No. of Recommendations: 16
I was discussing this with a friend just yesterday. He said he never heard his father use the 'n' word until Trump came on the scene. Then it became common use in his vocabulary. His father was probably always a quiet racist, but Trump seems to have given him permission to say it right out loud.
And that's why when my Filipino friend's asked me about racism in the US, I told them it's always there just under the surface, and surfaces some times - but it's always there. And I used these two quotes to illustrate to them, which y'all have seen before but:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.” Lee Atwater 1981
LBJ to Bill Moyers:
We were in Tennessee. During the motorcade, he spotted some ugly racial epithets scrawled on signs. Late that night in the hotel, when the local dignitaries had finished the last bottles of bourbon and branch water and departed, he started talking about those signs. "I'll tell you what's at the bottom of it," he said. "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
Well, they do seem to be emptying their pockets for Trump, eh?
