Month: July 2018

No matter who wins the U.S. Senate race in Montana come November — State Auditor Matt Rosendale or incumbent Democrat Jon Tester — Big Sky Country will send to Washington someone with a flattop. It’s still that kind of place.

And to ensure that old-fashioned haircut is a Republican one, the president of the United States flew the 2,074 long miles back in time to the arena in Great Falls last night for one of his trademark campaign rallies.

“Thank you, Montana. What a place. What a place! It’s great to be here tonight with thousands of proud, hard-working American patriots.”

Now honestly, every president is delighted to be wherever he is speaking. And he knows the audience is all patriots, otherwise they wouldn’t be so deliriously happy to hear him.

Trump should be happy to be in Montana, however briefly. He won the state by 20 points in 2016. Not as good as George W. Bush’s 2000 victory margin of 25 points. But still a warning sign to music-teacher-turned=farmer-turned-pol Tester, who wants a third term.

It’s fascinating to watch the ultra-rich New Yorker work his thing on a vast blue-collar place like Montana, which is larger than two Floridas with five percent of the state’s current population.

You can watch the entire rally here courtesy of C-SPAN’s Video Archives. The first speaker is elder son Donald Trump Jr., who looks mighty comfortable on a political stage. The president starts speaking just before the 20-minute mark.

Trump sounded many familiar themes, including the strong economy, the need for real borders, the dishonest media and obstructionist Democrats. He’s added Maxine Waters to the list with those other elite coastals Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. And he mocked Elizabeth Warren again for her claim to Native American heritage.

“You deserve a senator,” the president said to loud cheers, “who doesn’t just talk like he’s from Montana. You deserve a senator who actually votes like he’s from Montana.”

He criticized Tester for voting against the Republican tax cut bill, repealing Obamacare and opposing Trump’s travel ban on some people from predominantly Muslim countries, recently upheld by the Supreme Court.

Tester’s strategy is a familiar one for Montana Dems–work liberal in D.C. then run conservative every six years back home. Think six-termer Max Baucus. Trump Jr. made fun of Tester for just now acquiring a hunting license after 15 years.

Last week in a North Dakota rally Trump criticized Senate Democrat incumbent Heidi Heitkamp for much the same. Like Tester, she’s one of 10 Democrats running in states that Trump captured in 2016. And Trump is campaigning hard there to maintain or possibly enlarge the slim GOP majority.

But the Montana presidential visit (rare for a place that has but three electoral votes) was also clearly personal for Trump. He vowed in April Tester would “have a big price to pay” for releasing unsubstantiated allegations that torpedoed Trump’s nomination of Dr. Ronny Jackson to head the Veterans Administration.

Trump charged:

Tester said things about him that were horrible and they weren’t true. And that’s probably why I’m here. Because I won Montana by so many points, I don’t have to come here.

Trump also announced that from now on his rallies, expected to go on all summer and into the fall, will have giant TV screens outside the venue for the “thousands and thousands” of people who can’t get in.

Don’t take the brown acid.

You’re white. You’re educated and open-minded. You’re a good person! And you’re anything but a racist. Right?

You don’t care if someone is pink, purple or polka-dotted. In fact, you were raised to not even see color.

And you need to stop, Robin DiAngelo says. Stop saying things like that, for they are completely insulting. Human beings aren’t purple or polka-dotted, and we should see color.

Doing so is one of the first steps white people can take toward improving race relations, according to DiAngelo, a white, Seattle-based speaker and trainer who focuses on racial justice, and whose third book, “White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism,” was released June 26.

I sought DiAngelo out — and read her new book — because I have had my own struggles with racism.

A year ago, I wrote a column about Columbia City that implied the historically black community only hit the map when a Pagliacci Pizza and Rudy’s Barber Shop moved in. I apologized, and have made it my mission to understand that whiteness is something I wear every day. It influences how I interact with the world.

I learned from DiAngelo’s book that my biases began when I was born white. From there, I was raised with a privilege that I never earned, but that came from biological fate, and generations of oppression and segregation — some forced, and some inherent. It is my responsibility to deconstruct those biases.

I don’t even think about my race, DiAngelo said, while people of color are reminded of it every day, be it with slights, discrimination or abuse. They pay for it with stress, health problems and even early death. (The death rate for African Americans was generally higher than whites for heart diseases, stroke, cancer, asthma and diabetes, according to the Centers for Disease Control.) All this while being asked to explain to white people what they can do to make things better.

And if they try to explain, well, most times well-meaning white people challenge them with talk of polka dots. They get defensive, angry, afraid or go silent — reinforcing the “white equilibrium,” which gets us nowhere.

That’s white fragility.

“Most white people cannot answer the question, ‘What does it mean to be white?’ with any depth or complexity,” DiAngelo said. “(White people) are not raised to see ourselves in racial terms, and bring that inability to answer that question to the table with us.

“And people of color know that (white people) can’t answer that question, that we have no awareness of ourselves as racial beings,” she continued. “That’s part of what they have to navigate with us. If I have no idea how my race shapes me, I am probably not going to be open to any feedback about how your race shapes you. And so we end up minimizing and invalidating them.”

So ask yourself, DiAngelo says: When was the last time you had a person of color at your dinner table? When did you risk “ruining dinner” by challenging a relative who made a racist comment, when the comment itself should do that on its own? And are you aware of the ways in which your whiteness has made your life so easy that the color of your skin barely crosses your mind?

Keep reading…