That is why Obama stays on the tip of Trump’s tongue. The invocation of him is a hot-wire shorthand that gives an emotional charge to his statements that his audience receives intuitively. The racism is coded, received, without the burden of delivery. Charles M. Blow, Oct. 13, 2019
[Dear Reader: While this is not a short essay, there is a 90-second version embedded in it. For that version, just follow the bold-faced portions of the essay. –PCY]
Told by a new friend, several weeks after I had entered a new public high school in a new state my junior year, that the first friend I had made there was Jewish, I was shocked. He couldn’t be Jewish, I said. Then an even more shocking thought
occurred to me: Where did the first thought come from? To that point in my life, I had never, to my knowledge, met a Jew, having attended only Catholic schools and lived only among Christians before our family moved to the new state. Yet I clearly had imported into my subconscious some ugly stereotypes against which I had unwittingly measured the normalcy of my friend Alan.
Continue reading “The Pyramid of Hate and Violence: On Race, Bigotry, and the American President”
