First of all, I had no idea there was a debate tonight. It's my own fault for categorically ignoring Fox News Anything. But it's because they pull shit like this. In case you missed the icon in the corner, the meeting between Obama and the GOP was happening live. They were cutting off the actual dialogue and explaining how combative he was being before it actually happened. But my point here is not to bash Fox. Lots of other people do that much, much better than me. My point is simply that I don't tend to ever know what's happening on that channel and now I'm a little sad about that.
Second, I don't usually agree with Jesse Jackson. I usually find his methods way too aggressive and narrow-minded and I think he purposely alienates people. In this case, however, I think he may be right. A recent piece in the Times discussed how the US currently has worse socio-economic mobility than Europe. Given that this mostly affects the low-income, this also disproportionately affects African-Americans. Surprisingly, Rick Santorum is one of the only candidates who is actually addressing this reality head-on, even if it is in an incredibly stupid way. But to continue to pretend like the poor economy is equally hard on everyone and race plays no factor and it's all about the middle class is just stupid and blind. The unemployment rate for African-Americans is almost double that of whites and has remained unchanged, even while the overall unemployment rate has dropped. The sort-of-a-point that I'm trying to get to is that Republicans like to blame their poor numbers among African-Americans on the fact that Obama is black, or that they have outdated party loyalty. I think they would be doing us all a favour if they would recognize that African-Americans aren't voting for them because of policy, rather than politics. Republicans have made perfectly clear that they don't care about anyone but the rich. It's nice to talk about the power of small business and the American Dream etc when that works. But it doesn't. Europe has better socio-economic mobility than we do, and it's tough to deny that our lack of a safety net is having a huge impact on that reality.
I have no real hope that any of the Republicans actually will talk about race issues tonight. But I genuinely do think MLK would have wanted them to. Not because Jesse Jackson said so, not because that was his passion, but because it's the only way the conversation is going to have any real substance. It's the only way to inject some actual policy into an otherwise totally political discussion. So I'll end with one of my all-time favourite MLK quotes, one that hung in my classroom and I made my kids write an essay about:
"A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan."
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