"'Six months from now we will find out if the greatest con job in history will take a serial liar and open bigot to White House ...'" Pitt said.

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COMMENTS: 
*  Who ever said all white people are racist? Only those stupid enough to believe they have to blame their problems on someone else, instead of themselves. And the ones who are so easily manipulated into putting the blame on the powerless instead of on those who are really to blame. All Republicans defend their precious Wall Street and big banks, who were to blame for the recession, but who came out pretty rich. Instead they believe that the reason they can't get ahead is all about undocumented workers, not the greedy corporations who make sure nothing trickles down. And who is pushing this? A rich guy running for president. It's easy to blame the powerless, for what the powerful are really doing, because gullible people fall for it over and over.
*  So a Black kid is arrested for shop lifting means that, according to racists, all Black kids are thugs, but a White kid is arrested for the same crime and his race never comes in play, and he is more likely to get probation instead of jail. A successful Black person is told by white people that he is "a credit to his race", but when has anyone told a successful white man that "he is a credit to his race"? Have you ever felt that you had to watch your p's and q's, so you wouldn't embarrass your white people? Have you ever had a family member lynched, because they didn't "behave" like they didn't behave like a white person is suppose to behave?  By the way, I am white. According to Ancestry, about 66% British, around 18% Irish, about 8% Iberian peninsula (which is mostly hispanic, so I guess that would make me suspect to many of you).  And because I am white, other white people think it's okay to make their nasty racist comments and jokes around me. Or at least, they used think so. Now that I'm older, I'm much more likely to call them out about it. I used to be wimpy about it, but now any more.
*  Hope and change did not work because some people did not have hope for change! The GOP vowed not to help the POTUS with anything and then the same folks that voted for the POTUS in 2008 failed to come out and vote in the mid terms and the rest is history. This is why Republicans like the uneducated and are always cutting educations to keep the public dumb so that they don't know whats going on.
*  If you truly think corporations will bring back enough manufacturing jobs to America that will provide good paying jobs that will ease lots of the issues facing all people, you have ignored the globalization and the advances in automation and technology over the past 20+ years. This is not a republican/democrat, liberal/conservative, Obama/Clinton/Trump/Sanders issue; this is a Wall Street, free market corporate profit issue, and no president now or in the future will have the power/influence to fully restore those days. Either you get the education, training, and/or experience to get and hold a good paying job and avoid being lower class, or die making the same weak argument you're making today.
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Columnist Leonard Pitts tells Lawrence crowd it’s time for white Americans to ‘stop eating Jim Crow’
By Mackenzie Clark, May 21, 2016

Pulitzer-winning columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. addressed a crowd of about 350 people at the ACLU of Kansas’ first Free State Forum on Saturday, calling for a realization that people “don’t need common blood to reach common ground.”

Much of Pitts’ talk, held at Abe and Jake's Landing in downtown Lawrence, focused on issues of race in America, and how those concepts are playing a role in the presidential election. He quoted a lesser-known speech from Martin Luther King Jr. to explain the concept of “eating Jim Crow” — how white southern aristocracy during the Reconstruction era symbolically fed the white underclass.

“And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man,” Pitts said, quoting the speech King delivered at the conclusion of the Selma to Montgomery March on March 25, 1965.

Pitts said these words were a succinct summary of what he believes is the greatest con in American history: rather than provide poor white Americans a living wage, affordable housing, quality schools or health care, the money and political interest in the country has given them “whiteness.”

Historically, Pitts said, when the white underclass would complain about working conditions, the “money” would respond with threats to bring in black workers for less pay. Today, he said, the same principle is still being applied in order to prevent the underclasses from uniting into a powerful force for change, regardless of party lines and other differences, or even imagining the possibility of doing so.

“For a visceral example of this, you need look no further than the presidential election of 2016, in which Republican voters have fallen in love with a preening, narcissistic bully who doesn't even represent the things they’ve always said that they value,” Pitts said, referring to the presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, who Pitts said has “routinely insulted and alienated Muslims, African-Americans, Hispanics and women.”

“How is it that the party of religious conservatism is swooning for a man who cannot name a Bible verse?” he asked.

Pitts also discussed disproportionate rates of incarceration, traffic stops and police frisking of African-Americans, despite statistics showing that a majority of drug users and dealers in this country are white, and that whites are more likely to be found carrying contraband. He also named nine individual black men and boys who have recently died as a result of police use of force, including Tamir Rice, Eric Garner and Sean Bell.

Pitts concluded his talk emphasizing the importance of the election.

“Six months from now we will find out if the greatest con job in history will take a serial liar and open bigot to White House,” he said. “... We are long overdue for a moment of reckoning in this country, a moment of truth on race and class. It is long past time that we begin to call that con job for what it is and help people to see the intersection between their misery and the misery of those other people who don’t look like them on the other side of town, because Jim Crow is a pitiful excuse for a meal.”
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