Editorial reply to Mr. Kushner: Thorough factual analysis of race relations or NOT?

It is unfortunate today that so many of us can’t get beyond the partisan political divide of liberal versus conservative, Republican versus Democrat, to seek a unifying truth to help us resolve issues, such as racism, that threaten our national unity. Mr. Kushner contends objective analysis, yet quickly falls into “liberal” or “progressive agenda” vilifications, followed by conservative media and political talking points. So, are we to take his observations as a solid, objective foundation upon which to make his primary points that anti-black racism is no longer systemic to American society and that black advocacy is inherently reverse racism?

There is a single and simple point from which to begin contradicting Mr. Kushner’s assertions on race relations, its prevalence, and impact on contemporary American society: NO white ethnic minority was EVER held as slaves in this country based on a stereotyping that they were somehow inherently and collectively inferior to the dominant established white power structure.

The words of Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens on the Confederacy’s stance on slavery reverberate to this day. The question remains to what effect and upon whom? Royal Examiner Photo from YouTube TYT news broadcast

If some Caucasian ethnic minorities faced levels of discrimination from established Anglo-European majorities upon their arrival to these shores, none were condemned to the status of a slave class, a sub-human commodity not subject to institutional norms like an expectation of equal treatment under the law. Even the Irish and Italians at the height of ethnic stereotyping against them had an expectation of payment for their labor and legal accountability for the perpetrator of an assault on their person, their rape, or their torture and murder. Not so right into the 1960s for black Americans in much of this country, 100 years after slavery was abolished by the Civil War.

What was George Floyd’s killing other than a modern-day lynching, except knee to throat rather than the neck in a noose hanging from a thick tree branch? (“Strange Fruit” indeed – look up the Billie Holiday song.)

If Mr. Kushner fails to understand that fundamental difference upon which the ongoing racial divide underlying our society generated by several centuries of a national dehumanization of one race is based in, one is left to wonder how solid is the foundation for all his arguments.

Royal Examiner File Photos/Roger Bianchini

Mr. Kushner states that racism exists only “on the fringe of society” and that racist generalization against black Americans are “promptly and universally criticized and condemned” in modern American society. For starters, I would ask Mr. Kushner what percentage of this nation’s private interpersonal conversations on race do you participate in, upon which to base such an assertion?
Hopefully, racism as a belief system is held by a minority of our nation’s population as we approach the end of the second decade of the 21st century. But is it only found on the peripheral edges of society, never to creep into a corporate board room or political backroom discussion?

On point: ‘All Lives Can’t Matter’ until ‘ALL Lives DO Matter’ – the question remains, Do All Lives Matter to most of us?

Major political figures from both parties have been immersed in racial controversies in recent years, including the last two presidents of the United States. You don’t have to have a long memory to know that President Trump has drawn negative attention from the political left for being aggressively resistant to the U.S. military’s stated intention of removing the name of military and political officers of the Confederacy that fought the federal government for the right to maintain slavery as a state right, from the bases that have carried those names, primarily in the south, for years.

And the Obama Justice Department headed by Eric Holder drew negative attention from the conservative side for a suspected attempt to “federalize” local police departments around the country to the advantage of the African-American population. That initiative began around 2014 in the wake of the killing of a young black man by police in Ferguson, Missouri.

Online research and the fact-checking Snopes website indicates that “federalization” of local police departments across the country was based in the Holder-led Justice Department’s use of “consent decrees”, civil actions brought in support of a section of the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act prohibiting police conduct “that deprives persons of rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States.”

Need I remind anyone of the pre-Coronavirus pandemic controversy that raged around our own Democratic Governor Ralph Northam’s younger, black-face costume college party days?

And it also was within the last decade that former Texas Governor and former Trump Administration Secretary of Energy Rick Perry was pressured to remove the posted entrance way name “Ni**erhead” from his family hunting grounds as he emerged onto the national scene.

Periphery of society, Mr. Kushner – Really?

I will not continue a point by point analysis of his letter, and even note that I agree that some overreaction in the rhetoric of protest has occurred on the national stage of late. I also agree that talking to, rather than “at” each other is crucial to resolving our national issues from whichever perspective we view them.

However, I wish Mr. Kushner’s letter didn’t leave me feeling that I had simply been lectured on the current conservative base’s perception of reality as we all struggle to come to terms with primary issues such as race relations, public health, and abuses of institutional authority at a time of increasingly divisive political rhetoric in America. Some historians have called the current level of American political divisiveness the worst since the 1850s run-up to the Civil War.

So Gary, and others with similar or opposing opinions on these topics, let’s talk – TO, rather than AT, each other.

Roger Bianchini, Member, Royal Examiner Editorial Board