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This part of the city is almost entirely black and has been for many years. All of the whites I work with supported Obama and live in essentially white communities. And almost all of my neighbors supported Obama--except for one oddball hyperpatriot African American veteran and gun nut around the corner. I can't recall once where the presidential election came up among my white coworkers--including the nominal radicals, socialists, and Marxists--where one or another of them did not challenge my "racist" opposition to Obama, though charges that I was complicit in "the Republican War On Women" seemed to be about twice as popular. In contrast, none of my black neighbors saw the election this way. They have always tended to view my Green Party yard signs rather charitably, as a kind of well-intentioned eccentricity on my part, I guess. A few talked about the need for role models, etc., though this seemed part of a more general American brainwashing about celebrity--better to have a celebrity who did crappy things than no celebrity at all. Their general view wasn't that Obama would do anything at all to improve conditions here but that a Republican victory would be seen as a green light for the whites to crack down actively more aggressively on the black community across various fronts. We've seen a series of policy decisions that should be conveying a lesson, most dramatically perhaps the stream of stories about shootings and brutalization of blacks by police forces functioning more like armies of occupation. But the lessons learned, I fear, is the groundless assertion that the Republicans would have done much worse, and this view vindicates their earlier decision. As to the whites, I think the undaunting and undented self-love most of them have in such ample supply will prohibit any critical examination of any of their many past errors. As I've said before, the imminent campaign to put Hillary in the White House just makes me cringe. Here in Ohio, we're already getting polled by robo-calls regularly. The prospect of spending the election year out of its earshot is very appealing. ML ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
