Vice President Michelle Lujan-Grisham?

My God, what a motley VP list. However, Michelle Lujan Grisham aka MLG, New Mexico's governor, is definitely the best of this bunch. If this strategic leak was not a cynical trial balloon--and I think it is not at all a final list--MLG may really have a running chance to be a VP nominee. 

I am convinced this so-called list was really leaked to tell Amy Klobuchar and Stacey Abrams they are no longer in the running. I therefore predict another list will be leaked in about a week.

I mean, really, look at this so-called short list: two cops, Harris and Demings, an odious traitor to the progressives with no constituency Biden needs to win (Warren), and a mayor with no showing she knows anything about national policies. Oh, and Susan Rice, who has never been in any position of true electoral leadership, such as, say, a national union leader who was in the trenches negotiating major legislation, hint, hint, Sara Nelson. If he picks Rice, the whole Benghazi nonsense gets another vampiric lease on life.

Still, MLG making the "this week's top five," to quote the late Casey Kasem, is the big surprise. As my closest friend here in NM and I say, MLG is definitely the best of the national corporate-oriented Dems, and has shown great humane flexibility and strength since assuming office after winning the governor position in 2018. MLG also served nearly a decade in Congress, and knows the DC critters and federal electoral politics. And...she is a Latina, and Biden desperately needs Latino voters to energize for this fall's election. Heck, I think I just made the case for MLG for VP, didn't I? 

But, what about that pesky sexual assault claim against MLG late last year from the disgruntled, can't-play-well-with-others and now former campaign advisor guy? See here for the background. My take is, now that the hypocrisy of #MeToo and NOW have been exposed, Don't mind that torpedo, full speed ahead! The hypocrisy is only going to get worse in our culture anyway, as Ms. Roving Eye, Republican Nikki Haley, is already doing her best to run for president in 2024. And to listen to Haley's appeals to xenophobia and racism, you would think the daughter of South Asian immigrants was a white Southern belle from the Antebellum period. So, my advice to MLG on the sexual assault allegation is: Say what you've said, which is "It didn't happen." But now, add, "If it did, so what?" 

Onward and upward, MLG!

Trump moved Tulsa rally one day to avoid juxtaposition of his pro-white nationalism and Juneteenth

So, Trump moved his Tulsa, OK rally from June 19, aka Juneteenth, to June 20.

If Trump had "many" African-American friends, why not hold the rally and celebrate Juneteenth, and provide an education oriented speech which many of Trump's white fans could use right now? 

Trump knows he does not want to celebrate Juneteenth, or anything relating to African-Americans. He moved it to the 20th to stop the juxtaposition with Juneteenth.  It should not be lost on anyone how Trump is no longer using "very fine people on both sides" remarks he used during and after Charlottesville protests, where many in the pro-Trump/pro-Confederate monument side were pretty scary in their racism and anti-Semitism. Now, faced with multi-colored protestors, mostly peaceable, demanding reform of the racism inherent in our criminal justice system, Trump's remarks are about crackdowns against protestors, continued criticism of the protestors, as well as unending exhortations in favor of police and National Guard forces--when there are so many recorded instances of police and National Guard overreach and abuse in responding to the protesters.

Trump moved the date of his rally, practically unnecessary in Oklahoma, a state he remains slated to win big in November, in order to make sure his pro-white nationalist message did not have to be tempered.

The duplicity of Blairites in the Labour Party and destruction of the Corbyn candidacy, and its echoes into American media and politics

