I'm going to talk about Trump's racism, but I'm not distracted from anything. [View all]

...Trump's latest vile attacks on the Obamas are indeed an attempted distraction from something or the other he's desperate for the American people to not dwell on.

But it's also another reinforcement of white, republican political leaders' deliberate retreat from the promises of the civil rights era; not as some leveling of the playing field as many of them like to couch their demagoguery and sophistry; but as a pronounced diminution of the value and contributions of black people in this country, and even an elevation of actual traitors to this nation who were invested in slavery and genocide.

There has never been a full realization of the promises behind the 14th Amendment which intended to grant citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the U.S., including formerly enslaved individuals, and ensure equal protection under the law. Or the 15th Amendment, prohibiting the denial of the right to vote based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Instead, there's been a wanton clawing back of those federal protections in successive republican presidencies since the Reagan era, aided vigorously by like-minded republicans in Congress and on the Supreme Court.

Thing is, Americans already witnessed to the injustice and abuses of the past voted these republicans into office. It's not as if aliens landed from another planet and brain-boxed these people. Sure, republican politicians have honed their political appeal to the lowest denominator and have either discovered, or advantaged a well of racism in America that never went away.

We saw this during the Obama presidency with the 'backlash,' as many journos described it, against the notion of a black man and his supporters making rules and norms for a white majority, of which, many were assuming their race's (or religion's) eternal dominance over the rest of the country.

So much noise was made about affirmative action, as if blacks in America had achieved more than a tenuous parity with their white counterparts which was balanced on a disingenuous promise of equality that never occurred to millions of white in the country, and was never actually accepted by the multitudes who were made to grudgingly relinquish their spaces to people they'd been conditioned to believe were beneath them; made to be subservient in ways they'd never before even contemplated.

I remember well, my first opportunity to rise to the level of management in the retail store where I worked as a young man, and being told that I would be transferred to D.C. in a predominately black neighborhood, and asking (and getting such defensiveness) why the company seemed to be unable to keep black managers in the suburbs.

I explained to him that I grew up in this community, and in fact, had attended the high school directly in back of the store. After a few hours I was called back into the office and informed that my retail management training would begin in that very suburban country, not the suggested deporting to someone else's hometown; but not without a lecture from him about how 'offended' he was by my complaint.

I told him that, 'I appreciated his offense,' and I don't know how that went over with him, but that one act of defiance propelled me into several decades of upwardly mobile successes in that industry into retirement.

We got to a certain point in repairing the damage done in this country, with successive presidents honoring and assisting the advancement of black people through a society still inclined to discrimination as opportunism against people who can't remove the color of their skin to accommodate or negate their bias against them; and someone decided it was fine and dandy to appeal to those antipathies as a way to political power.

That's the essence of the republican party today, with their appeals to the worst of the worst, parading out the same tired, corrosive racism that their great-grandfathers once used to subjugate an entire race of people to their will.

But while this nation may well still have a well-spring of insecure losers who think blaming people of color for their own lameness makes them lions and kings; if you look around, these fools are surrounded. THAT'S why they're squealing and slopping about like stuck pigs.

They're sensing the end of their delusional political front they erected to avoid measuring their weakness and cowardly lameness against the people they've been telling themselves are 'DEI' and inferior to their sorry selves. it's been really something to see what the republican party has become as they parade around in what they believe are their best suits, and shit all over themselves as we watch.

Dominance and superiority over others is something these people exercise, not something they inherently possess. As one of my writing influences, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote so eloquently at beginning of the last century in his book, 'Souls of Black Folk' :