Two White People Were Forced to Grapple with Their Whiteness Last Night
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a42766/flint-debate-race-question/
As longtime followers of the Bill Cosby saga know all too well, watching CNN's Don Lemon ask questions on the electric teevee machine is like being one of those guys in The Wages Of Fear, riding those rickety trucks full of nitroglycerine down through the rugged Mexican mountains. You never know when he's going to ask a guest why she didn't off bite some dude's dick. On Sunday night, though, when Bernie Sanders and Hillary Rodham Clinton came to this wounded, poisoned city to demonstrate that it is still possible to conduct a political debate in this country without talking about some dude's dick (in any context), Don Lemon brought the real stuff....
This smacked just a little of mortuary tourism. In situations like this, a candidate has to be very careful that he or she is not using bereaved parents as props, either in person or vicariously. Perhaps out of nervousness, HRC tiptoed close to that line....
Afterwards, and not entirely fairly, Sanders was accused of comparing getting a cab with losing a child to police violence, and for not knowing that white people live in poverty, too. (I mean, come on. The man grew up in Brooklyn and he got his start in politics doing open-housing campaigns in Chicago. Not only does he know that poverty transcends race, he also knows how easily the latter can be used as a way to make sure not much gets done about the former.) But it was the question that was the story. Can you imagine asking that same question of the four remaining Republicans? Can you imagine the reaction of the people in the audience if anyone asked. I can but, then again, I've watched a lot of Leni Riefenstahl in my time....
It's about damn time and it was in exactly the right place. Like Ferguson before it, Flint is the place where the notion of nothing ever being About Race falls to sticks and splinters. (In fact, after the debate, Michigan Senator Gary Peters specifically cited Flint as the Ferguson of environmental justice in that it has become a rallying point on the issue.) There is absolutely no question that, because it was a poor and largely minority city, nobody cared too much whether its inhabitants were being poisoned every time they turned on their taps. "If this had happened in a wealthy suburb," said Congressman Dan Kildee, "Governor (Rick) Snyder would have run out of blue ribbons for all the commissions he would have appointed to see how this happened." That was the answer the two candidates were looking for. Neither of them ever had to worry about sabotaging the minds of their children when they brewed a pitcher of iced tea. Neither of them ever had to worry about brushing their teeth with a chemistry set. That was the answer they were looking for and, by coming here at all, they at least got most of the way to it.