Here is an op-ed piece from a pro-Tory/Conservative reporter, Peter Oborne from the London Daily Telegraph, and David Hearst, a Middle East correspondent who wrote for various newspapers in the US, Great Britain, and elsewhere. The two writers analyze and admit something they would not otherwise like to admit, about how corporate media manufactures narratives. The op-ed is about how Jeremy Corbyn, a genuinely nice, intelligent, caring person, who favored policies well within the range of mid-20th Century economic policy positions that created the British "general welfare" state, and whose mother had fought on behalf of British Jews against Nazis inside Britain,* was turned into some sort of Stalin-esque monster and an anti-Semite.  Here is their interview with Corbyn, which itself is worth reading as it helps readers see how astute, deeply knowledgeable, and empathetic Corbyn actually is on a host of political, historical, and literary issues, especially including Brexit and the European Union, and the discussion of anti-Semitism.  Corbyn truly understands the pros and cons regarding the European Union, which is also what Yanis Varoufakis has long understood, and this interview Varoufakis did a few years ago with Corbyn shows Corbyn's perhaps-too-subtle view, though it has been consistently and resolutely held.

The op-ed from Oborne and Hearst is another part of what we had learned, in April of this year, how the Labour Party's own internal investigation revealed various Blairite leaders in the Labour Party were hoping the party's fortunes would fail in order that Corbyn could be replaced, and how it was those Blairites who, ironically, were in charge of "investigating" anti-Semitic statements from members and local political officials.  See this article in Jacboin about the report, and this article from Jonathan Cook at the same online magazine as the initial article cited in this post. 

What I saw, in real time, and repeat now, is how British corporate-dominated media, and most shockingly, the BBC, were willing to overlook Tory anti-Semitism, and work, hand in hand (whether there were meetings is not the point, as I seriously do not think any were had nor were any meetings necessary) to destroy Corbyn, and, each time, when Corbyn tried to be conciliatory, it only made him look weak at a time British regular folks were looking for resoluteness. See my initial take the morning after the election, and this take from the brilliant David Graeber in the New York Review of Books a few weeks later.  I had updated my "initial take" post showing how polling data proved fairly well what I had thought about the lack of resoluteness, and the media attacks on Corbyn as both monstrous and dithering worked to undermine Labour, and how, in an ironic twist of fate, most of the Labour seats lost were of Blairites--including one particularly odious (and sadly Jewish) anti-Corbyn MP, Ruth Smeeth.** 

The anti-Semite charge against Corbyn was always, to me, as a person of Jewish religious heritage, most astonishing and most defamatory.  I went through each of the allegations against Corbyn, and found the same consistency that he followed during the Northern Ireland wars in the 1970s through 1990s.  He was accused then of being pro-Irish Republican Army, but those who rip into Corbyn seem to want to ignore how even then Tory Prime Minister Cameron acknowledged the truth behind the 1972 "Bloody Sunday" massacre, which had been Corbyn's position nearly all along.

What I have learned, since the time of the British elections last December, is Corbyn lost older voters who remembered the unfair attacks on Corbyn for his "support" for the IRA, when, of course, it was not support in any nefarious sense, but one of common decency, and genuinely seeking peace.  That the organized Jewish community, led by an anti-female and homophobic, and anti-pluralistic, Chief Rabbi, who wrongly attacked Corbyn personally for being anti-Semitic,*** were hysterical in their attacks on Corbyn and Labour, was an icing on the cake of overall media dishonesty.

Had Bernie Sanders won the Democratic Party's nomination, I can't help but think corporate media, and their allies in the corporate wing of the Democratic Party, would have gone out of its way to undermine Bernie's candidacy, the way the British media and Blairites did with Corbyn. These people would rather lose to fascistic elements in the opposing conservative parties than win with anyone who would challenge the societal inequities to which they sometimes give lip service of wanting to change. It is why I am continuing to think about #DemExit after November, notwithstanding my support for most Democrats up and down the ticket--while still refusing to endorse Biden at this point, notwithstanding his now having enough delegates for a first round victory.  Anyone who thinks the corporate elite oriented Democrats, or their handmaidens in corporate media, really want "unity" in any honest way need merely return to 1972, when the corporate powers already in the Democratic Party, and the reactionary union leader, George Meany, deserted and sabotaged another decent, kind, and intelligent candidate, George McGovern. It is bad enough for progressives to have to fight media powers, who continue to overly influence too many Democratic Party voters. However, it is not possible to successfully fight that media, when those in the same party have their knives out and attack anyone and anything resembling progressive policies, which would get to the heart of our society's inequities.  At least with a new political party, which has no corporate power within it, one may convince its growing rolls of voters to not trust broadcast corporate media narratives and presentations.

