Rep. Bowen: statement on President’s racist “sh*thole” remarks
'For now, the unfortunate leader of this country is making America hate again with seemingly every sentence he manages to construct."
MILWAUKEE – Yesterday, the President of the United States asked why people from “sh*thole countries” like Haiti and some African countries should be allowed to reside in America. Rep. David Bowen (D-Milwaukee) issued the following statement on the president’s racist remarks:
“Before the presidency of Donald Trump, the United States was a proud beacon of light for innocent people displaced by natural disasters, war, unrest, and those in search of economic opportunity and one day we will return to that,” said Bowen. “For now, the unfortunate leader of this country is making America hate again with seemingly every sentence he manages to construct.
“This president is incapable of empathizing with the struggles of Americans, especially Americans of color, so it’s of little surprise that he holds such disdain for people who have been victims of tragedy and economic instability in other parts of the world and have found refuge in the charitable spirit of the American people.
“House and Senate Republicans, including those from the Wisconsin delegation, should work with Democrats on a bipartisan comprehensive immigration package that maintains protections for refugees, ends the cruel threat of displacing Dreamers, and values the black lives of those of the African diaspora.”
NOTE: This press release was submitted to Urban Milwaukee and was not written by an Urban Milwaukee writer. It has not been verified for its accuracy or completeness.
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Students are taught that the United States of America’s founders (white men) were racists. This has also been extended to Western Europe which in most countries banned slavery a generation before America. American students are taught that there are different rules for the wealth and that they can not succeed in this country of injustice. We look at current events today in America and Europe and you see citizens of South American Countries, African counties and Middle Eastern countries Do anything they can to escape misery. Venezuela has some of the greatest and richest resources on this earth and their country is a basket case. Yet all these people of color come here because they no true discrimination and unfairness. They no given a chance they can make it here. Haiti is what Trump stated it was. On almost every world misery index Haiti tops the list.
How do you know what students are taught? When and where did you last step into a classroom? That these countries have problems, which everyone on Earth admits, is not an excuse for racism. That should go without saying.
It is an interesting coincidence that Donald Trump made his shithole remarks on the same day that Edgar Ray Killen died in a Mississippi prison. Killen was the Klansman who had arranged the killing of 3 civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi in 1963, although he was not convicted for another 30 years. . The goal of the Klan at that time, with the support of much of the white South, was to preserve the system of white supremacy, based on violence and terror; It was the system that had prevailed in the South since Reconstruction, and that was now threatened by the Civil Rights movement. This post-Civil War system had produced one of the great migrations in human history, the flight of black people from Southern terror to the unwelcoming arms of places like Milwaukee.
Donald Trump and his most fervent fans are not preservationists, since that system is gone. They are reactionaries, trying to recreate it and restore what they believe has been lost. At this point, there can be little doubt that central to Making America Great Again, is making America white again. Starting with “white backlash” in the 1960s, this racially driven reactionary movement has become the most powerful political force in our country, linking racial animus and greed. With corporate and individual wealth calling the shots in the background, it has produced the Trump Administration and its fervent base of white people who have convinced themselves, with great encouragement from the Republican Party and right wing media, that they, rather than black people, are the true victims of racism in this country. And that immigrants, rather than shareholder value and automation are responsible for their economic insecurity.
A majority of people across racial groups may be appalled by Donald Trump and his support for the “fine people” of the 21st century klan and neo-Nazi movements, our modern day Edgar Ray Killens; but he holds onto that base of racially motivated fans and know-nothings, like Troll, who choose to believe lies that they want to believe and distort history and social reality in ways that make them innocents and black people and immigrants the real racists..
Frank, no mention on how African Amercans migrating from the south were blocked from getting union jobs in the 1950’s and 1960’s. In Milwaukee. How Marquette university had quotas on blacks and Jews in the 1950’s? The Klan marched in Madison in 1924 to drive out Italians then they showed in the thousand in New York to vote Democrat at the democratic Convention.. The last Klansman to be welcomed in the Senate was Robert Byrd. Hillary Clinton kissed his cheek. Get your facts straight.
Someone tell Troll it’s 2018, not 1924. These days you have white supremacists either in Congress or running for office and they are Republicans, every single one.
MP.D your party needs new ideas. When Nancy Pelosi calls working class tax cuts, and child tax credits crumbs that is out of touch. Your party is what it is? Trump and Russia, no dice. Trump is unstable strike two, Trump is racist…rural America voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 in higher than normal numbers. You can not just play R&B concerts 10 days before the next election and hope African Americans vote.
I guess things are shaping up nicely regarding crime, education and unemployment in Rep Bowen’s district since he has time to send a PR on what the President is saying. Keep up the good work!!!
If I were being unkind, I might suggest that Troll has a reading or thought disorder. In my comment on the Great Migration, I use the term “the unwelcoming arms” of places like Milwaukee. I didn’t realize that I needed to mention specifics, but if you want some, here they are: Milwaukee had/has a rigid system of school and housing segregation; job discrimination was rampant; the city’s long-time police chief Harold Breier could accurately be described as a racist, anti-Semitic fascist; etc. And, unlike the Deep South, white Milwaukee convinced itself that it had created a racial paradise, as they said, “the colored are treated good here,” thereby making any discussion of real problems virtually impossible, since the burden for everything that was wrong rested with black people.
From Reconstruction until the 1960s, the Democratic Party in the South was the home of some of the most virulent racism in the world, part of an unholy alliance between southern racists and northern liberals. That all changed with the Civil and Voting Rights Acts that ended legal segregation in this country. It changed very abruptly, and the Republican Parry quickly became the new home of racists and those willing to stoke racial resentment, north and south. It is possible that, in just a year or two (1965-66), the Trolls of the world had discovered the magic of free markets and that government and taxes were evil. Possible, but extremely unlikely. Instead the rallying cry became the victimization of hard working white people, a theme that Donald Trump has taken out of the shadows and brought into the open, with the partial result that neo-Nazis and the Klan are now inside the Republican tent and cannot be ignored.
The generation of Milwaukee Democrats who voted for George Wallace in the 1964 primary has been succeeded by those Republicans in the suburbs, especially, as in the days of segregation, those who wrap themselves in religion to cloak their various hatreds.
And, the goal now is not preservation of bigotry, but its restoration, “MAGA,” of which Troll is just one of many voices; all of which have daily access to alternate facts on Donald Trump’s Semi-official Fox News and other far right outlets; Each of them willing to reinforce Troll’s and GPS’s racial innocence, the mental stability of Donald Trump, the notion that the Russia-Trump story is a hoax, and the belief that the tax cuts just written into law are for the “little people.” As the pundit once said, people don’t believe lies because they have to, but because they want to. And, like George Constanza, Troll believes they can’t be lies because he believes them.