America is heading towards the abyss – whatever the outcome of the coming election. If Trump wins, we have a fighting chance to save our democracy as we know it. If he loses, the racial totalitarians will be in power and our fight will be a rearguard action based on the hope that when the American people get a full dose of governance by the party of hate they will gather their forces to defeat them.
Michelle Obama – to pick one among a myriad of examples to hand – has declared the coming election to be an election about racism. According to Michelle, Trump and his supporters are racists, and their helpless victims are people of color like her. In this delusional vision – typical of the racial messages coming from every benighted American who considers themselves “progressive” – Trump supporters are white nationalists who oppress people of color. Thus, in a recent message, Michelle Obama has urged undecided voters to, “’Think about all those folks like me and my ancestors,’” and then vote Democrat, “like your life depended on it.” Like her arrogant supporters she thinks that a reflection on the state of benighted black people provides a self-evident reason to condemn the half of America who would vote Republican. The Democrat electoral cause is a crusade against a racist president and the white supremacists and racists, who support him and are determined to attack the most vulnerable citizens among us and make their lives hellish.
Okay, Michelle, since you asked for it, here’s what I think about folks like you. You are worth $100 million, a lot more than most of the people who inhabit this country. In short, you are incredibly privileged. I won’t insult you the way you insult white people by calling this black skin privilege, though many Republicans voted for your husband because they wanted a black American to be president even though he was a Democrat.
Not only are you privileged and rich, but despite your cavalier contempt for our country and its achievements – you are one of the most admired women in America, however implausible and tragic that may be. As for your ancestors, black Africans enslaved every one of the unfortunate men and women who were sold at slave auctions to Europeans and shipped to the New World. There, the English had indeed established a slave system. But in 1776, the creators of this great country founded the first nation in human history – black or white – dedicated to the proposition that all human beings – black as well as white – are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with a right to liberty that no government can take away.
Immediately on the creation of their new nation, they began ending slavery first in what rapidly became the Free States of the North, then in the vast territory incorporated under the Northwest Ordinance in 1787. Seventy-six years later – not the 400 your devious and malicious friends reflexively attribute to “American slavery” – the Emancipation Proclamation sounded the death knell of a hateful system. The costs of this world-shaking effort were 350,000 mainly white Union lives, and that of the noblest president with which this country has been blessed.
I won’t deal with the specifics of your paranoid view that only black people experience the frustrations of modern life, and only because they are black. But I will dredge up this unpleasant fact: Ninety-percent of interracial crimes in the United States – more than half a million in all – are committed by blacks against whites. Yet, this has not led to a wave of anti-black racism on the part of whites. On the contrary, there has never been a time when white Americans have more generously and openly and virtually unanimously embraced the idea that black lives matter, and proceeded to do what they could to help that minority of the black community that has fallen behind. Indeed, the president you slander as racist has done more for black people in his four years in office than your husband did in eight. It is time for a little humility Michelle and color-blindness, and for putting away the racist rhetoric you are hoping your party will use to get back in power.
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