As an aside, I should add I found this paragraph in the Oborne/Hearst article amusingly telling, as it shows, once again, how fascism will ape socialist policies from time to time, as part of its relentless sowing of division and hate against those on the "outside" or oppressed in a given society:

By another irony, once he had won the election, Johnson adopted a number of Corbyn’s policies which he had previously denounced as unworkable. 

Since becoming prime minister, Johnson has abandoned planned cuts in corporation tax, announced plans to nationalise Northern Rail and announced £100bn funding for infrastructure projects.

Mussolini supposedly (not really) made the "trains run on time" and started mass work projects, as did Hitler.  This is how fascists roll, and it is Trump's last card to play as this election heads into the final two seasons.  Watch for this, as Trump and the Republicans becoming increasingly scared enough of the Rust Belt and other places where Trump won in 2016 decide they may not vote for him again.

* And if you think it was because his mother was some fellow traveler Commie only following Moscow-directed orders in the 1930s, see this article in Ha'aretz, which contains, sadly, a fairly long drive-by against Corbyn, which explains how the fight on Cable Street was one where not only individual Jews, but neighbors and decent people were willing to do what most political groups and parties, including the Communist Party, refused to do. Corbyn's mother was active on behalf of the Spanish Republic in the mid to late 1930s, which put her in the firm left political category.  Her decision, then, meant she was willing to stand up and not follow political party when it went against her comscience.

** Wikileaks had previously disclosed confidential government documents showing Smeeth to have been a pro-US government person who, in American Red Scare parlance, would have qualified her as an "agent." The phrase "strictly protect" in parentheses next to her name in the Wikileaks exposed government cable means she is someone the government believes to be a person who provides "confidential" information. See this article in Wired. And see this backgrounder on her from a decidedly harsh and polemical source, WikiSpooks.  One should read the links, as opposed to the opinions and conclusions, and see how applying the style of arguments Ms. Smeeth, her establishment husband Michael, and others made against Corbyn, when applied to her, fit her more snugly.  No, I don't believe Smeeth a "spy" for US governmental interests, but that did not stop her from playing her role in the attacks on Corbyn.

*** Here is a deep dive run down of many of the attacks on Corbyn and anti-Semitism.  For me, when I looked at most of the allegations against Corbyn, I found them mostly a confusion between anti-Israeli government behaviors and anti-Semitism.  And to attack Corbyn for maintaining lines of communication with Arab groups which mouth anti-Semitism within their anti-Zionism, and not rip into how "mainstream" politicians hang with the Waahabist Saudis, which are virulently anti-Semitic, though not much in the anti-Israel camp, at least officially, is the worst form of hypocrisy. 

An old Dutch prog band knocked me over today

Sometimes YouTube knows what I want and need to hear.  There was a Dutch prog band, Solution, from the early 1970s I had missed the first time around.  I am knocked over by them.

Here is their album, Cordon Bleu, released in 1975. It is great to just let roll.

Rand Paul's racially tinged con game

I have long said, in the history of the United States, we should be wary of people who lead with the value known as "liberty." "Liberty" was often the rallying cry of slaveholders dating back to Patrick Henry, and later Confederates, and then, starting in the 1950s and 1960s, the soft language about "liberty" to refuse service at public accommodations as deprivation of private conscience.  One hears this language in those who wish to refuse public accommodation services to gays and lesbians, this time with the qualifier, "religious liberty."

We now have the spectacle of Senator Rand Paul (R-TN), who, in the past, has said his so-called "libertarian" principles would have caused him to oppose the 1964 Civil Rights Act, now refusing to support the anti-lynching bill which Congress is on the verge of passing.

