Dog Whistles...

There was once a brilliant man named Lee Atwater. May he rest in peace. Atwater was a political strategists who is most famous for getting George H.W. Bush elected with one of the most reprehensible campaign ads in American history.  In the 1988 election then Vice President H.W. Bush was running against Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis. Dukakis' predecessor initiated a prison furlough program which allowed certain inmates to visit their families for a weekend with good behavior. During he first month of Dukakis' term as Governor a felon named Willie Horton who while out of a furlough raped a Massachusetts woman.  Atwater immediately made a campaign commercial showing a prison with a revolving door and a second simply showing a photo of inmate Horton.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTdUQ9SYhUw

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Io9KMSSEZ0Y

The Ad showing Horton was said by many at the time to have been a racial dog whistle given that studies showed that many rural voters associated crime with people of color. Atwater admitted as much. He once said:

"You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."


He also joked in the early 90s that his biggest accomplishment was convincing that a Connecticut born blue blood was just a "regular guy" from Texas and even said that his job was to get people vote against their own interests.
               My issue here isn't racism in America, but rather our VILE political landscape and how the unintelligent are manipulated and seem oblivious to it. In the  1980s Ronald Reagan introduced something called "trickle down economics".  The logic behind "trickle down" was that when the rich get richer it helps the economy because they SPEND more money.
            Most economists have shown that when the rich get richer they simply save more or buy stocks and bonds. They don't really do much for the average steel worker or farmer but the popular spin always seems to be that when big companies get more money or have fewer regulations to deal with they give raises. This has proven to be false as American wages have frozen since the Reagan administration. By that I mean they have NOT kept up with either the cost of living or inflation.

       When huge corporations have most recently gotten huge tax breaks, rather than hiring more people they FIRED people and bought their own stocks to manipulate the prices. Amazingly whenever someone mentions raising the minimum wage, certain politicians fight it saying it would crash the economy and have convinced their followers of it, and the same politicians have convinced their followers that the SAME wealthy men and women who control Wall Street will simply make them richer rather than giving top executives bonuses.

      I'm no expert on the economy, but I've always thought that the purpose of any company was to make money.  Companies hire people because they need jobs done, NOT because their purpose was to "create jobs". How many companies have moved jobs to other countries OR simply replaced people with robots because it meant more money? This wasn't done because regulations or high taxes forced them to do so. Huge companies are not known for their "compassion" their sole goal is to make as much of money as possible. Recent relaxation of regulations and a huge tax break are being sold as a boon for the economy. I don't see it, but then again the under educated do sadly tend to respond to dog whistles.

Martin Luther King

Doctor Martin Luther King staged protests in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963 and upset the city fathers who then turned to the city's black clergy and pressured them to publicly distance themselves from Dr. King.  The ministers complied and told Dr. King in writing essentially not to rock the boat for those who lived in Birmingham as they would have to deal with the repercussions of his actions long after he was gone.
        Not being in a position to pick up a phone and call the men in question, or to dictate a letter to them he found the ONLY paper available to him, the April 16th days newspaper. He got a pen from a guard and in the margins of the news paper sat down and wrote a letter to his fellow clergymen which became the now legendary "letter from a Birmingham jail."

      In this now legendary epistle Doctor King explained WHY he'd come to their city and why he had to do what he was doing. He explained how simply being passive was the best way of insuring that the black man's position in the south would never change and how it was the best way to assure continued second class citizenry.

       I write this on the day Americans set aside to honor Dr. King and racial tensions in America in the year 2018 most certainly have NOT disappeared. I doubt they ever will. While there IS hope I can honestly say the America in which I live is NOT the same America in which my parents and grandparents lived. I will not be denied entrance into restaurants, hotels and restrooms simply because of the color of my skin.  I can vote without fear of the Ku Klux Klan coming to my home to "send me a message" and I can interact socially with whomever I please without fear of groups of violent bigots setting upon us.
     
     In 1963 Dr. King gave a speech in the shadow of the Lincoln memorial which became known as the "I have a Dream" speech in which he envisioned an America in which "his children would "be judged NOT by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." He admitted that in 1963 "a negro in the south can not vote and a negro in the north feels he has nothing for which to vote." My grandfather couldn't vote in rural Louisiana for the better part of his life. When I turned 18 one of the first things I did was register to vote and have never missed an election. I have two nephews who don't vote at all and figure it serves no purpose. One distrusts all politicians the other thinks the system is "rigged" to where his voting for president won't make a difference.

      Does racism still exist? I know of ONE job I KNOW I didn't get simply because of the color of my skin.  I have been called racial slurs by people who either didn't think I heard them or simply didn't give a damn how a person of color felt about anything.  I've had people tell stupid jokes based on stereotypes in my presence because they didn't think I possessed the intellect to know I was being insulted and I've most certainly been treated differently for simply being a black man.

     Things for which I'm simply ostracized now are things for which I would have been either jailed without cause or LYNCHED for years ago so I have to say things are MUCH better than they were.  If Dr. King were alive today, had he NOT been assassinated in 1968 his character would have been daily on Fox News and in conservative news outlets the way his lieutenant John Lewis' is now.  While he was alive conservatives in both parties OPENLY called him a "communist".
    Truth be told, today isn't the day in which I honor and remember Dr. King, for me that day is April 4th the anniversary of his death.
        I believe Dr. King's work was not so much about race in America, but rather us reaching a point where every American would enjoy the same rights and privileges regardless of his/her race, religion or where he or she might have been born. Do I believe his dream his been realized? Hardly. Do think it will be one day? I have hope and would love to live to see it.