[Lee] Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry Dent and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now [Reagan] doesn't have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he's campaigned on since 1964 [...] and that's fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster...

Questioner: But the fact is, isn't it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?

Atwater: Y'all don't quote me on this. 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 forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

theropod_V_2.0 wrote:I graduated high school less than 20 miles from Harrison, Arkansas. A large and vocal cell of open KKK terrorist exists less than 10 miles from our home. Trump is a vaunted hero among 90% of the general population. Ignorance and hate has been a way of life here since well before the Civil War, and even limited reforms will probably never happen. One of my best buds is Vietnamese, and that’s close enough to black for the knuckle draggers around here. I’ve seen him refused service at quickie marts, and when I tried to buy a Coke for him was also refused service. To rub a little salt in their pussy I marched just outside the door and pumped quarters into a vending machine while grinning like a fool. Slack jaws and bright red faces watched in horror.

RS

A Republican official in Leelanau County, Mich., is rejecting calls for his resignation after he used the n-word at a public meeting and is also refusing to stop using the racist language.

Leelanau County Road Commissioner Tom Eckerle used the racial slur during a diatribe about why he refused to wear a mask during the coronavirus pandemic.

“Well, this whole thing is because of them n-----s in Detroit,” Eckerle said at a public meeting Thursday, according to The Washington Post and the Leelanau Enterprise newspaper.

Road Commission Chairman Bob Joyce rebuked his colleague, but Eckerle, who was elected in 2018, continued, accusing the Black Lives Matter movement of “taking the country away from us.”

“I can say anything that I want. Black Lives Matter has everything to do with taking the country away from us,” Eckerle said.

Joyce later told the Leelanau Enterprise that "there's just no room for that kind of language here” and that he “won't tolerate any kind of racism in our meeting room or in our organization.”

Eckerle’s comments came the same week Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) declared racism as a public health crisis in the state.

Eckerle doubled-down with his use of the racial slur during an interview with a local public radio station, saying it “is not racism” to use the word.

"I don’t regret calling it an n----r,” Eckerle told Interlochen Public Radio. “A n----r is a n----r is a n----r. That’s not a person whatsoever.”

The Real Reason the American Economy Boomed After World War II

The United States long reserved its most lucrative occupations for an elite class of white men. Those men held power by selling everyone else a myth: The biggest threat to workers like you are workers who do not look like you. Again and again, they told working-class white men that they were losing out on good jobs to women, nonwhite men and immigrants.

It was, and remains, a politically potent lie. It is undercut by the real story of how America engineered its Golden Era of shared prosperity — the great middle-class expansion in the decades after World War II.

Americans deserve to know the truth about that Golden Era, which was not the whitewashed, “Leave It to Beaver” tale that so many people have been led to believe. They deserve to know who built the middle class and can actually rebuild it, for all workers, no matter their race or gender or hometown.

We need to hear it now, as our nation is immersed in a pandemic recession and a summer of protests demanding equality, and as American workers struggle to shake off decades of sluggish wage growth. We need to hear it because it is a beacon of hope in a bleak time for our economy, but more important because the lies that elite white men peddle about workers in conflict have made the economy worse for everyone, for far too long.

The hopeful truth is that when Americans band together to force open the gates of opportunity for women, for Black men, for the groups that have long been oppressed in our economy, everyone gets ahead.

I have spent my career as an economics reporter consumed by the questions of how America might revive the Golden Era of the middle class that boomed after World War II. I have searched for the secret to restoring prosperity for the sons of lumber-mill workers in my home county, where the timber industry crashed in the 1980s, or the burned-out factories along the Ohio River, where I chased politicians in the early 2000s who were promising — and failing — to bring the good jobs back.

The old jobs are not coming back. What I have learned over time is that our best hope to create a new wave of good ones is to invest in the groups of Americans who were responsible for the success of our economy at the time it worked best for working people.

The economy thrived after World War II in large part because America made it easier for people who had been previously shut out of economic opportunity — women, minority groups, immigrants — to enter the work force and climb the economic ladder, to make better use of their talents and potential. In 1960, cutting-edge research from economists at the University of Chicago and Stanford University has documented, more than half of Black men in America worked as janitors, freight handlers or something similar. Only 2 percent of women and Black men worked in what economists call “high-skill” jobs that pay high wages, like engineering or law. Ninety-four percent of doctors in the United States were white men.

That disparity was by design. It protected white male elites. Everyone else was barred entry to top professions by overt discrimination, inequality of schooling, social convention and, often, the law itself. They were devalued as humans and as workers. (Slavery was the greatest devaluation, but the gates of opportunity remained closed to most enslaved Americans and their descendants through Emancipation and its aftermath.)

Women and nonwhite men gradually chipped away at those barriers, in fits and starts. They seized opportunities, like a war effort creating a need for workers to replace the men being sent abroad to fight. They protested and bled and died for civil rights. And when they won victories, it wasn’t just for them, or even for people like them. They generated economic gains that helped everyone.

The Chicago and Stanford economists calculated that the simple, radical act of reducing discrimination against those groups was responsible for more than 40 percent of the country’s per-worker economic growth after 1960. It’s the reason the country could sustain rapid growth with low unemployment, yielding rising wages for everyone, including white men without college degrees.

America’s ruling elites did not learn from that success. The aggressive expansion of opportunity that had driven economic gains was choked off by a backlash to social progress in the 1970s and ’80s. The white men who ran the country declared victory over discrimination far too early, consigning the economy to slower growth. Sustained shared prosperity was replaced by widening inequality, lost jobs and decades of disappointing income growth for workers of all races.

In important ways, much of the work of breaking down discrimination stalled soon after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. “It was fundamentally over by the time of the Reagan presidency,” William A. Darity Jr., a Duke University economist who is one of his profession’s most accomplished researchers on racial discrimination, told me. Over the past several decades, some barriers to advancement for women and nonwhite men have grown back. New ones have grown up beside them.

Wisconsin Police Shoot Black Man as He’s Getting in Car

Video surfaced Sunday night of police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, shooting a Black man in the back at close range as he got into a car following what they called a “domestic dispute.”

Witnesses told the Kenosha News that the man, later identified as Jacob Blake, had just tried to break up a fight between two women. Video posted online shows him walking to a car, trailed by police, and opening the driver’s side door.

One cop grabbed him by the back of the T-shirt and at least one opened fire. At least seven shots were heard as bystanders screamed in horror.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/kenosha-wisconsin-police-shoot-black-man-as-hes-getting-in-car