I listened to Rand Paul's speech in favor of his amendment to limit the scope of the legislation to serious bodily injury or death, and thought, maybe he is not so off here. The proposed statute's title says "Lynching," a word which has long implied death, torture, or severe beatings by a group of individuals for racially motivated reasons. As phrased, this statute would appear to expand the term "lynching" to include someone getting shoved or someone getting a mere cut no different than what happens in a touch football game--but with racial or ethnic animus. But, then, I went through the proposed statute's wording in detail and went through the previous legislation upon which it is built. It was then I realized Senator Paul is playing a con game that is, sadly, consistent with the history of legislative obstruction racists in Congress have long perfected, going back to the Constitutional Convention, let alone the Antebellum period, meaning before the US Civil War (1861-1865). 

Let's start with the language of the bill, which is, again, on the verge of passing in the Congress.  It states, after a long preamble of "Whereas'es":

Sec. 3. LYNCHING

(a) Offense.—Chapter 13 of title 18, United States Code, is amended by adding at the end the following:

Ҥ 250. Lynching

Whoever conspires with another person to violate section 245, 247, or 249 of this title or section 901 of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 (42 U.S.C. 3631) shall be punished in the same manner as a completed violation of such section, except that if the maximum term of imprisonment for such completed violation is less than 10 years, the person may be imprisoned for not more than 10 years.

I then reviewed 18 USC 245, 18 USC 247, and 18 USC 249 to see what they state. 18 USC 245 is a law which sanctions persons who act, under alleged authority of law, to deprive other persons of rights to participate in what are delineated as "federally protected activities." 18 USC 247 makes it federal crime for a person to damage religious property or obstruct, through threat of force, persons in the exercise of religious beliefs, with an additional component for racist or other similar motivation.  18 USC 249 is the federal hate crimes statute.

What I noticed about the three statutes, 245, 247, and 249, is none of them had any wording that included "conspiracy," "aid," "abet," etc. Note now the language of proposed 18 USC 250 "Lynching" expressly using the word "conspiracy" to add to three other statutes. The use of the word "conspiracy," then, goes to the very definition of lynching in the sense of multiple people being involved in the violation of another person's civil rights.

However, there is already a section for "conspiracy" to violate civil rights in the same statutory chapter, 18 USC 241. The statute states in part:

If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same. (Underline added)

Therefore, prosecutors across the United States have already had the right to prosecute two or more persons who conspire to violate 245, 247, and 249. The proposed statute, then, appears to be symbolic, which is why nearly all members of Congress, including the modern John C. Calhoun, Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), are supporting this bill.  The reason for the long preamble of the proposed statute is, therefore, to provide the nation with a history lesson about lynching, and most importantly, Congress' own failure to pass the legislation. This makes the preamble to the legislation more substantive and important than the actual legislation--and makes the legislation essentially a resolution in statutory guise.  Here is an op-ed by an African-American journalist, Stacey Patton, who has written extensively on institutional and unofficial violence against African-Americans, on the token symbolism of this bill. 

Sadly, as we know from long observation, Congress loves nothing more than symbolic acts, virtue signaling, and the like. If one watches Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) speak after Rand Paul's speech, one hears little but emotion and outrage from her, which is, knowing how intelligent and sharp she is, merely grandstanding and virtue signaling, a specialty in which Senator Harris excels. Harris, who, as District Attorney in San Francisco, liked to lock up poor, minority mothers to somehow make their children attend school with more regularity, says nothing in her outrage that would show us how this bill would result in any substantive change in the law. Instead, Harris sputters in emotionally-laden rage, which is perfect for MSNBC "commentary."

