Race

I’m a big fan of Chauncey DeVega.

Chauncey DeVega at Salon has interviewed Cornell Belcher, a leading pollster for the Obama campaigns. This nails what I’ve been saying about the DNC election this Saturday. This is why I think Keith Ellison is a better choice than the establishment candidate, Tom Perez.

Per Salon:
“When presidential candidate Donald Trump says, ” You know we are going to take back our country. Yes, we absolutely are going to take back our country, believe that,” he is having a racial conversation. Our response to that conversation can’t be, “We are going to raise your minimum wage.” …

“Progressives have a blind spot when it comes to race. They do. Conservatives and Republicans don’t have a blind spot when it comes to race. They understand the power of race and they use it. It is mind-boggling to me how tough it is for progressives to have a conversation about race without them wanting to make it a conversation about class and economics. …

“We’ve got to confront the unconscious “soft bigotry” that we also have among progressives. This conversation over the last couple of weeks has been startling to me because it’s almost like we have amnesia. Instead, we want to pretend as though it’s the 1980s again and we have to compete for a shrinking and more resistant electorate. You’ve got to shake up things, even within the progressive community and the Democratic Party, because what you are talking about is really empowering a new generation of people who don’t look like the past generations of progressives. …

“[It’s] not about pointing a finger at that white blue-collar worker in middle America who has really seen his or her world change and is anxious about the future. It’s about us having a conversation about one America, and how we come together and compete as one America, and stop playing these racial games where we pit working-class whites against working-class blacks to the benefit of only the wealthy like Donald Trump and his Cabinet.”