer jobs in February 2021 than a year prior.
• Within the worst-hit sectors, workers in the lowest average wage and lowest average hour occupations were hit the worst and remain most damaged a year later. While aggregate output data (for example, gross domestic product) appears to have rebounded significantly by February 2021, the “output gap”—the difference between actual and potential economic output—that remains represents a far greater share of jobs because the still-jobless workers in the economy previously worked in some of the most disadvantaged sectors in terms of wages and weekly hours.
• Within the hardest-hit sector, leisure and hospitality, Black women, Hispanic women, and Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (both men and women) saw disproportionate losses. Occupational segregation—the fact that these workers are less likely to be found in higher-paid management professions, even within leisure and hospitality—exposed them to the worst of the job losses.

Minorities & Low-Wage Workers Face A Higher Risk

The charts above are from the Kaiser Family Foundation. They show that minorities and low-wage workers are at a higher risk of serious illness (and perhaps death) if infected with the Coronavirus. While the virus is no respecter of persons and can infect anyone (since no one has an immunity to it), it can more seriously affect some groups -- groups that already have conditions due to a lack of insurance and jobs that give them more exposure. We have a very unequal society, and the pandemic is exposing that inequality.

Why Are More Minorities Than Whites Dying From Virus?

We have learned in the last few days that the Coronavirus, while not a respecter of race, is hitting minorities harder than whites. Minorities (especially Blacks) are dying in larger percentages. Why?

Those minorities are not more susceptible to catching the virus. Why then are they dying in larger percentages? The answer, whether we want to admit it or not, is because the United States is still a racist nation. And our racist institutions mean that too many minorities are forced to live in poorer neighborhoods, have lower paying jobs, and are uninsured in larger numbers. All the Coronavirus did was to expose the continuing racism in this country.

The following is part of an article in Mother Jones:

A few weeks ago, a thought woke Camara Jones up in the middle of the night. It was about the coronavirus. That’s commonplace these days, but Jones is a family physician and epidemiologist who worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where among other things she studied racial bias in the medical system. Her thoughts on a pandemic are anything but commonplace.

The coronavirus had revealed something essential about the workings of race in America. “The thought that woke me up,” she told me over the weekend, “is that the most profound aspects of racism operate without bias and without stigma.” What she means is that racism in its most pernicious form slides by on deniability, without any of the telltale oafishness with which more ordinary forms of prejudice announce themselves. Left in its wake are lopsided outcomes that are made to look like the natural order of things.

Nothing illustrates that dynamic better than a pandemic that is wrongly said to be “the great equalizer.”

“This disease,” she says, “is not an equal-opportunity disease.” Black people are contracting the coronavirus and dying from the disease at higher rates than other people. This disproportionate effect is a social issue in the guise of an epidemiological one. Black Americans, particularly in the Southern states that have not expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, are more likely to be uninsured. They’re more likely to work a low-paying job. They’re more likely to suffer from heart disease, asthma, cancer, and other conditions, not—as Jones takes pains to emphasize—because of biology. It’s because of straightforward social choices such as where toxic dumps get sited, where new highways get built, and where Black people have historically been permitted to live.

It will be hard to fully grasp the scale of disparities in coronavirus outcomes. Cities and states thus far have been slow to collect data by race and ethnicity. From what we know now, though, the pattern is troubling. In Chicago, for instance, 69 percent of people who have died from the coronavirus as of April 8 are Black, even though they make up 32 percent of the city’s population. In Michigan, where an outbreak has gripped Detroit and where Black people make up 14 percent of the population, they represent 40 percent of deaths. In Louisiana, where an outbreak has rattled the New Orleans area, 70 percent of those who have died are Black. In Alabama, Black people make up 27 percent of the state’s population but 52 percent of those who have died from coronavirus. In Mississippi, where Black people make up 38 percent of the population, they makeup 56 percent of coronavirus infections and 72 percent of deaths. And as ProPublica reported, Black residents in Milwaukee County, who make up 26 percent of the county’s population, constitute half of its COVID cases and 81 percent of its deaths. 

In New York City, Black residents make up 22 percent of the population and 28 percent of deaths. In Los Angeles, though early data is limited, Los Angeles County public health director Barbara Ferrer reports that Black people “have a slightly higher rate of death than other races.”

Jones sees the effects of racism everywhere in the coronavirus outbreak. She points to the way the disease has ravaged jails and prisons, which are disproportionately Black because of disproportionate policing. In Chicago, for instance, 238 inmates and counting at Cook County Jail have contracted the disease. In Louisiana, five people have died of coronavirus as 42 inmates and staffers have contracted the disease. At the jail complex in New York’s Rikers Island, more than 160 inmates have contracted the disease, including one who died while serving a parole violation.

White Privilege Has No Place In A Nation of Immigrants

Trump supporters and apologists are bending over backward to deny that Trump's latest statements (about four women of color in Congress) were racist. They are wrong. While the trumpistas may not have been offended (being white), minority American citizens know better because they have heard similar slurs about their race/ethnicity all their lives.

Those white apologists are just clinging to their white privilege. They don't mind a few immigrants being here -- as long as they are servile and keep their mouths shut. But that isn't what American is supposed to be about. In a nation of immigrants and descendants of immigrants, all people should be equal (regardless of color, religion or ethnicity). Anything less is un-American.

