Political Theatre category archive

Field looks at the Senatorial run-off in Mississippi (see the yesterday’s post of Mike Malloy’s comments about it) and cuts to the chase. An excerpt:

Roland Martin recently asked poor white people in Mississippi what they had to lose by voting for the democratic candidate. . . .

It’s an interesting question, but it misses the point of why they (poor white people) don’t vote for democratic candidates in the first place. There are a couple of reasons for that.

First, often times the democratic candidate is a person of color. —That happens to be the case in Mississippi now— Most of these people, regardless of what you hear from the main stream media, are just flat out racist, and there is no way in hell they are going to vote for a black man to be dog catcher let alone their senator. The Negro cannot represent them because he or she is not worthy. It must be someone who looks like they do, and who “shares their values”. It was racism not “economic anxiety” that drove all those poor white people to vote for trump.

Follow the link for the second reason.

Afterthought:

I may have told this story before, but it seems relevant.

When I was in college, my father told me a story told to him by the then-current Superintendent of Schools in my county (when I was in high school, he was a Phys. Ed. Teacher and coach, but he was the rare high school coach who could do more than coach). He was also a good and decent man who gave me my first baseball glove.

He and several other administrators had decided to drive to some school administrators’ convention of some sort in New Orleans. Note that this was at the height of the civil rights struggle of the 1960s. He told my father that, when they got to Mississippi, the atmosphere was so poisonous that they felt obliged to fake their Southern accents to sound more Southern than their Virginia Southern accents.

And this was a carload of white Southerners.

If Mississippi was able to make actual white Southerners fearful, well, words fail me.