what about a woman judge?

[kpete]

https://twitter.com/danmericaCNN/status/739911480892497921

[truedelphi]

1. Can we get off the racist sexist thing-ee?

What is destroying this nation right now is that even as we have an AA President, and women on the Supreme Court, we have lost our demcoracy.

What would be remarkable is a NON-Corporate OWNED person of any race, creed, skin color, religion, or male or female (or even a hermaphrodite!) occupying any office higher than dog catcher.

That is all.

[thucythucy]

2. I take it racism and sexism aren't issues for you.

Next time you see a cop following your car, imagine the possibility of being shot dead in the next sixty seconds just because of the color of your skin.

No amount of "non-corporate OWNED...demcoracy" will change that reality for millions of your fellow citizens. It's the Sanders campaign's inability to deal with that reality early on, in a meaningful way, (and I voted for the man in my primary) that has in large part doomed his campaign.

That is all.

[truedelphi]

4. Ya know what? I was threatened by a cop. I am a white,

middle aged (and aging rapidly female,) whose "crime" had been to be going 57 in a 55 MPH zone. It happened in 2006 in Lake County California.

The cops are out of control - in many many places. And once they get out of control, they don't stop.

It came to pass that the cop who threatened me later was indicted circa 2013 for repeatedly molesting a 14 year old school girl. The cop in question was Latino, and the child was white.


My first husband, of Scandinavian descent, skin whiter than alabaster, was hassled by Chicago's finest for his long hair. AFTER he had spent a year in Nam and seen a lot more difficulties than Rogers Park PD cops would ever see.

It is not about race and it is not about sex.

It is about ending the Corporate Ownership of the United States.

[thucythucy]

5. Granted, abusive cops are a problem for everyone.

But the situation is, I would argue, exponentially worse for people of color. Had you been black, instead of being threatened you might well have been killed. Had you been black, you'd very likely have very many more stories to tell about being hassled by cops than you do now. As for your first husband, long hair was a choice on his part--one that cops indeed used to pick up on. You know what cops used to call long-haired hippies, back in the day? "White n-g-rs." So even when you think racism isn't a part of what's happening, it often is.

And so it too often IS about sex (the cop who hassled you, as you say, was later indicted for sexually abusing a girl -- this certainly sounds like gender related violence to me) and IS about race.

As I said, statements like yours on behalf of the Sanders campaign is why I think Sanders failed to connect with so many African American, Latino, and yes, with women voters. To reduce everything to the single vector of corporate ownership is to ignore history and to ignore reality. There was racism in this country long before "Corporate Ownership" of the United States (unless you consider the agrarian small farmer economy of the US circa 1810 to have been "corporately owned&quot and there will be racism even after every income inequality is made smooth and every corporation expelled from politics.

To dismiss these issues as being unimportant is to alienate millions of Democratic voters who know better.

[truedelphi]

7. Let's dissect some of the things that are dividing us on reaching some type of

Consensus.

First of all, I don't think that the issues surrounding sex or race (or religion for that matter) are unimportant. And please hear me out before you go "But you said...!!"

What is going on in my brain is that I am quite a bit tired of coming to a forum and hearing ad nauseum that because the fact that these issues exist -- well, that means that since we can assign this candidate or that candidate a free pass on these issues, then we all need ONLY to focus on these issues as a way of sweeping the bigger issue, Corporate Control of the American way of Life, under the rug. And thinking people have started to understand that the reason this ploy is being utilized is because the Establishment Candidate is totally dominated by the Corporations to whom she has showered her allegiance. So her handlers and those they have had drink the Kool Aid prefer to keep saying "Hey Gang, look over HERE at this bit of sexism or that bit of racism," rather than ever ever EVER focus on what is really going on.

We in the movement who have been around a long long time used to use a word, and it meant something. That word was IMPERIALISM. (Before we had that word, one Benito Mussolini defined Nazism as being the Corporate Control of a society's way of life!)