The following is just a part of an excellent article in The Washington Post by Viet Thanh Nguyen (and I urge you to read the whole article). He writes:

When Donald Trump first proclaimed “Make America Great Again,” many white Americans focused on the slogan’s explicit appeal. Why wouldn’t we want America to be great again? But many of us who do not happen to be white understood the slogan’s subtext: Make America White Again. Immigrants, refugees and people of color have always recognized Trumpism for what it is — a politics of nostalgia for an era of unquestioned white superiority and power. Trump’s comments last weekend, that four congresswomen should “go back” to their ancestors’ countries if they don’t like this one, were also an argument that immigrants of color should simply be grateful to be here. Increasingly, post-white Americans are refusing to perform what many white Americans expect of them: docile compliance, with the implicit sequel of servitude. Instead, these proud Americans, who don’t hesitate to call Trump out, are both thankful and critical.

Call this mixture of gratitude and attitude a nuanced patriotism, a complicated love. Nuance like this is not a part of Trump’s rhetoric or his vision of America. Now, confronted by women of color who are not performing the gratitude and servitude he expects, he has made his own best case for even the most hesitant white people to recognize how white supremacy underlies his vision: “If they don’t like it here, they can leave.” This paraphrase of the classic insult “love it or leave it” implies that the four members of Congress do not belong to the United States, even though three of them — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts — were born here. (The fourth, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, came here from Somalia as a girl and became a citizen.)

With these and other statements and silences, Trump is making whiteness, which has functioned as the politely invisible norm in American society, into the impolite, visible norm. Along the way, he is creating a situation where white people must choose: Be critical of their own whiteness or embrace it wholeheartedly. The fact that so many white people immediately recognized his racism is one good thing that has come out of this controversy, proof that they can identify and resist white supremacy.

Still, Trump’s appeal to a core group of Americans speaks to an uncomfortable truth in American history, which is that this is a country founded on the white racism of colonization, genocide, slavery and immigrant exploitation, which many white people who are not white supremacists benefit from. While Trump and his supporters would probably refuse words like “genocide,” they would still see the conquest of America by white people as a fact to be celebrated rather than apologized for. Trump’s vision of America is so explicitly racist that the 1950s can no longer be cited as the time period for which he might be nostalgic. The 1950s were the beginning of the end for government-sanctioned segregation and racist immigration laws that had kept out almost all nonwhite immigrants since the 1924 Immigration Act. What Trump wants is the America of the late 19th century, when Congress passed the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the first time it targeted a racial group for immigration exclusion.

Asian immigrants, and their American descendants, can testify to the pain of perpetually being suspected as foreigners. “Where are you from?” was the not-so-friendly question that many us have experienced. And if we tried to say that we’re from here, we braced ourselves for the follow-up: “No, where are you really from?” How often is a white person subject to this question? Do people ponder Robert Mueller’s ancestry? No. . . .

That is what is most dangerous about Trump: the nostalgia for purity that supposes America is a white homeland and that motivates him and his followers to tell others to go back to faraway homes. This nostalgia is based on a fiction that the uncontaminated America is an immaculate place, despite the realities of an imperfect social fabric and the many tragedies taking place in actual American households: divorce, violence, homophobia, mental illness, unemployment and drug abuse — to name only some maladies. As for many immigrants, their new home in America is often as much a place of discomfort, even torment, as one of love and belonging. Immigrant stories are full of pain — the trauma of past wars and refugee experiences, the brutality of working constantly, the mundane destruction of affection that comes about when parents cannot spend time with increasingly distant children. . . .

Nostalgia, which means homesickness, eradicates this complexity. Home often appears in our memory through a distorting longing so strong it borders on illness, where we forget all that might have been wrong and fetishize all that seemed good. “Make America Great Again” is an expression of this homesickness, threatening to hurt us all by defining home in only one way and turning it into propaganda, in the process expelling all those who do not fit home’s definition. Those fearful of change are homesick for an America that was, in fact, not so great for many people, including those white people who never benefited from America’s promise, from the poor to the working class to women of many backgrounds. To truly make America great requires the paradoxical ability to see that America as a home has always been imperfect. To make America a home for everyone means acknowledging that home is what we love and fear, what we remake and renovate. . . .

To progress, we must redefine home and who belongs to it. While Trump wants to separate us into white Americans and everyone else, we must forge connections among people who do not look or think alike. We must say that this home is capacious enough for the white people to whom Trump appeals and for the rest of us, and that our destinies are tied together in a fateful kinship that no amount of border-closing or deportation will forestall. Economic prosperity does not have to be tied to nostalgic white supremacy. Instead, economic equality can emerge only by working through the agonies of our racial history, one that has exploited the poor of all colors and divided struggling white people from their nonwhite allies who also seek economic justice.

This is our American home. Passions are high, voices are loud, but this is the reality: Home is where we are, home is what we claim, and no one can tell us to go home if we are already at home.

Huge Wealth/Income Gap Between Whites & Minorities

I have posted many times about the huge gap in wealth and income between the richest Americans and the rest of America. And it is a big problem, made only worse by the recent tax cuts for the rich passed by the Republicans. It must be rectified.

But that is not the only gap posing a problem for our economy. There is also a significantly large gap in wealth and income between Whites and minorities. The median income for Whites is $61,200 and the mean (average) income is $123,400. For Blacks, the median income is $35,400 and the mean is $54,000. For Hispanics, the median is $38,500 and the mean is $57,300.

The difference between Whites and minorities is even greater when it comes to wealth (see the chart above).

Conservatives don't want to admit it, but we still live in an unfair economy, and it's caused by continuing discrimination against minorities. We have not solved our society's racism, and it continues to affect our economy.

NOTE -- The chart above is from the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. The numbers are from 2016 -- the last year for which numbers are known. They do a survey every three years. I doubt the 2019 numbers will look any different when published.