So right and great to see you driving home the point with your eloquence and clarity. But it’s worse I believe. The one side, as seen in the picture, shows courageous black Americans fighting for Democracy and the core principles in the declaration of inalienable rights, and the police using brutal authoritarian tactics to beat them down. The journalists tried then and now for “balance,” failing to register that one side is fight for democracy and the other against it.
In a way, the fault lies on both sides of white supremacy: the journalists acting to ameliorate the crime and create some sympathy for the white supremacist mass murder, and the politicians supporting the anti-democracy rhetoric. Yes, like Trump— it’s amazing to see how clearly his actions and words are racist, supremacist and racist/anti-democracy in retrospect (though in all fairness to me I saw it then, but don’t feel the daily threat now).
These racist murderers only act from the long complicity and promotion of racist values by politicians. It was not Trump, or stretching back to Reagan, it is uninterrupted and open proclamations of doctrines of repression of black Americans. We can go back to 1957, when Senator Strom Thurmond, who ran for president only years before on a segregationist, anti-black American platform, used the Senate rules to brandish a 24 hour filibuster on the senate floor to advocate for a state of racial injustice that continued in the United States for nearly a century. His epic 24 hour “tirade” used the rules of democracy against itself to keep black Americans from having it. And he was a leader? Like Trump, he directly promoted racism as a platform, in the tradition he came from.
Those are two horrible “sides” of white supremacy. Unfortunately they are both anti-democracy. Martin Luther King was actually fighting for it, for America, for American values, of which he had an abundance of, while the white Europeans the literally beat him down on the Selma bridge had brought and handed down the harsh authoritarian tactics of the brutal white monarchs they descended from.
