Quote of the Day

Quote of the day. From Elie Mystal in The Nation, describing the Republican Convention, or as he called it, the Republican Infomercial.

"But there are other racist white people who miss their dog whistles. There are white people who want every drop of privilege and power that flows from America’s systemic oppression of Black people, but don’t want that MAGA-hat-induced heat when they go to the grocery store. They don’t think of themselves as “racists”—and get more offended when they’re called racist than they do over actual acts of racism. They support the bigotry and xenophobia that Trump brings, but they don’t want to feel like bigots and xenophobes while supporting it.
These white people need some cover, and this year’s RNC is providing it in the form of Black people who support Trump. The Republicans have invited a cadre of professional “Black friends” to validate Donald Trump and make white people feel a little less racist while supporting white supremacy.
There’s a word for what Republicans are doing—tokenism—and there are a lot of definitions of the term floating around. So, at the risk of sounding as intellectually constrained as Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, I’ll use the dictionary definition of the term:
tokenism | noun | the practice of making only a perfunctory or symbolic effort to do a particular thing, especially by recruiting a small number of people from underrepresented groups in order to give the appearance of sexual or racial equality within a workforce.
It is important to understand that tokenism is not done to benefit minorities, not even the token minorities used in the scheme. Tokenism is done for the benefit of white people, to make them feel more comfortable and less complicit in the prejudice and bias of their institutions, schools, and workplaces. It’s done to shield white endeavors from accusations of discrimination. It is, quite literally, a cosmetic adjustment: a mere lacquer of Black faces gilded onto the same old white spaces."