Here is the national conversation:
{crickets}
Wait. Must be a technical glitch. Here it is:
{crickets}
So I was looking at my hopeful diaries from 2008 during the campaign. One of them was a response to a very good and positive diary about Chicago. It was a good diary, but I had just been to Chicago, and my experience was somewhat different:
Thoughts About "Overheard on a Bus"
Here is the gist:
So as a part of the conference there was a party at a building on the end of this long amusement boardwalk place whose name I don't remember. Chicago people will know. It was a great place, Second City did a comedy set, and my experience in Chicago till then was that it was a really great city.
When I left, I took one of the cabs that was lined up at the entrance to the boardwalk area. The cab driver was an African guy, that is to say a guy from a place in Africa who was speaking a language into his cell phone that I had never heard before. We were at the left turn to my hotel, waiting for traffic to clear when the cab behind us honked and rammed the rear bumper of my cab. I looked back and there was this white cab driver with an Archie Bunker hat shouting at us. He rammed us again while screaming at us. I've only been driving for the last 40 years, but I could see that with on-coming traffic there was no way for my guy to turn. The other cabbie rammed us again and my driver got out. The white cabbie got out and began a racist tirade and spit in my cabbies face. None of the usual racial slurs were left out. This pissed me off, so I got out.
And then from the next lane over, a guy in an SUV rolls down his window and says he's Chicago PD and tells my driver that he will take him in if he doesn't get back into his cab right now. So I start to tell the cop that the other guy rammed our car. He just looked at me and told me to shut up and get in the car. He said nothing to the white cabbie.
So we got back in the car. As the car pulled up to the hotel, my driver had tears pouring down his face. He was devastated.
The thing is when I wrote the diary, Obama had just given his speech on March 18 about racism and the need for having a national conversation. It was a brilliant speech.
The national dialogue on racism, despite the seeming lack of something called that, has occurred. The mainstream political discourse has agreed that complete resistance to any policy proposed by President Obama is justified, even if it hurts the country and ruins the lives of the citizens. And the resultant consensus, from these actions, seems to indicate that, as a national polity, we are racist, we want to keep it that way and we will work hard to ensure that it stays that way.
That might sound harsh, but look at the response to having a not-white president by the Republicans and Teabaggers. Obstruction on issues that were agreed upon in the past, but not now. Like mandatory clauses in health care bills. A republican idea. Now anathema.
But this diary is not about the details of the racist resistance, there are too many instances to detail. Rather, it is about that national conversation. What happened to it? Why has it happened as a political piece of theater orchestrated by the right? Where is the White House?
Racism is at the central core of the Republican response to the Obama administration. In my opinion, it needs to be addressed directly by the president. There is no other way that the Republicans will be shamed out of their traitorous, economically destructive, racist policies.
All of the racists need to get called on their Archie Bunker attitudes. It need not be accusatory, but we still need that national conversation, because this issue is paralyzing our government. It is likely to kill our economy if it continues as far as failing to raise the debt ceiling. Something the R's did under the shrub, but now, with an AA president seems impossible.