As long as the DFL (with no resistance from the Rs or Gs or Is, etc.) holdsWM: Confining racism to the DFL is hardly worth the effort being expended. In 1968, when the Kerner Commission produced their tome, Blacks were doing none too well where I lived just down the road apiece from East St. Louis, IL.
onto the fiction of the Kerner Commission Report of 1968, that Blacks can't
make it like other groups and therefore have to be taken care of by the
government, you will have this upside down world in which Whites get jobs on
the Democratic City Plantations to take care of the Black folk.
On cold, raw, swamp mornings, people carried bushel baskets and walked the railroad tracks hoping to find coal dropped by the freight cars rocking by. They took that coal back to tarpaper shacks where insulation was newspapers glued to thin walls and tried to keep themselves warm with filthy, dangerous coal stoves. No indoor plumbing.
In the summer we would all get out and plant bean fields and tend them. It was back-breaking stoop work of the worst kind in that humid, sulfur laden heat. The women would thread the picked beans and hang them from nails to dry so they could cook shuck beans in the winter--a dish that can stretch across a family by adding more water.
The young men, those bright-eyed black boys, were being shipped off to Vietnam by the planeload. As well, planeloads of soldiers were returning, totally screwed up, wounded physically, mentally, and every other way.
East St. Louis is a place where, in the black community (and since, at that juncture, blacks comprised 90% of the population), the great, the near great, and the striving meet late at night. You could listen to famous black musicians sit and play in some dingy, down at heel bar, just kickin' it for the love of the sound. It could be Miles Davis, born and raised in ESL, Ike and Tina Turner when they played St. Louis, or Chuck Berry, who lived outside St. Louis to the West, could be throwing a party to end all parties. It could be Duke Ellington or anyone else.
During the summer, black dancers would come through town. I distinctly remember a day in the
park, gathered around a huge tree watching African dancers led by Katherine Dunham. Into this humid, 90+ degree, dusty afternoon marched some twenty black men in paramilitary Black Egyptians gear. These were ex-GIs and home boys and middle-aged men and privileged black students from St. Louis University and they were on fire with a palpable, justifiable rage.
Across the river in St. Louis, black people were still expected to sit in the back of the bus, black women were not given any anesthetic during birthing, they were prescribed greater dosages of birth control drugs, and all the towns around had sundown laws.
The biggest problem with racism is that everyone here is infected. Everything is infected. If we all agreed to a plan to eradicate it, and we all, everyone of us, worked at it every day, we could make a considerable dent in racism in 100 years.
Of course the DFL denies it's racism, as does every other party. Part of the illness is denial. Course, you don't have to be connected to any party to have the disease.
WizardMarks, Central
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