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I often have the opportunity to discuss politics, race, religion, gender and other issues on MSNBC. Television is a terrific forum for disseminating ideas, but it also has severe time limitations. So I have joined with theGrio in a new project. After my MSNBC appearances I will come over to theGrio in order to continue the conversation by offering some supporting ideas, references or explanations that I was not able to fully explain during the TV spot.
Let’s see if this little experiment works.
On Tuesday night I appeared on Countdown on MSNBC. Lawrence O’Donnell asked me to respond to recent survey data indicating that many Republicans voters believe that President Obama has pursued policies of socialism, that he was not born in the United States, that he behaves like Hitler and that he may be “the anti-Christ.” O’Donnell wanted to know what, if anything, these data mean for the current health of our democratic processes.
YOU CAN WATCH THE VIDEO HERE:
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Here are a few links that might be helpful for further understanding my conversation with O’Donnell.
1. If you want to think about the current polling data in context it is worth taking a look at this 1974 article: “Political and Racial Attitudes: Black Versus White” by Harrell R. Rodgers, Jr. and Charles S. Bullock III in the Journal of Black Studies. The authors investigate survey data from the 1960s and 1970s. The find real improvements in white racial attitudes toward black Americans in a very short time period (1963-1971). Decades of research since Rodger and Bullock show that our country has made dramatic strides in reducing the social acceptability of open expressions of racial bias. As a country we should all want to protect those gains and we should all be concerned if it seems that we are moving backward.
Here is a little taste of what the article reveals.
2. O’Donnell and I also discussed my recent blog post for The Nation. Here is a link for that piece titled “Is this the Birth of a Nation?” In it I argue that we should understand the verbal attacks against Representative John Lewis as being acts against the federal government. Health care reform opponents did more than reveal their bigotry; they indicated an unwillingness to accept the actions of the government as just and legitimate. We should be worried about the broad implications of these actions.
You can read the whole article here.
3. If you would like to know more about the history of Reconstruction in America, I encourage you to read one of the definitive texts on this era, Eric Foners’ Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. Also, to learn more about the film Birth of a Nation then please check out Melvyn Stokes’ D.W. Griffith’s the Birth of a Nation: A History of the Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time. (2008)
Feel free to leave other questions and comments here. I will try to get back and respond to as many as I can.
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