Racists Politicians Have Happened Before

Many people have asked me, "what do you think of Donald Trump?" I've shied away from answering them, mainly because, what I think about Donald Trump means absolutely nothing to people who can do anything about Donald Trump. Besides, every so often history produces someone who by all sensibility, should not be where they end up being. In most of those situations the organization, the company, the country or the branch of government and especially the people ends up paying the price. Most of the time the people following such a person are fooled into believing that this person really cares about them. But think about it. Trump has always lived with a silver spoon in his mouth. Not everyone born with a silver spoon, cares less about the everyday person. However, Trump has never taken the silver spoon out of his mouth to feed anyone else. In everything he does, there has always been some kind of profit for him. If not he isn't interested. Believe me, becoming the President of the United States will put him in position to profit for himself, even more. America, as free as it is and as free as it claims to want to be; in significant measure has shown her true colors. Before you love it or leave it folks get all upset, I love America enough to want to see her care about EVERYONE! So, my answer to the question about Donald Trump is, America has allowed racist people to rise high in politics and even the presidency on more than one occasion. One example of a bad person elected president is Woodrow Wilson. This passage is from a national bestselling book entitled, Lies My Teachers Told Me by James Loewen. "President Woodrow Wilson's administration was openly hostile to Black people. Wilson was an outspoken white supremacist who believed that Black people were inferior. During his campaign for presidency, Wilson promised to press for civil rights. But once in office he forgot his promises. Instead, Wilson ordered that white and black workers in federal government jobs be segregated from one another. This was the first time such segregation had existed since Reconstruction! When black federal employees in Southern states protested the order, Wilson had the protesters fired. In November, 1914, a black delegation asked the President to reverse his policies. Wilson was rude and hostile and refused their demands." The book goes on to say that Wilson displayed little regard for the rights of anyone whose opinions differed from his own. Does that sound familiar? Woodrow Wilson's wife was worst. She often told "darky" stories in cabinet meetings. The truth about Wilson is mostly hidden. History paints him as a hero. Sadly there are a lot of schools around the country, many of them predominately Black schools, that have been named after Woodrow Wilson. Helen Keller called Woodrow Wilson "the greatest individual disappointment the world has ever known." However, you'll never read that in history books. According to an article The 11 Most Racist U.S. Presidents by the Huffington Post, "When NAACP lawyers persuaded the U.S. Supreme Court to rule Jim Crow as unconstitutional in 1954, Dwight D. Eisenhower the 34th President of the U.S. did not endorse Brown v. Board of Education and dragged his feat to enforce it. At a White House dinner the year before, President Eisenhower had told Chief Justice Earl Warren he could understand why White southerners wanted to make sure “their sweet little girls [are not] required to sit in school alongside some big black buck.” The 11th President James Knox Polk led the fight against those politicians and activists pressing to ban slavery in the new southwestern territories. This lifelong slaveholder was angrily hated by antislavery Americans as the leader of the western marching “Slave Power.” Indeed, President Polk wanted slavery to extend to the Pacific Ocean. He looked away as White slaveholders (and non-slaveholders) danced around the legal protections for Mexican landowners inscribed in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and went about illegally stealing the lands of the new group of Mexican American citizens. President Polk started a forgetful history of the Mexican southwest—and the long history of racism against Mexicans inside and outside of the border—a history of racism that is now fueling the campaign of Donald Trump. America has never been without racism. And some of the biggest perpetrators of racism have been high ranking politicians. When these people rise up, racism goes from covert to overt. Another way of putting it would be that the volume of racism is turned up every now and then. When it comes to racism, this country is like a drug addict who can't seem to kick it's racism habit. Every time there's positive headway made in the area of race in this country (electing a Black President), something negative stops the progress in its tracks (birther issue, police brutality and the Trump movement). The one positive aspect these racist outburst reveal is that America still has an underlining stream of hatred buried deep in the souls of people who are unhappy. Hitler proved that anger can be directed by a slick talking huckster, who is able to misdirect people and get them to see victims as enemies. As a whole, Black people, Brown people, Red people nor Yellow people, don't have enough power to really affect how any White people as a whole, live their lives. If the angry people, who believe in these slick talking liars were to follow the money trail all the way to its logical end, they'd find it's the rich and the powerful, who are pulling all the chains and changing policies to keep themselves rich and powerful. And I don't think it's a stretch to say, in this country, most of the really rich and powerful are White. And yes, while I do know that not all of them are greedy, I also know they do not wish to share their wealth with Black, Brown, Red, Yellow or other Whites. Racism affects everyone, including White people. Racism, as controlled by the rich and powerful, makes it difficult for the average White person to be a star in the game of life. Racism, as controlled by the rich and powerful, makes it impossible for Black, Red . Yellow and Brown people to even participate equally in the game of life. For Blacks, Red, Brown and Yellow people, the truest, most evil reason racism exists is, to destroy hope. Once hope is destroyed people lose vision. Once vision is lost people live for the moment and can't imagine the future. Without hope and vision for the future people die. They die from the deep within their soul, until their bodies follow. The new racist political hucksters know this. One of the most blatant examples of this is President Obama and the birther issue. Once he was elected President of the United States, and hope looked as if could spring forth, the birther issue popped up. It was a way to steal the hope, vision and future from people who might just think that there was hope in their future. Personally, I connect this emptiness with working hard and earning my doctorate. The day after I went through the ceremony my White supervisor at work told me that "getting a doctorate isn't a big deal". The night before I'd had a night of hope during the ceremony. I thought because the university I worked for had no Black, fulltime Ph.D.s working there and that their excuse has always been, "we can't get Black Ph.D.s to move to Idaho, they would be happy, that a former scholarship football player took his education to another level. Quickly, I was slapped back to the reality of racism. The birther issue did the same thing to many people of color in America. And while there are also many White people who think that the birther issue is a sick and racist Every once in a while this country is like a balloon that puffs itself until it finally pops. It didn't need any outside source. A false leader rises and gives the hateful enough air and allows them to puff up themselves.