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ucrdem

(15,703 posts)
Sat Jun 20, 2015, 12:08 PM Jun 2015

President Obama Tells Mayors Racism is a ‘Blight’ on Nation

(BOG)

President Obama speaks at the U.S. Conference of Mayors in San Francisco Friday.

KQED - JUNE 19, 2015

President Obama told hundreds of mayors in San Francisco Friday that this week’s massacre at a historic African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina, shows that racism still haunts the United States.

“The apparent motivations of the shooter reminds us that racism remains a blight we have to combat together,” Obama said during a keynote speech to the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

“We have made great progress,” the president said. “But we have to be vigilant because it still lingers — and when it is poisoning the minds of young people, it betrays our ideals and tears our democracy apart.”

The president also used the speech to insist he has not given up on federal gun control reforms, even after being rebuffed by Congress in the wake of the December 2014 slaughter of 20 first-graders and six adults at a school in Newtown, Connecticut.

“If Congress had passed some common-sense gun safety reforms after Newtown — after a group of children had been gunned down in their own classroom — reforms that 90 percent of the American people supported — we wouldn’t have prevented every act of violence or even most. We don’t know it would have prevented what happened in Charleston, no reform can guarantee the elimination of violence,” Obama said. “But we might still have some Americans with us. We might have stopped one shooter, some families might still be whole, y’all might have to attend fewer funerals.”



http://ww2.kqed.org/news/2015/06/19-obama-speaks-in-San-Francisco

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President Obama Tells Mayors Racism is a ‘Blight’ on Nation (Original Post) ucrdem Jun 2015 OP
Racism rolls on. yallerdawg Jun 2015 #1
I agree 110% ucrdem Jun 2015 #2
Sadly SCOTUS thinks it is over, ucrdem. sheshe2 Jun 2015 #4
+ infinity. sheshe2 Jun 2015 #3
KnR sheshe2 Jun 2015 #5

yallerdawg

(16,104 posts)
1. Racism rolls on.
Sat Jun 20, 2015, 01:33 PM
Jun 2015

We will not have equal opportunity until we have equal outcomes.

The outcomes tell us we have a whole lot of work to do. If we don't care about outcomes, and the ongoing serious disproportionate limitations and impositions on blacks and other minorities including women, we are not the democratic society we profess to be.

Overt ugly racist acts are tragic. Covert subtle institutional racism of America is our ongoing, unending national shame.

ucrdem

(15,703 posts)
2. I agree 110%
Sat Jun 20, 2015, 08:07 PM
Jun 2015

The idea that the US or any G-12 nation has "overcome racism" in any kind of satisfactory way is ridiculous and at this point, after dozens of filmed and widely publicized police shootings and beatings going back to Rodney King, it's really hard to claim naiveté as an excuse for thinking so.

sheshe2

(87,475 posts)
4. Sadly SCOTUS thinks it is over, ucrdem.
Sat Jun 20, 2015, 10:27 PM
Jun 2015
Last week the US supreme court reassessed the nation's history of voter exclusion and decided the contest was over. The court gutted a key element of the 1965 voting rights act, which demanded that areas with a history of racial discrimination at the polls get prior authorisation before changing their election or voting laws. "There is an old disease, and that disease is cured," argued Bert Rein, when opposing the act before the court earlier this year. "That problem is solved." Justice Roberts agreed, arguing that the provisions were based on "40-year-old" facts.

It's difficult to imagine a less propitious week for that argument. No sooner had the court pronounced racism dead than its skeleton emerged from cupboards galore and started doing the can-can on primetime.

The day before the ruling, the trial of George Zimmerman opened in Florida. Zimmerman, who is Latino, shot dead an unarmed black teenager, Trayvon Martin, claiming he looked "suspicious". He was neither charged nor arrested for several weeks, and then only after nationwide protests. Zimmerman, who had never met Martin, referred to the boy as a "punk" and complained to the police dispatcher: "They always get away." Zimmerman weighs 250lbs and had a 9mm handgun; Martin, 17, weighed 140lbs and had a packet of Skittles and a can of iced tea. Zimmerman claims he was acting in self-defence. "He shot him for the worst of all reasons," said state prosecutor John Guy in his opening statement. "Because he wanted to.''



http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/30/us-supreme-court-thinks-racism-dead
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