Earlier this week, I posted an item on Michele Norris, of NPR, who declared while a guest on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that Donald Trump’s campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” has a racist message in it tuned to a frequency that only people of color can hear:
In the phrase ‘Make America Great Again’ there’s one word that if you are a person of color, that you sort of stumble over, and it’s the word ‘again’. Because you’re talking about going back to a time that was not very comfortable for people of color. They did not have opportunities, they were relegated to the back of the line.
It turns out Norris is not the only the Democrat to hear that dog whistle. Back in December, Symone Sanders, former press secretary for Bernie Sanders (no relation), made a similar argument:
[Make America Great Again] takes us back to a time when we were in slavery, when we were in chains, when we worked on plantations, internment camps for the Chinese.
She went on to clarify that not “every single Trump supporter is racist, but … we have to be real and understand that the populism around Donald Trump’s campaign was intrinsically tied to racism.” Which sounds as though she is saying that every single Trump supporter is racist after all.
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
On Tuesday Sanders was given an opportunity to train her keen observational skills on another matter that seems to center racism. She was on a panel moderated by CNN’s Don Lemon to discuss the heinous live-streamed kidnapping and torture of a white special needs man by four black Chicago teens. Her “analysis” begins at approximately 0:39 in the video.
https://youtu.be/bv25bPGoxw4
After conceding that the actions of the mob were “sickening, she changes gears:
I want to say something that’s not very popular. We cannot callously go about classifying things as a hate crime. Motive here matters. So, was this for hate of Donald Trump … because of the things he has said, or was this for pure hate of white people?
To say Sanders is subscribing to a double standard in an understatement. In one instance, she is more than willing to “read between the lines” to come up a racist interpretation of an innocuous campaign slogan. In the next, she can barely discern racism at all, much less hatred, even though as Lemon says at the beginning of the segment the four cretins shout “F*ck white people” numerous times during the video.
Lemon also offers up an interesting take on the behavior of the four black teens, who are now in police custody. Per Joe Newby, he says later in the broadcast:
I don’t think it’s evil…. I think these are young people and I think they have bad home training.
I have no idea who is raising these young people, because no one I know on earth who is 17-years-old or 70-years-old would ever think of treating another person like that. You wonder, at 18-years-old, where is your parent, where is your guardian?
