DR. WILLIAM BARBER AT OCCIDENTAL COLLEGE- SOMETHING TO FEEL GOOD ABOUT - Perdaily.com
DR. WILLIAM BARBER AT OCCIDENTAL COLLEGE- SOMETHING TO FEEL GOOD ABOUT - Perdaily.com:
DR. WILLIAM BARBER AT OCCIDENTAL COLLEGE- SOMETHING TO FEEL GOOD ABOUT
If you have found yourself profoundly depressed since the election and assumption of the presidency by Donald Trump, you should have been at Occidental College on Wednesday night- it would have given you hope. The Reverend Dr. William Barber II not only laid out in painful detail what put Trump in the White House, but also took the time in the clearest of possible terms to lay out what we the people could do about it now by coming together and asserting our majority status in what still remains for the present a putative democracy.
Barber thesis is that endemic racism is not only alive and well, but is literally the only force powerful enough to get poor White voters in 95 of the poorest counties in the United States and elsewhere in the South to vote against their own economic self-interest.
Instead of these poor voters wondering why some of those pushing Trump or prior Republican candidates make as much as $97,000 an hour, while fighting a $15 an hour minimum wage, the "gift" of racism is that it is able to deflect the blame of poor White explotation by the obscenely rich to the usual Black, Latino, Muslim, and Jewish suspects, which continues to succeed in the 21st century by offering equally poor and downtrodden working class Whites the consolation prize of feeling at least nominally superior.
What this has left us with in this latest election- and many of the ones proceeding it- is the voting reality that this profoundly poor racist motived13 Southern states voter core has given conservative Republicans and now Trump an almost insurmountable 171 electoral college leg-up in winning presidential elections, when one realizes that Republicans then only need to accumulate another 99 electoral votes out of the remaining 37 states.
But in North Carolina, Barber didn't stop at just pointing out the racist fear motivated model that has kept putting conservatives and now Trump in power. His Moral Mondays and other programs coordinated with litigation networked across racial and state lines to engage a multi-racial and ethnic have-not majority that has finally given constitutional "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness" a substantive new reality reflected in a new Democratic governor and other elected officials.
This has been accomplished, while waging successful judicial confrontation and reversal of what had been the systematic gutting of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
