Just being born white appears to be a basis for ridicule and shaming. Imagine that.
The draft 2020 Democratic National Committee platform being circulated in Washington aims to reinforce the view that liberals are best situated to battle for minorities seeking higher wages, better housing and jobs, and more money for schools.
With the August convention coming on the heels of the Black Lives Matter protests, it features support for the movement and an expanded pledge to root out racism.
The preamble says, “We will give hate no safe harbor. We will never amplify or legitimize the voices of bigotry, racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, or white supremacy.”
In promising change, it sets up one group that has it too good and is holding minorities back: whites.
In more than 80 pages in the draft platform published by Politico, whites are mentioned 15 times, all critical, including three references to white supremacy or supremacists and one to white nationalists. The document doesn’t capitalize white as it does Black, Latinos, Asian Americans, and Native Americans.
In most mentions, the reference is to how whites are better off at the expense of others. And the promise often is to “close the gap” between minorities and whites, though no solutions are offered.
While the nation elected its first black president in 2008, racial issues still rage, and that is a huge factor in former Vice President Joe Biden’s consideration of a running mate in time for the Democratic National Convention, where the platform will be confirmed.
As part of the preamble to the DNC 2020 draft:
Democrats will fight to repair the soul of this nation. To unite and to heal our country. To turn this crisis into a crucible, from which we will forge a stronger, brighter, and more equitable future. We must right the wrongs in our democracy, redress the systemic injustices that have long plagued our society, throw open the doors of opportunity for all Americans, and reinvent our institutions at home and our leadership abroad. We do not simply aspire to return our country to where we were four years ago. We know we must be bolder and more ambitious. We must once again stop another Republican recession from becoming a second Great Depression. President Trump and the Republican Party have rigged the economy in favor of the wealthiest few and the biggest corporations, and left working families and small businesses out in the cold. Democrats will forge a new social and economic contract with the American 1people—a contract that creates millions of new jobs and promotes shared prosperity, closes racial gaps in income and wealth, guarantees the right to join or form a union, raises wages and ensures equal pay for women and paid family leave for all, and safeguards a secure and dignified retirement.
The full draft text is found here.
A sample of how this ‘whiteness’ thing has spread around the nation, enter Rutgers University. Without much press….
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H/T: The College Fix has uncovered a fascinating change in programming plans for the English Department and Writing Center at Rutgers. You see, teaching all of the rules of grammar, sentence structure and where to put the nouns, verbs and adjectives is apparently insensitive. To whom, you might ask? Well, the title of the memo detailing all of the proposed changes is, “Department actions in solidarity with Black Lives Matter.”
Titled “Department actions in solidarity with Black Lives Matter,” the email states that the ongoing and future initiatives that the English Department has planned are a “way to contribute to the eradication of systemic inequities facing black, indigenous, and people of color.”
One of the initiatives is described as “incorporating ‘critical grammar’ into our pedagogy.”
It is listed as one of the efforts for Rutgers’ Graduate Writing Program, which “serves graduate students across the Rutgers community.
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This should be added to yet another item that also too got almost no press and that is the Smithsonian Museum. There is a unique separate wing called National Museum of African American History and Culture. It is not only funded by private donations of which Oprah Winfrey is a top donor with more than $30 million but Congress also provided funding. Why is this a big deal you ask?
There is a specific portal and ‘whiteness’ here too is a political target.
Phase one of the portal features eight foundational subjects including:
- Being Anti-Racist: a conscious decision to make frequent, consistent, equitable choices daily.
- Bias: the inclination or prejudice toward or against something or someone.
- Community Building: connecting and engaging with others doing anti-racism work and exploring issues of race.
- Historical Foundations of Race: how race, white privilege, and anti-blackness are woven into the very fabric of American society.
- Race and Racial Identity: how societies use race to establish and justify systems of power, privilege, disenfranchisement, and oppression.
- Self-Care: caring for one’s mental, emotional, and physical health to sustain the work of dismantling racism.
- Social Identities and Systems of Oppression: systems built around the ideology that some groups are superior to others.
- Whiteness: an ideology that reinforces power at the expense of others.
Huey Newton