However, I am not here to defend Rand Paul. I write to condemn Rand Paul's objection and proposed amendment because his words and actions are also symbolic. We already have "conspiracy" embedded within the statutes 245, 247, and 249, which would include a simple cut, abrasion, or wound that heals in little time or is merely temporary. And, contrary to Paul's concern trolling, there is no evidence police officers have been hampered in apprehending people accused of crimes nor have there been abuses of the existing laws regarding deprivation of federal civil rights. Rand himself admits, ever so quickly and slightly in his remarks, the symbolism involved in the bill. And Harris, working herself up in a quivering faux outrage voice little different from the woman in Central Park trying to sic police on a black man for having the temerity to request she follow dog leash rules in that park, faintly admits, at one point, the bill's symbolism.

Is one symbolic gesture worse than the other?  Yes. Rand's symbolism is far worse. Rand is arguing for a narrowly-conceived, technical legal wording in a one-line statute (apart from a long preamble), which itself is based upon word-police political correctness concerning the word "lynching." For Rand Paul, who ranted against political correctness, when demanding more attention be made regarding the Obama administration's response to the 2014 ebola virus situation, as the virus came from, hmmmm, Africa, his sudden concern for politically correct language is hypocrisy in an odious cause. When placed in the context of symbolism and virtue signaling, what we see is Rand Paul's action is not virtue-signaling. Instead, Paul is vice-signaling in acting to block passage of a bill that merely represents recognition of the US Congress' own failure to protect African-Americans from official and unofficial violence for over a century after the Civil War.

In Rand Paul's action to block the bill, Paul is symbolically upholding and re-affirming the history of racism within the US Congress itself, no matter how much he may otherwise protest, and no matter how much he claims to want to stop police militarization, and his claim in his speech that he may support ending the "qualified immunity" for police officers. Again, Rand Paul is the man who has already publicly said he would have opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act (pathetically trying to draw some distinction between property rights and civil rights in that context, which is practically speaking, impossible). He is also insensitive to the very reasonable argument that much of the modern libertarian movement was founded, and developed, in concert with racism-based opposition to the civil rights movement, particularly in the American South, including Paul's state of Kentucky, than with any true concern for "liberty of conscience" or "freedom" of the "individual." When all of this is considered, Paul's symbolism in offering a symbolic amendment to a symbolic bill is insulting and ugly--especially when Rand acted on the day of George Floyd's funeral, and ten days of grief, outrage, protests, and rioting.

Yes, when this bill passes, and Trump signs the bill, and when Senators Cory Booker and Kamala Harris do their victory laps on MSNBC and CNN, I will be saying, as did Ms. Patton above, this bill is vacuous, symbolic virtue signaling, and that what is necessary are real structural reforms and accountability to combat deep institutional and informal racism in our society. However, it is important to notice, right now, what Rand Paul has done, and acknowledge how deep the racism in our society goes in whatever we choose to argue about nearly anything else. Rand Paul has shown us once more why anyone who studies the Antebellum period, especially, should not be fooled by the sectional arguments over tariff policy, internal improvements, the continental railroad, or any number of issues, or think the ensuing Civil War was about anything equal to or greater than slavery and racism in American society. Whatever we Americans argue about, then or now, there is, embedded within the arguments, the continuing deep stains of racism. To not acknowledge that simple fact is to miss the significance of the debates over those other issues that are otherwise separate from racism in American society. This is not to say there are not substantive policy disputes concerning tariff legislation, internal improvement legislation, and the like. However, I am saying these disputes can never be properly understood without recognition of the emotionally laden argument over race, from slavery, through Jim Crow, and through our present age of mass incarceration.

Rand Paul can pass all the lie detector tests in the world (assuming lie detector tests are valid), and tell us, at gunpoint, how he is not racist. However, his actions speak louder than any denial about where he stands in the continuing argument over racism in American society.  The sad part is how Booker, Harris, Klobuchar, and Biden before them, have been accomplices, for their own self-promotion, in that continuing argument.

