I’m actually thinking about my dad right now and I’m crying. I’m thinking about the time in the late 1950’s in which my father and Joe Carter Sr. were refused service in a downtown Oklahoma City cafe because Joe was black.
My dad told the owner of the cafe to go to hell. He and Joe then sat on a curb and ate some sandwiches they bought at a nearby convenience store. A lifetime friendship fell into place. One of affection and deep mutual respect.
Fast forward to today and I’m thinking about James Clyburn and his friend Joe Biden. I’m thinking of how Joe Biden wouldn’t be on the cusp of being president elect if James Clyburn hadn’t stood by Biden in South Carolina when it appeared Biden’s candidacy was dead in the water.
I’m also thinking if not for the black voters in Atlanta, Milwaukee, Detroit, and Philadelphia we’d be looking at another four years of Donald Trump.
Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. I was wrong about Georgia. An SEC football state actually stood up to the Birther racist Donald Trump. Go figure this could happen in Richard Nixon, George Wallace, and Donald Trump’s Solid South. But it did. To me this is the single most encouraging thing in this election in that a southern confederate state went for a ticket with a female black liberal alongside Joe Biden. I didn’t think this was doable.
The confederacy never ended. They’ve never accepted the fact they lost the Civil War, but gladly accept monies from the U.S. Treasury via other states in the Union to prop them up economically.
So as we move along this process with Trump and his lawyers there is some hope for the South. Maybe just a glimmer, but some hope beyond SEC West football.
Hope is a good thing.
I challenge any white Trump supporter in Oklahoma to tell me with a straight face if they’d have had a problem with a black policeman murdering George Floyd if he were white.
Really. Think about it for a day. Try and forget the individual and corporate effective marginal rates and think about what if George Floyd was white. Then maybe you’ll understand some of what just happened in certain cities in our country in this election.