Kimstu
November 24, 2016, 4:35am
61
Yeah, look at how peaceful and amicable race relations were under Republican Richard Nixon !
August 11, 1965: In the predominantly black Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, racial tension reaches a breaking point after two white policemen scuffle with a black motorist suspected of drunken driving. A crowd of spectators gathered near the corner of Avalon Boulevard and 116th Street to watch the arrest and soon grew angry by what they believed to be yet another incident of racially motivated abuse by the police. A riot soon began, spurred on by residents of Watts who were embittered after years of economic and political isolation. […] Finally, with the assistance of thousands of National Guardsmen, order was restored on August 16. […] The Watts riot was the worst urban riot in 20 years […]
Um, well, never mind that. How about the great state of US race relations under Republican Gerald Ford ?
Earlier that summer of 1974, federal District Court Judge W. Arthur Garrity ruled that the Boston School Committee had deliberately segregated the city’s schools, creating one system for blacks and another for whites — separate, unequal and unconstitutional. […]
Southie was ground zero for anti-busing rage. Hundreds of white demonstrators — children and their parents — pelted a caravan of 20 school buses carrying students from nearly all-black Roxbury to all-white South Boston. The police wore riot gear.
“I remember riding the buses to protect the kids going up to South Boston High School,” Jean McGuire, who was a bus safety monitor, recalled recently. “And the bricks through the window. Signs hanging out those buildings, ‘Nigger Go Home.’ Pictures of monkeys. The words. The spit. People just felt it was all right to attack children.”
Er. Well, surely we had no race problems under everybody’s favorite Republican Ronald Reagan !
You start out in 1954 by saying, “N—, n—, n—.” [Editor’s note: The actual word used by Atwater has been replaced with “N—” for the purposes of this article.] By 1968 you can’t say “n—” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff.
The candidate arrived to a raucous crowd of perhaps 10,000 whites chanting “We want Reagan! We want Reagan!”—and he returned their fevered embrace by assuring them, “I believe in states’ rights.” In 1984, Reagan came back, this time to endorse the neo-Confederate slogan “the South shall rise again.” […]
On the stump, Reagan repeatedly invoked a story of a “Chicago welfare queen” […] Often, Reagan placed his mythical welfare queen behind the wheel of a Cadillac, tooling around in flashy splendor. […] More directly placing the white voter in the story, Reagan frequently elicited supportive outrage by criticizing the food stamp program as helping “some young fellow ahead of you to buy a T-bone steak” while “you were waiting in line to buy hamburger.” This was the toned-down version. When he first field-tested the message in the South, that “young fellow” was more particularly described as a “strapping young buck.”
Well, but there weren’t any actual race problems then, right?
December 29, 1985: Elmwood [Philadelphia] […] is also a place where blacks are called “colored” and are decidedly not welcomed by many of the white residents.
A black couple […] learned this the hard way when they moved to Elmwood from an apartment in a black neighborhood Oct. 31. […]
So, too, did Gerald and Carol Fox, a black man and a white woman who moved in 2 1/2 weeks later and three blocks away. […]
Bloxom said she was unprepared for the hostility that greeted them: windows shattered by BBs, bottles tossed at the house, a demonstration by 400 whites outside the house Nov. 20.
At the Fox house, where 200 whites milled about and chanted the following night, vandals had by then already axed kitchen cabinets, destroyed a lamp, a clock radio and the water and oil heaters, and left behind a broken bottle stuffed with a rag soaked in gasoline.
Hmm. Well, things were surely much calmer under Republican George H. W. Bush ?
The 1992 Los Angeles riots, also known as the Rodney King riots, the South Central riots, the 1992 Los Angeles civil disturbance, the 1992 Los Angeles civil unrest, and the Los Angeles uprising, […] started in South Central Los Angeles and then spread out into other areas over a six-day period within the Los Angeles metropolitan area in California, beginning in April 1992. The riots started on April 29 after a trial jury acquitted four police officers of the Los Angeles Police Department of the use of excessive force in the videotaped arrest and beating of Rodney King, following a high-speed police chase. Thousands of people throughout the metropolitan area in Los Angeles rioted over six days following the announcement of the verdict.
Oops, I must have meant under Republican George W. Bush .
The Cincinnati riots of 2001 […] were the largest urban disturbance in the United States since the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
The riots were sparked after 19-year-old Timothy Thomas, an unarmed African American man, was shot and killed by Cincinnati Police Department Patrolman Stephen Roach during an attempt to arrest him for non-violent misdemeanors, most of which were traffic citations. Tensions were already high following a series of other incidents of alleged police brutality and racial profiling, including two deaths.
Huh. All these racial tensions, protests and riots about complaints of police brutality, and so forth… it’s almost as though the US has some kind of longstanding historical problem with systemic racism that persists through both Republican and Democratic administrations. :dubious:
Kimstu
November 24, 2016, 4:41am
62
Whoops, that 1965 example was meant to be this one : Nixon wasn’t President in 1965.
The “War on Drugs” was actually a political tool to crush leftist protesters and black people, a former Nixon White House adviser admitted in a decades-old interview published Tuesday. […]
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying,” Ehrlichman continued.
“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
More Nixon-era racial tensions :
On May 11, 1970, the city of Augusta, Ga., was rocked by a race riot sparked by a prison killing of a mentally handicapped Black teenager at the hands of prisoners. Black residents in the town frustrated by the treatment of police and the conditions of the jail marched through the town before it was a full-fledged riot. By the next day, six people were dead and more than 60 were injured after the melee.
jayjay
November 24, 2016, 5:57am
63
I don’t know if you misunderstood me or not, Kimstu , but I was being very sarcastic with the sentence you quoted.
ETA: Actually, I’m not sure that quote wasn’t misattributed. I don’t remember posting that, on second thought.
How would you suggest responding to such an incredibly silly statement, including the laughable ‘there are no racial problems when Republicans are in power’?
