McConnell's not alone. A lot of white folks don't think Blacks are real 'Americans'

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Leonard Pitts Jr.

It does not exactly break your heart to see Mitch McConnell used as a piñata.

He is a man of uniquely pious hypocrisy, able to affect moist-eyed sincerity while ruthlessly chopping the legs out from under democracy. Whether it is stealing Supreme Court seats or defending an indefensible president, his superpower is the uncanny ability to lie, to know that you know he’s lying and yet to keep a straight face through it all.

So one does not weep to see him smacked about, as happened last week after he rhetorically implied that African Americans are something other than real Americans. But one hopes both ardent critics and casual observers understand that ultimately, this is not simply a McConnell problem — which is to say, not just a transient gaffe reflecting only one senator’s clumsy syntax.

For those who missed it, a recap: Asked last week about African-American anxiety over the Senate’s failure to pass legislation to expand and defend voting rights, the minority leader replied: “Well, the concern is misplaced, because if you look at the statistics, African-American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans,”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/mcconnell-not-alone-lot-white-211016684.html

[Stuckinthebush]

1. I wish there was a social theory around race that examines this phenomenon

Perhaps some academician can develop a theory that encompasses this observation that white has been defined by our society as the norm and every other racial category is the other.

[lees1975]

3. There is. It's called "Critical Race Theory."

And that's why Republican politicians are so afraid of it and are willing to become communist dictators to try and prevent free speech to stop it.

[Stuckinthebush]

4. I know

Was being a tad sarcastic.

[BeckyDem]

2. McConnell is a racist who knows exactly where his power rests.

The filibuster’s racist history, explained


“It’s been a tool used overwhelmingly by racists,” says Kevin Kruse, a historian of race and American politics at Princeton University.
By Zack Beauchamp

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2021/3/25/22348308/filibuster-racism-jim-crow-mitch-mcconnell

[Hortensis]

5. The entire trumpist right doesn't see the entire left as "real Americans."

Democrats and liberalism itself have become the great enemy of everything good that the trumpists must destroy. "Not real Americans" is our identity to them.

Those conservative AA who refuse to vote against the white man's party (@40% of all AA!) bear some responsibility for the re-ascendance of overt racism, as opposed to Americans of all races who fight for their equality. It couldn't have happened without their help, just as it couldn't have happened without those on the left who refused to vote to oppose racism with the Democratic Party.

We're IT these days, after all. Btw, "Americans" include all of America's racial, religious, ethnic and gender groups and everyone else, not just black and white.

Oh, and McConnell's mistake? I've observed it here a bunch of times. It's a hazard of talking about AA as a different group separate from white people; whether characterizing them as more deserving than privileged Americans or as victimized by a bad, racist "America" they're supposedly not part of, it's not uncommon for well meaning posters to stumble over it without noticing or intending.