Donald Trump their leader is clueless and even worst on the issue of racism in America…
He says he’s ok with losing come November…
Republican lawmakers don’t fell that way….
They want to keep their jobs….
The continuing protests are no longer just about the Floyd death, neither are they just police insensitivty and actions….
They represent a awaking to the racism that IS a embedded part of America and its culture…
And…
If you look at the protestors in the street?
Most of them are now white….
Not black….
Republicans across the nation ARE also beginning to acknowledge the problems to some extent…
It’s ironic that the Grand Old Party carried Northern, Midwestern and Western states for half a century by waving the bloody shirt *, mobilizing veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic, and urging them to “vote the way you shot.”
Much of the Southern Democratic reaction that reversed Reconstruction and constructed Jim Crow institutionalized the myth of the Lost Cause with monuments, school lessons, holidays and symbols (e.g. the Southern Cross) — almost all of them long after 1865. Many of these were established in a second Redemption (of the white race) that intensified the subjection of black Americans for several decades after roughly 1890 (e.g. Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896).
* of the martyred Elijah Lovejoy, an abolitionist editor slain in 1837 by a pro-slavery mob in Alton, Illinois
Few , if any, protestors could tell u what party Abe Lincoln was in….
I used to have a mini-book that showed on the left-hand pages, “You know that you’re a Democrat if…” and on the right-hand ones “You know that you’re a Republican if …”
One pair of facing pages read
“You know that you’re a Democrat if you can’t believe that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican ! ”
and
“You know that you’re a Republican if you can’t believe that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican ! ”
As a very young child, before I knew anything about politics, I found it impossible to believe that Lincoln was a Republican. I think it was due to growing up in Cook County in a family that while not very political had been Democrat. Maybe my earliest public school teachers had something to do with all that too.
My only frame of reference was sitcoms etc that badmouthed Nixon and Reagan.
I also remember seeing an episode of Sesame Street in which there was some kind of jazzy cartoon of Lincoln and Washington together and telling my parents that Lincoln was black.
Then sometime later in either Hebrew School or Sunday School we learned about FDR turning away the boats of Jewish refugees and I found it hard to believe he was a Democrat.