Bill.
Reading through through Bobby Jindal's comments about the Charleston murders what sticks out isn't what is said but what isn't. Nowhere in these passages is there any acknowledgement of the basic, essential, unmistakable fact of this crime. A white man killed 9 black men and women precisely because they were black. In fact, bizarrely, Jindal claims exactly the opposite when he asserts that "it doesn't matter whether you are white or black." To the dead churchgoers, that is all that mattered; that is the only reason they are not walking among us today.
The 1st step in absolving oneself of a great crime is to deny it ever happened. The Civil war wasn't about slavery, it was about states' rights. Jim Crow wasn't about preservation of white supremacy, it was about equal separation of the races Four thousand lynchings weren't about a systematic system of state enabled terrorism, they were about protection of white female virtue. And systematic disenfranchisement, of blacks today isn't about preservation of white privilege, it's about voter fraud that doesn't exist. For all the progress that's been made, to deny the presence of racism in America today is to deny the reality of the folks who experience it.
Eli
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