“We have now sunk to a depth at which
the restatement of the obvious is
the first duty of intelligent men.”
(George Orwell)
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Antonin Scalia, appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1986, is currently the longest-serving Associate Justice on the United States Supreme Court. In the continuing (anti-Affirmative Action) case of Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, Scalia had this, in part, to say (highlights mine):
There are those who contend that it does not benefit African-Americans . . .
I’m assuming here that Scalia’s use of the word those refers to, in his own warped and clearly racist context, each and all of those folks (including himself I’m sure) who believe and maintain that ALL African-Americans are a bit less of everything that defines Teh Superiority implicit in ALL white folks — Teh Stupid (obviously) included.
Scalia continues:
. . . to — to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school — a slower-track school where they do well.
One of — one of the briefs pointed out that — that most of the black scientists in this country do not come from the most advanced schools. They come from lesser schools where they do not feel that they‘re — that they‘re being pushed ahead in — in classes that are too — too fast for them. . . .
Note that in a mere 95 words, Scalia uses the words they and them, resp., six and three times each, and by doing so implies that EVERY African American is intellectually inferior to EVERY white American, all based on premises which I expect would be dismissed and laughed at by anyone with half a mind.
A couple of conclusions are obvious. First, Scalia is a racist. Second, this country clearly has NOT — in spite of popular rumor and its occasional attempts — progressed very far beyond the racist place it was in 1787 when our current Constitution was completed and offered for ratification by the ‘several States.’ Ratification by the original 13 states was completed in 1790, at which time slavery was legal in eight of the states, and not legal in the other five.
It is, of course, fair to note that in the main body of the 1787 Constitution, ALL black African-Americans were defined as being three fifths that of a free person. It’s also worth noting that Founder and Slave-owner James Madison constructed the Second Amendment so as to enable slave states to put down slave rebellions by allowing them full access to the well regulated Militia(s) which were now, courtesy of Article I, Section 8, fully under Federal control. Slave owners — and racism — thus were Constitutionally protected. More or less.
Following Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860 (but prior to his inauguration in 1861), seven states — South Carolina first, then in quick succession, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas — seceded, citing “states rights” and “slavery.” The Civil war followed quickly in 1861; the Emancipation Proclamation was issued in 1863; the Civil War finally ended in 1865, the same year that the Thirteenth Amendment — which began with the line Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude . . . shall exist within the United States — became the law of the land. In 1866, the fanatical Ku Klux Klan rose from the racial ashes of the Civil War, a dour event that was followed by ratification, in 1868, of the Fourteenth Amendment which plainly stated that ALL persons born or naturalized in the United States . . . are citizens of the United States and . . . No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens . . . etc. Racism was, in other words, officially dismissed and forever banished.
Sadly, however, the era of Jim Crow and Segregation — driven by unending embedded racism — persisted in the legal shadows with only occasional efforts to interrupt. And it endures yet today as it continues to drive portions of the national politic, including even issues brought before those who sit on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Some still love to call America The Greatest Country in the World, even though it’s made manifestly clear each and every day that far too many in America can more correctly be said to still represent what the country has always been: a bigotry-driven white supremacist nation. For everyone on the receiving end of that type of hate-driven agenda and behavior, however, there is nothing great implicit in what they know is still the dark reality that is solely intended to both define and suppress them.
In other news, Ben Carson notes that ‘America As We Know It Is Gone’ If Hillary Clinton Picks The Next Supreme Court Justices. In Carson’s words,
“If we get another progressive president and they get two or three Supreme Court picks, America as we know it is gone.”
That’s the best reason to vote for and elect a progressive president I’ve run across in at least the last couple of hours! Why? Because the truth forever remains that Progressives are far less likely to harbor deep-seated fears, or hatreds, or religious/racist bigotries, or irrational xenophobia(s) than are radical Conservatives, nor do Progressives covet the ‘privilege’ of imposing the horrors implicit therein upon anyone, anywhere. Those seem to be tools that are far more common to extreme right wing politics — tools designed and used to instigate fear, hate, bigotry, and even violence of and by the masses — invariably to be directed against them, the fresh enemies of the state.
And who might our ‘fresh enemies’ be? They will, of course, be them — not necessarily the African Americans of Scalia’s they and them (and certainly NEVER the murderous gun-toting anti-immigrant anti-abortion anti-Muslim anti-LGBT white Christian terrorists), but rest assured that whomever they might turn out to be, they WILL be duly targeted. Why? Because in the (shallow) opinion of far too many Americans, it is the grand mentality of those destined to become our Leaders — those who are willing and anxious to denigrate and/or destroy them — that will
MAKE AMERICA GREAT . . . AGAIN.
(yeehaw)
******
“In a time of universal deceit,
telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.”
(George Orwell, 1984)
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TheZoo 