General Discussion

malaise

(269,192 posts) Mon Jul 15, 2019, 04:56 PM Jul 2019

Most Racist Presidential Comment of My Lifetime?

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-07-15/trump-s-racist-tweet-most-vile-made-by-a-recent-president
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President Donald Trump’s vicious verbal assaults on four women of color who are members of Congress have sparked an avalanche of well-earned criticism, including from his own fervent supporters. As regular readers know, I’m fascinated by history, so I’ve been wondering where Trump’s tweeted comments rank among the most racist made by presidents (or successful presidential candidates) during my lifetime.

Let’s start with what Trump said. He attacked the quartet as people “who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all).” He added “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”

This is dreadful stuff. In the second place, three of the four were born in the U.S., so they’re already in the places from which they came. But in the first place, “Go back where you came from” was already a racist rallying cry when I was a kid, during the early years of integration. If the president of the United States is unaware of that history, Heaven preserve us.

OK. So much for this past weekend. Now for my other contenders for most racist comment (again, I include those made by candidates only if they won):

Fourth place: In 1983, during debate over the establishment of a national holiday to honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., President Ronald Reagan commented that “We will know in about 35 years” whether King was a Communist sympathizer. This was a reference to the sealed files containing records of the FBI’s surveillance operation against the civil rights icon.