We have learned so little and have still not apologized to our children and grandchildren

This interview by neo-con Jeffrey Goldberg with General "Mad Dog" Mattis, who I have long detested for being a warmonger and a war criminal, much more in the mode of the infamous General LeMay than General Patton (no prize from me for Patton, either, but that is a topic for another day), shows Mattis has finally decided he could no longer avoid facing the consequences of what he supported throughout his life. It reminds me of something in the deepening past. Cut back to The Atlantic, circa December 1981, when David Stockman spoke bluntly with the now late writer, William Greider, and admitted the lie behind Ronald Reagan's economic policies, particularly when Stockman, then head of the Office of Management and Budget for the Reagan White House, and considered the architect who managed the data and arguments to push the Reagan economic agenda, admitted these were designed--and I repeat, designed--to undermine the middle and working classes, punish the poor, and exult the rich.  

And yet, too many of us continued to elect people like Reagan, elected Clinton to finish so much of Reagan's ultimate plan, and kept on voting badly, including both choices each party threw up in primaries throughout all these decades, all while continuing to revere Reagan himself.  Worse, so few of us have ever come to grips with the corporate hoax known as the Cold War, the significance of us allowing our nation's leaders to commit so much havoc, torture, and murder around the globe, creating and maintaining the military-industrial complex, which we turned into a prison-industrial complex here at home, and diverting us with the entertainment-industrial complex. So complex, one may say, but oh so interrelated, and oh so clear to anyone who stepped away from their corporate media network cable news and programming.  

We did this, or allowed this, for our own selfish economic ends. We did this for our own racism, which we justified with our fears of the people who our police otherwise oppressed and treated like a colony within our own nation. And all the while we maintained a confident, yet, uninformed set of prejudices we arrogantly called "life experience."

Ah, to live long enough to see so many echoes of past eras.  And to see how little many in our generation and my parents' generation have learned. So very little. But, sure.  Tell us we have to vote for Biden as we continue spouting our uninformed opinions with an arrogance and refusal to see how reforming our nation's systemic racism requires some sacrifice on our part for the good of others who have so long suffered.    

I guess the reason we could end up voting for Biden in November is not because of anything positive about Biden, or any foolish belief Biden ever means what he says with regard to anything hopeful. It will only be, and I repeat, only be because Trump has now ripped off any pretense of following any open governmental norms.  Here we sit in June and I am still not on board with Biden, though he is now only forty odd delegates from a first round ballot nomination for president by a confused, frustrated, and frankly frightened Democratic Party electorate. But, really, what is Joe Biden really going to do to positively earn any votes of the disaffected, especially when exit polling data* shows the Bernie Sanders agenda to complete the New Deal is far more popular, and people were more herded by fear and propaganda to vote for Biden?  What of those millions of young people, who voted for a true hope for a better world with Sanders? There is really nothing--just more vote shaming, and misplaced analogies to the 1920s and early 1930s German Weimar Republic, (see the final footnote at the bottom of this long blog post, where I exposed why that historically based analogy and argument is wrong).  

The question of the hour is when will my fellow adults take some responsibility for what our generations have done to get us to this place?  I still see no contrition, no humility, no understanding of how Trump is the result of our conduct over decades.  None.  

I say to my generation and older: Live with your fear.  Live with your arrogant ignorance. And worry, and I mean, worry, about me as well as others who are not going along with your continually stupid, mean-spirited decisions which have brought us here. You figure it out.  There is an answer or set of answers.  Do your own homework for once in your benighted, blinkered lives.   

*I guess I should at least mention the discrepancies between exit polling data and official results, nearly all of which adversely affected Bernie Sanders, and how the US government uses exit polling data for other nations' elections to determine if the elections are fair and not fraudulent.   

White America looks in the mirror

A lot of white people in America are looking in the mirror with dismay and confusion. "Not me!" they cry. Sorry, you, too. And me.  In fact, all of us white folks need to be far more humble about how white privilege works. Between the lying woman banker further undermining #MeToo (while exposing how race can and does override gender in an intersectionality moment) and the police killing of an African-American in Minnesota, we are really seeing how white privilege functions. White folks really should not be heard talking about "Well, I ain't rich like Oprah or Michael Jordan, so don't tell me about reparations!" for awhile (but we know it will come back again). That is not where white privilege is located, as that remark confuses highly unequal class stratification and general race related issues. Yes, there is a multi-relational aspect to race and class, both of which are relevant for African-Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans. For white people, the privilege is firmly located in white people's relationship with their local police, and the criminal justice system in general. White privilege is located in where we are allowed to live, and the schools in which our children are educated.

