Where do I begin?
I don't even know where to start.
UPDATE.
Okay.
I guess I'll start with one foot firmly pressed on the third rail.
So, the moderator asks an epistemologically incoherent question: What are your blind spots WRT race? (Sorry, but they're his blind spots. HTF can he know what they are?)
Confronted with the impossible task of responding, the candidate gamely makes the attempt, specifically referring to ghettos and poverty.
And Camp Clinton, wallowing in an epistemological void, leaps upon the response, twists the semantics of both the question and the response, and then pretends that America is something other than what it is.
The question was not, "What do you know about the problems that face African Americans today?", the question specifically asked, "What are your blind spots?" In other words, it invited the candidate to define a negative space -- “What DON’T you know about the problems that face African Americans today?”
Sanders selected one particular aspect of the African American experience that is largely opaque to him: the ghetto. He didn't state that All African Americans live or have lived in ghettos. He simply observed that the modern American racial ghettos -- which are as real as they have ever been -- are foreign to his personal experience.
From the firestorm of twitrage, one wonders whence the apparent denial of the simple truth: that many (possibly most) African Americans -- or at least, urban African Americans -- remain starkly ghettoized, ie. physically segregated from whites, latinos and asians. "On average, 60 percent of blacks would have to move in order for blacks and whites to be equally distributed in American cities." The Clintonian deceit has two angles — pretending (a) that Sanders claimed that all African Americans live in ghettos; and (b) that “ghetto” is synonymous with the dense, blighted housing projects that didn’t even exist the first time someone applied that word to the urban neighborhoods into which African Americans were corralled* by the whites who ran the cities.
Consider the city of Milwaukee, generally recognized as one of the most segregated cities in the US. Per wikipedia, the city went from 23% “Black or African American” in 1980 to 40% in 2010. Given the population of about 600K, that’s about 240K African Americans residents. The entire public housing infrastructure of Milwaukee — much of which is specifically aimed at senior citizens, BTW — comprises four or five thousand units housing “over 10,000” people. If you’ve ever actually been to Milwaukee, you understand that the “ghettos” of Milwaukee — the segregated African American neighborhoods — are not characterized by high-rise housing projects, but by old city streets full of deteriorating, ill-maintained houses, often remodeled into multi-family dwellings.
That is the reality of the African American Experience of tens — MANY tens — of thousands of African American residents of Milwaukee. The truth of that reality is not invalidated because the facts were written here by a white male, while angry African Americans denounce Sanders’ tone-deafness all over the twitterverse. Those neighborhoods are ghettos, even if some folks (melaninally challenged or not) have lost track of what the word “ghetto” means. Truth doesn’t care about overused memes like “X-splaining”. It isn’t my opinion that African Americans in Milwaukee live in economically marginal ghettos, nor that the racial segregation of that city creates a socioeconomic trap for most of those African Americans, isolating them from educational, economic, and cultural opportunities — particularly when they are children. I acknowledge, nonetheless, that I have no fucking clue what it is like to live in that circumstance. It is, for me, a blind spot: A place I cannot see into, a condition I can never fully comprehend — not even were I to quit my job and move there, because I still would not be of there, would not ever be limited by the constraints that apply to those were are of there.
Sanders’ response was clumsy, it was inelegant, it was unartful — but what it was not was untrue. It misrepresented neither Sanders, nor the reality of life for millions of African Americans — most of whom will not be tweeting anything in support of either candidate.
*Except, of course, that I can’t use the word “corralled”, because that is comparing African Americans to livestock animals. Except of course, that that is exactly how they were viewed by the whites who deliberately segregated and isolated those African American communities. Which means that “corralled” might be a hurtful word, but it is also the RIGHT word, the word that accurately conveys what was happening. Sometimes, honest language wounds, and some truths are always going to be painful to discuss, leaving “us” (“us” being a dangerous formulation — many critics would deny my right to use that word in this context) with the choice of either having a painful reality-based conversation, or having a comfortable delusional conversation. We know which choice Camp Clinton has made. Coincidentally, the comfortable delusion suits their electoral purposes
Comments
Anywhere you wish.
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
the essence of fascism ...
How many times have I been told, when insisting that the W regime marked the arrival of authentic fascism in the US (specifically, Cheney's energy policy commission), "No, no, fascism is when the corporations serve the government, not when the government serves the corporations.
When people ask, "Who won World War II", the correct answer might well be, "The Fascists".
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
...
https://youtu.be/S0Wpx99Imq8Damn, now I know where I should have begun!
With this, block quoted in my final dKos comment, in November 2015, copied from one of my earliest dKos comments back in November 2005:
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.