And it was a word that meant that the Establishment and its candidates wanted to subjugate everyone who came along, with white men being in power and the rest of everybody too busy fighting an illegal war in Vietnam or bringing the boss his coffee and young men bombing the beJesus out of brown skinned people in third world countries.

I find it absolutely frightening that people think Hillary Clinton is not part of this establishment and part of America's New imperialism problem. She wa s not exactly all about brown skinned people back when she ran for the Presidency in 2008. In fact since she polled so high in back woodsy places in Ohio and Northern Kentucky, she spent time there, letting the voters there know that there was "something special" about her that made her different from Barack Obama.

I leave it to your imagination to figure out what that "special" quality was.

And above and beyond that, she was married to a man who when President gave over one hundred billion dollars to militarize the police in this country, which gave them bigger guns and more powerful tools, with no commensurate training programs as to how to defuse situations. At that point in time, Mrs Clinton as First Lady spoke of young AA men as being thugs! I can't find any speeches anywhere where Mr Sanders says that he views young AA men as thugs!So you have absolute crap going on these days, where the cops in a poor neighborhood in San Francisco give orders to a homeless man and then shoot and kill him dead as they didn't feel he responded fast enough. What do they mean by not fast enough? There was something like 92 seconds between when the orders were given and when the first bullets hit the man. Was he hard of hearing? Was he in striking distance of the officers who claimed he was threatening them with a knife.

If the Clintons had been a bit more progressive in attitude back in the to separate Bill Clinton Administrations, maybe we would have put the brakes on this militancy by the police. But when people in the WH think young AA men are thugs, what else can result?

Also you need to examine the offensiveness inherent in the notion that "well, your first husband chose to wear his hair long" That is rather like saying "When the young woman was raped, maybe she should have chosen to wear less make up and a longer skirt."

Or even, "Maybe those kids at the convenience store in in Florida should have chosen to not play loud music or wear baggy pants."

Blaming the victim is never enlightened, is it? (ON edit: And neither is ignoring the one major problem inherent in, and encompassing, all the others. And as long as we keep ignoring the bigger problem, Imperialistic Corporate Control of our lives, and keep pretending that Establishment Candidates are "all about the children" and also are all about peace and love and tolerance of others, when nothing could be further than the truth, we remain separated from the solutions.

####

[thucythucy]

8. Two quick responses

and then I go to bed. I'll address the substance of your post probably tomorrow afternoon (deadline at work).

First, I think Mussolini was talking about fascism, not imperialism.

Second, when I said your first husband chose to grow his hair, I was pointing out that this was a part of his identify he could discard at will. Unlike a person of color, who's generally stuck with the skin in which they're born. The point is that hippies to cops back then were like people of color--indeed, Abbie Hoffman wrote that he grew his hair long in order to experience a portion of the oppression felt by people of color--being followed around a store, hassled by cops, yelled at and threatened in the street, etc.

As a rape survivor myself I know a good deal about the pitfalls of victim bashing. My comment wasn't meant in that way at all.

As for the rest of it, we're probably closer than you think.

Best wishes.

[Johonny]

3. What about a white male judge?

Why aren't people asking about that? Donald's statements make it clear he is aware and happy with the fact white male judges are biased in his favor. This is why he assumes minority judges will naturally be biased against him.

Even if a minority judge was truly race neutral they'd be more biased than the current system which he correctly identifies as giving him an edge. This is what people are not harping on. Trump is acknowledging America has a racial bias problem and its in his favor. When he says Make America Great Again he is really saying keep the status quo where I'm on top and minorities are on the bottom. He is using fear that the current oppressors will become the oppressed to ride the white male vote. But to do that is to ackownledge the system as it now stands is rigged against the poor, minorities, women etc... and he likes it that way!

This doesn't mean that the future is doom the other way, that minorities once in power will oppress. Although as Clearance Thomas has shown it doesn't mean they won't and not in the way you assume!

[thucythucy]

6. Well put. White privilege is "normal" to some folks

and they'd definitely like to keep it that way.