Reprint from August 1, 2019
Second of three parts
The NAACP (National Association of Colored People) gathered in Detroit for its annual convention. Lauren Gambino, based in Washington, D.C., wrote a piece for The Guardian Weekly. She wrote how the NAACP convention urged presidential hopefuls not to shy away from being against president Donald Trump’s effort to fan the flames of racism.
“After Hillary Clinton’s defeat (in 2016 presidential election), many top Democrats determined Trump had won because white working class white voters abandoned the Party as a result of its emphasis on race and identity. To beat him, they argued, candidates should only respond to Trump’s most inflammatory provocations and even then to quickly return to kitchen table issues: The economy, jobs, health care.
“Trump spent the final months of the 2018 midterm campaign whipping up fear about an immigrant caravan at the southern border and the MS-13 gang. But Democrats won control of the House, taking seats in districts Republicans had held for decades with the help of suburban and college-educated white voters.
“We’re taught that you could only win people of color by losing white voters. We didn’t believe that was true.
“Now, though, in the wake of Trump’s incendiary attacks on the congresswomen, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley, leading voices of the progressive left, many black leaders, and liberal activists, are pushing candidates to more aggressively combat the (former) president and his combustible politics of racial division.”
“The former NAACP president Cornell Brooks said Donald Trump was playing a dangerous game and implored Democrats not to treat 2020 as race-neutral.
“‘You cannot pretend,’ he said, ‘that health care, highways, jobs, and climate change, that those are issues of consequence, but that hate crimes, xenophobia, children in migrant camps, and the targeting of women of color are not real issues. That is a strategy for a massive loss.’
Continued next week