Justin Ward
2 min readDec 15, 2019

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I’m sure the mass-murderer who slaughtered nine black churchgoers to incite a race war just watches Tucker Carlson every night to hear his opinions on the capital gains tax…

I don’t understand this super-high threshold where it’s only racism if someone with swastika tattoos is screaming the n-word while zieg heiling.

There are lots of other ways to do racism.

Have you really never heard this famous quote by Republican strategist Lee Atwater?

You start out in 1954 by saying, “N*gg*r, n*gg*r, n*gg*r.” By 1968 you can’t say “n*gg*r” — that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N*gg*r, n*gg*r.”

Do you think Ronald Reagan was a racist? Or let me rephrase that, did you think Ronald Reagan was a racist before that tape came out where he was comparing African ambassadors to apes? Did you think when he was talking about “welfare queens” he wasn’t trying to conjure up a particular image in the public imagination.

Do you not think that when Rush Limbaugh says “This is Obama’s America, where white kids get beat up while black kids cheer them on,” he was trying to race bait and equate the very existence of a black president with the opening stages of a race war?

Are you really that dense or just totally blinded by your own ideology that you can’t see what’s painfully obvious?

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Justin Ward
Justin Ward

Written by Justin Ward

Journalist and activist. Founder and co-chair of DivestSPD. Bylines at SPLC, The Baffler, GEN, USA Today. Follow on Twitter: @justwardoctrine, @DivestSPD

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