Defenders of Jefferson Davis’ Legacy Mar MLK Day
When truth becomes unspeakable, the unspeakable becomes truth.
Lest San Diegans forget, racism has a starring role in both our present day reality and our history.
Sunday’s UT featured a comparison of law enforcement practices in San Diego neighborhoods. As we’re learned from previous studies, race and ethnicity are almost always tied to how much police action occurs on the streets. Crime, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to play as large a role.
San Ysidro and La Jolla have similar population totals, crime rates and calls for service.
The primarily Latino community saw nearly three stops per reported crime. The wealthy white enclave’s contact level was one stop per crime.
I’ve lost track of how many analyses of police behavior in San Diego provide evidence of bias. The things I do remember are the denials and dismissals by the SDPD and the Police Officers Association.
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Here’s an excerpt from a column I wrote in 2013 worth reviving:
The year was 1986, and San Diego, like much of the nation, was swept up in a national discussion about a new holiday commemorating MLK’s contribution to US history. Legislation (signed three years earlier) making Dr. King’s birthday a national holiday was going into effect, and many cities around the country were honoring the slain civil rights leader by naming streets and buildings after him.
It seemed like a no-brainer for the San Diego City Council, then led by Mayor Maureen O’Connor. After some deliberation they announced that Market Street would be renamed Martin Luther King Way…
…The reaction of merchants along Market Street, spurred on by developers eyeing redevelopment possibilities, was strongly negative. Claiming that they’d been excluded from the decision making process, they organized the Keep Market Street Initiative Committee and delivered nearly eighty thousand signatures to the city clerk, a move that put the question, eventually known as Proposition F, on the November ballot.
Arguments for rolling back the name change including the ‘burdens’ of having to reprint stationary and business cards carried the day, with 60% of San Diego voters agreeing.
Thanks again to Vince Compagnone for the tip and the photo.
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Flipping the narrative is a hallmark of right wing politics. Always has been, always will be. Nowhere is this more evident than the period surrounding Martin Luther King Day.
The flakiest crackers in America dole out platitudes aimed at getting their names on the record as somehow being not racist. Every year the King family issues a statement so “both sides” journalists have something to “balance” off the right’s repetition of a claim so ridiculous that should have never seen the light of day.
This year, the righties are getting creative. As passage of something –anything– addressing the wholesale disenfranchisement of voters by the GOP has become the focus on Capitol Hill is now near impossible, Indiana’s homage to whiteness is twisting the knife.
Former Vice President Mike Pence has a pro-filibuster op-ed at the Washington Post suggesting that more voting is the same as rioting.
Equating Democrats’ efforts to eliminate the 60 vote threshold to pass voting rights to the Jan. 6 insurrection, Pence says the people who were aiming to hang him were motivated by a desire
“to use federal authority to overturn results of the presidential election that had been certified by all 50 states. … [N]ow come President Biden and Senate Democrats with plans to use the memory of Jan. 6 to attempt another federal power grab over our state elections and drive a wedge further into our divided nation.”
Hoo, boy! That’s some world class groveling for MAGA votes Pence will never get.
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Virginia’s newly elected Republican Governor, Glenn Youngkin, went on Fox this weekend to quote MLK to explain why he's banning schools from teaching the works of MLK and others like him.
The guy who made banning “Critical Race Theory” a centerpiece of his campaign delivered on that promise on day one. And if that didn’t send a strong enough message, perhaps his elimination of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion section of the Virginia Governor’s website, or the elimination of the task force reviewing past criminal convictions and the firing of the Attorney General’s Civil Rights division certainly re-enforce the point.
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The former President kicked off his 2024 campaign on Saturday in Arizona, and he didn’t disappoint his most racist followers.
“The left is now rationing lifesaving therapeutics based on race, discriminating against and denigrating ... white people to determine who lives and who dies. If you’re white you don’t get the vaccine or if you’re white you don’t get therapeutics. ... In New York state, if you’re white, you have to go to the back of the line to get medical health.”
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Judd Legum at Popular Information has a rundown of the various ways righty Republicans seek to argue that honoring MLK’s legacy is to NOT talk about racism. The key here is for them to limit their actual contact with King’s works to 35 words, stripped of their context and original meaning.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
You don't have to be a history scholar to realize that this is a gross mischaracterization of King's vision. King spoke frequently about racial inequality and the obligation to address racial injustice.
King's "dream" of a society where people could be judged on the "content of their character" was conditioned on economic justice for Black Americans. King asserted that the country needed to make good on the "bad check" it had written to people of color — a portion of King's 1963 speech that is never quoted by Republicans:
Nothing could be finer than the feigned outrage of political leaders when their rhetoric is correctly placed in the context of history. These displays of ignorance are, sadly, not always partisan:
Here are two choice examples in one quote from The Hill
Biden sparked criticism with his passionate remarks in which he called for changing the Senate filibuster to pass voting rights reform on the national level.
At one point, he asked if people wanted to be on the side of Martin Luther King Jr. and the late Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) and Abraham Lincoln or Confederate President George Wallace, segregationist Bull Connor and Jefferson Davis, who opposed the civil rights movement.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said the president’s remarks were “incoherent, incorrect and beneath his office,” and Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said Biden may have “gone a little too far” in his rhetoric.
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Hope and prayers…. From a Voice of San Diego missive over the weekend:
The fire: We very much hope the fire at the home of County Supervisor Nathan Fletcher and former Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez was a random accident. Police say it is “suspicious.” We hope because the implications of arson are grave. No political system can be productive, or fair, if leaders face assassination attempts. Even if attacks don’t succeed, they deliver intolerable trauma to public life. If they do succeed, the consequences are horrific and destabilizing.
I can only hope and pray that somebody from that publication starts looking at the ongoing coalescence of the fringes of San Diego politics. Those folks have big plans for our city, and I’m pretty sure they don’t include peaceful persuasion.
Email me at WritetoDougPorter@Gmail.com