Waters gives her take on racism’s role in society.
I am replying to last week’s letter, which referenced my earlier letter regarding Congressman Tom MacArthur’s failure to call out President Trump on his Charlottesville comments. The letter proposes that the president was correct when he said that both sides were to blame.
White nationalists, specifically a group called Unity & Security for America, organized the torch-bearing, Nazi-slogan-chanting march on Friday night. They marched again on Saturday and were met with counter protesters. Yes, there was a Workers World Party (communists) banner displayed. No, the Workers Party members did not kill anyone that day or send them “to die in forced labor camps,” but a white nationalist did drive a car into a dispersing crowd and killed a counter protester. The discourse on the evils of Communism is classic “Whataboutism.” “Whataboutism” is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as, “The technique or practice of responding to an accusation or difficult question by making a counter-accusation or raising a different issue.” Whataboutism was and is a common Russian propaganda technique that has been adopted by many current US politicians too.
Many Southerners may see the Civil War as a heroic rebellion against an “evil foreign power,” but perception is not fact. The facts are that southern farmers were very happy in their arrangement with the industrial northern states. Cotton was king and with unpaid slave labor, made southern planters as wealthy or wealthier than the northerners. To ignore the major role of slavery, and the tremendous wealth it provided in the birth of the Confederacy is unrealistic. And the Union’s war tactics? Another example of whataboutism.
I do agree that “racism doesn’t explain everything that happens.” But racism is part of a lot of things that happen and needs to be clearly and loudly denounced, especially by Congressman Tom MacArthur and our President.
