I see Bernie in a very different light. People have come together around a broad spectrum of ideas he talked about in the 2016 election that are now on the lips of so many of this year’s candidates—health care as a human right, getting big money out of politics, ending mass incarceration, free college tuition...People also like that Bernie’s principles have never wavered: as a young man he traveled to the segregated south where he was arrested trying to prevent a local school district from installing old trailers to extend an overcrowded school, in order to avoid sending the children to an all white school that had ample empty desks. His ideas are in support of people. People who defend the status quo attack him and divide us. That’s my perspective, anyway.

@Bobbyzen Bernie does have great ideas but I was referring to his backers who stayed home, or voted third party because of their anger that he didn't get the Dem nomination. My Facebook feed was full of meanness from them and it still is. I feel quite strongly that even if you are angry that your candidate didn't get the nod you have to think about the big picture and what will happen if Trump gets another term or even thinking back to the 2016 election and what a Trump win did to this country

@AmelieMatisse Some of the negative reaction had to be at the way Bernie had the deck stacked against him in 2016 by the DNC, and how the DNC really seemed determined to nominate Hillary no matter what. If Kamala Harris appears to win the nomination by genuinely winning the discussion, and looks like a solid bet to dethrone Hair Furor, it might make all the difference. And right now, she's looking pretty good. Telling the guys not to indulge in a food fight was brilliant.

@alliwant seriously, I will vote for whatever Dem candidate gets the nod

@WilliamFleming

That's unkind. Kamala Harris is not playing to the hilt her black heritage.

Kamala Harris is half black and bicultural. Her father is a black university professor from Jamaica. Her mother is a physician from India.

All her life, she has faced discrimination and hate for being black.

Kamala initially grew up in predominantly African American communities in Berkeley, CA.

Her parents emigrated to America in the 1960s.

[answersafrica.com]

@LiterateHiker According to Wikipedia:

“Her father, Donald Harris, is a Stanford University economics professor who emigrated from Jamaica in 1961 for graduate study in economics at University of California, Berkeley.[5][6] Recalling the lives of his grandmothers, Donald Harris wrote that one was related to a plantation and slave owner while the other had unknown ancestry.[7]”

A person’s ancestry should be of little significance IMO, Of greater significance is the fact that both her parents have been successful professionals. I doubt many Blacks sympathize with her victim narrative.

@WilliamFleming

Then why did you denigrate her? Shame on you. You wrote:

"As a politician though she can be expected to play that smidgen to the hilt. I’m surprised that she was relegated to a segregated Black school as a child in California."

In the South, people were considered black if they had one drop of African blood.

"The one-drop rule is a social and legal principle of racial classification that was historically prominent in the United States in the 20th century. It asserted that any person with even one ancestor of sub-Saharan African ancestry ("one drop" of black blood) is considered black (Negro or colored in historical terms).

"This concept became codified into the law of some states in the early 20th century. It was associated with the principle of "invisible blackness" that developed after the long history of racial interaction in the South, as well as the hardening of slavery as a racial caste.

"It is an example of the automatic assignment of children of a mixed union between different socioeconomic or ethnic groups to the group with the lower status."

[en.wikipedia.org]

@LiterateHiker Yes, it used to be that way, but times have changed to a degree. I think that in the future we’ll see more and more merging of races, and no one will think anything of it.

I did not intend to single her out for denigration—it’s just that she’s, after all, nothing but another politician and can be expected to play her cards like all the other politicians. I find it hard to feel much sympathy for her narrative, growing up in California with affluent, professional parents. BTW, I thought California was supposed to be a paragon of liberality, but now I learn they were segregated, just like Alabama.

@WilliamFleming

Read "The Warmth of Other Suns - The Epic Story of America's Great Migration," the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Isabel Wilkerson.

With stunning detail, Wilkerson tells this story through the lives of three unique individuals:

Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet, blue-collar success, and in old age, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois state senate seat.

Sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, where he endangered his job fighting for civil rights, saw his family fall, and finally found his peace in God.

Robert Foster, MD, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue medicine. Driving to California through the South, Texas and Arizona, he had to find shelter before nightfall. Motels refused him because he was black. The KKK roamed roads in pickup trucks, looking for blacks who had stopped beside the road to beat, rape, murder or lynch.

It was terrifying.

Through black community word-of-mouth, Dr. Foster found black families who provided beds and dinner for black travelers.

No California hospitals would hire him as a physician or surgeon because he was black. Dr. Foster started out taking blood pressure and getting health histories of black people in their homes, for life insurance companies.

Eventually Dr. Foster became the personal physician of Ray Charles, as part of a glittering, successful career as a surgeon after the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964.

@LiterateHiker I’ll be on the lookout for that book. I think however that you have a rather one-sided and exaggerated perspective. Growing up here in Alabama, I was acquainted with a lot of Blacks, many of whom were well respected in the community.

It’s easy to build up a horrifying picture in your mind based on a few anecdotes but real life is generally in shades of grey.

@LiterateHiker My hero, one of the greatest humans to walk the earth in the twentieth century was Maxie Maultsby Jr., from nearby Pensacola. a Black man, he attended college in Alabama and went on to get his PHD in psychiatry up north somewhere.

Dr. Maultsby founded the Rational Behavior Therapy method of psychological counseling, which is widely used and hailed around the world.

It is the kind of positive, uplifting story with which I like to fill my mind. His book, “Help Yourself to Happiness” certainly helped me in a dramatic way.

