Wicked Smart Guy, However …

As CNN reports, “There are some leaders who see faith and politics strictly as an either/or competition: You win by turning out your side and crushing the opposition. But the Rev. William J. Barber II, who has been called ‘the closest person we have to MLK’ in contemporary America, has refined a third mode of activism called ‘fusion politics.’ It creates political coalitions that often transcend the conservative vs. progressive binary. ‘There is a sleeping giant in America,’ Barber told CNN. ‘Poor and low-wealth folks now make up 30% of the electorate in every state and over 40% of the electorate in every state where the margin of victory for the presidency was less than 3%. If you could just get that many poor and low-wealth people to vote, they could fundamentally shift every election in the country.’”

Have you heard Rev. Barber give an interview on the MSM? I have many times, and this guy speaks faster than I can think! He does not speak glibly and what he says is thoroughly incisive. To be sure, he is wicked smart, but I must take issue with his notion that the poor are a sleeping giant that could impact politics in the manner he desires or believes. Shocking to most RepubliKKKlans, no doubt, is the fact that most of the poor in this country are white. By percentage, the Black community is, indeed, the poorest, but in absolute numbers, white folks are the most impoverished. Lest we forget, elections and votes are counted in absolute numbers, not by percentage.

That being said, if there is one driving characteristic among poor white folks it is this: Racism. Do you think poor whitey looks to rich whitey and curses them? No! The working white poor look at their Black neighbor or person on TV — now social media — and lament, why are they worse off or no better than that n****r? How do you think these people will vote if they are encouraged to do so? Not for a Democrat. They did that once for Obama! But never again because poor whitey was made no better off in the Obama years, despite him recusing the national economy, but these are small, troublesome details that no one remembers because, if you haven’t noticed, Obama was successful and — Black!

Nonetheless, this is how we got traitor trump, and we are still living in the first Black president backlash, a backlash that has now been made mainstream and a requirement for RepubliKKKlans to get elected. This, naturally, is nothing new in American politics. It has always been whitey versus Black, but in the decades following equal rights legislation of the 1960s, there has been a gradual weakening of race equality. In short, white supremacy is back in vogue in a way not seen since before the Civil War. I’ve recommended this book before, but it’s been a while, so I will remind readers of White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg. It’s the racism, stupid! Welcome to America!