In another look in the mirror, we see the way police have responded to the protests in Minneapolis and the way police handled the unauthorized and non-permit armed protests in Michigan, Wisconsin, and elsewhere, a few weeks ago. We really need to recognize what we are seeing there, too, which is it is far safer to protest what doesn't challenge economic royalty and white dominance, and how very dangerous it is to challenge economic royalty and white dominance. Just ask the Native Americans protesting a couple of years ago at Standing Rock.  Everyone who was even doubtful or the slightest bit critical about Colin Kaepernick owes that man a deeply heartfelt apology. Everyone who listens to Lee Greenwood's song about "Proud to be an American/Cause at least I know I'm free" should notice how this is a song that glorifies racial dominance. You can't really think you're free if you are African-American, Latino, Native American, or even Asian-American, and know how the law works against each of those groups, and how the dominant culture works against them. 

And despite the hypocrisies shown in the way Tara Reade has been received, and the woman in Central Park who clearly lied to police in claiming a black man was threatening her, women know how male domination and male violence works in a way us guys can never stop acknowledging and owing an apology to women. However, what we are learning again this week is how white women often choose race over gender as they recognize the protection they get from being white. Again, intersectionality can be a double-edged sword, which is why it is so important to evaluate and learn from.

Overall, this is a hard learning moment for white America, especially, all on top of the virus crisis and the economic crisis arising from, and exposed within, the virus crisis.

UPDATE: May 28, 2020: Over at FB, I was asked why I use the word "we" or "us" as a "white" person and why I am putting blame on myself, when I like to think of myself as not harboring racist assumptions. I provided this explanation, which I admit is kind because I can easily say, as a person raised "white," I may still have unconscious racial or ethnic biases that those of discriminated against minority groups may be able to see that I do not. What I said was this:

...I think we who been given, particularly since the New Deal, the designation of "white" have to acknowledge the system rewarded our grandparents and parents, up through the end of de jure segregation (meaning legal segregation), at the expense of African-Americans and Latinos. It was a wealth accumulation that changed the way we saw ourselves compared to African-Americans and Latinos, led to different assumptions in how we moved through life, and had important effects that stretched into how police viewed us; police who were of the same socially constructed ethnic and race as we were. My parents were able to buy homes and move to areas African-Americans and Latinos could not, and my Dad received benefits from FHA loans and GI bills that African-Americans and Latinos were too often denied. I think, too, of how many parties I attended in the 1970s where young people smoked pot or even snorted cocaine (I was known as a Milk and Cookies guy, who did not partake), where we did not worry about the police, and if the police came, there would be informal mechanisms to ensure our lives were not ruined. My father, who was in politics in the late 1960s through early 1970s, knew many of the cops in our area for years thereafter, and my relationship with the police was one where I had comfort in seeing them, and confidence I would be believed if there was something that happened.

The idea our nation should judge the issue of reparations or other economic issues vis a vis whites and blacks through Oprah compared to the white working class would be recognized as absurd if we honestly looked at these facts of life, as the wealth data consistently show much higher wealth median whites have compared to African-Americans and Latinos. That wealth disparity was the result of conscious policies we followed for many decades, even as white America was confronted with racial disparities it used to arrogantly deny. This is what I am trying to set forth when I say "we whites." Although my Dad joined the NAACP in high school in the early 1950s, when the NAACP was considered just barely a non-Communist organization, and although I was raised in a home which truly revered Jackie Robinson and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., we benefited from having that status of "white" at the expense of those not granted that designation. That I am not really seen as "white" in certain quarters of American society is a recent consideration, but not as relevant vis a vis African-Americans and Latinos.