@WilliamFleming

Stop insulting me. You sound like a racist white man.

My understanding of racism is not "exaggerated based on a few anecdotes." In my teens I began reading black literature and continue to this day.

My father had black band members in his jazz band. I grew up playing with band members' kids.

At the University of Michigan, I went looking for a jazz music class to play flute. The only one I could find was in the Afro American Studies Dept. For two years, I played flute in Jazz Workshop. I had the only white face. It was lots of fun.

"Does that Confederate flag covering the wall offend you like it offends me?" I asked black waiters in Georgia in 2006. "The Confederate flag is a symbol of racism, plain and simple," they replied.

2018: Stepping down from a bus, a small black woman stumbled into my arms on the sideway. I caught her to prevent her from falling. She was shaken up, so I invited her to lunch at a nearby restaurant.

"In Wenatchee, I have never experience so much hateful racism in my life," she said. "On the sidewalk, people hiss "nigger," "go back to Africa," "monkey" and worse. Men and women throw bottles and cans at me from cars and truck, screaming racist abuse. It's been horrible."

"After seven years here, I am moving back to New Orleans where I feel safer," she said. "At least I will be surrounded by black people. There's safety in numbers."

I wrote a pointed letter to the local newspaper, "Racism is Alive in Wenatchee." Glad they printed it.

In 2017 I convinced a friend to remove the Confederate flag from the wall of her garage boy-cave." It's about Southern pride," she said.

"First of all, you are not Southern," I replied. "You grew up in Cashmere, WA."

"The Confederate flag is a symbol of racism, plain and simple, black waiters in Georgia said about the huge Confederate flag covering their restaurant wall," I continued. "It's a symbol of racism."

She took it down.

@LiterateHiker You continue to build up a very bleak and terrifying image of the South and things southern. All I’m saying is that there are shades of grey. Why is that insulting? What is racist about that statement?

I have lived in close proximity with Black people for most of my life, seeing and talking with them most days. There was never anything terrible or horrifying going on where I was that I was aware of. I can remember when some families, Black and White were moving out of the neighborhood back in the fifties. Economic conditions were hard and the increasing mechanization of agriculture meant fewer jobs. People moved to cities where they could find jobs. Many of those cities were southern cities.

Someone should write a book about the people who stayed put and found success and happiness at home. That would be most people I think, but it is more dramatic to write about racism and terror and fleeing into the arms of liberal northerners. Sells a lot more books.

I’m trying to download the book you recommended. I’m very curious.

@WilliamFleming

You said I have a "one-sided and exaggerated perspective." That's insulting.

Have you ever read "Black Like Me" by John Howard Griffin? He's a white man who medically colored his entire skin black in 1959, to find out what it's like to pass as a Negro in the Deep South.

"One of the few books that do more than take us across the familiar and arid landscape of generalizations and statistics, but convey the feel, sight, sound and sweat of what the abstractly titled 'Negro Problem' is all about." - New York Times

"I didn't know black were treated that horribly in the South!" my daughter said at 15, after I asked her to read 'Black Like Me.' "What are they teaching you about American history in school?" I asked.

American schools are teaching a sanitized, white version of history.

After "Black Like Me" was published, white supremacists mailed Griffin death threats and burned crosses on his lawn in Chicago. Bricks were thrown through his living room windows.

With his wife and children, Griffin had to flee and shelter at a friend's home.

@LiterateHiker Yes, I read that book long ago. I’ve read various books by Black authors also. I’ve got the collected essays and memoirs of Albert Murray in which he describes growing up near Mobile, and he describes his return there in later life as well as travels across the South. Read Murray and you’ll get a balanced and intelligent perspective.

I recently read Maya Angelou‘s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”, again, an inside, balanced perspective. I downloaded a collection of slave narratives assembled in the 1930’s by the federal government when many former slaves were still alive. Read those narratives and you’ll learn a good deal about life as a slave—it’s advantages and it’s down sides. You’ll hear about it first hand as it really was.

In no way do I deny that there is a history of racism in this country, or that many injustices have been served to Blacks. But like Murray, I try to look at the whole picture, not just at that hellish spectacle created by the left-leaning news media.that has established such a one-sided and exaggerated perspective in the minds of so many.

@WilliamFleming

Your reply was great until your last sentence.

Once again, you minimized racism and discrimination against black people by calling liberal's perspective "one-sided and exaggerated."

"The advantages" of slavery? Really?

From whose perspective? Slave owners? The KKK?

@LiterateHiker Read the slave narratives and you’ll see. You can get them from Gutenberg Press.

The news media and entertainment industry in this country make a lot of money keeping people frightened, angry and aggrieved. They accomplish that by dividing people along racial, religious sectional, and cultural lines, constantly exaggerating and telling outright lies. Politicians take up the drum roll, hoping to capture your vote. It’s all a big whoop-de-doo over little.

There actually are some social issues that need attention. One is health care costs—illegal immigration is another. Excessive government spending and public debt need addressing. The country has become so divided and distraught that it is impossible to hold any kind of reasonable and productive discussion. For example, Republicans have been so demonized in the press that just to say that you voted Republican will get you accused of racism by some. They might imply that you are an ignorant, hypocritical EVANGELICAL. Oh my God, horror of horrors. Tell someone that you are from Alabama or Mississippi and they’ll come apart at the seams.

This country would be better served if the media would foster mutual respect and unity. Follow the advice of MLK.

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

—Martin Luther King, Jr.

Hear! Hear! Well said!