Reprinted from hartmannreport.com
" The next two or three election cycles will determine our nation's fate: a more widespread democracy or the Russian-style fascism promoted by Trump and DeSantis. Stay tuned and stay woke!
Why are Republicans proudly waging a "War on Woke"? First, some background.
In 1938, Lead Belly sang a song about the "Scottsboro Boys," a group of young Black men and boys who were falsely charged with rape and sentenced to the death penalty in Alabama in 1931. In the song, he talks about meeting the Scottsboro defendants, saying:
"I made this little song about down there. So I advise everybody, be a little careful when they go along through there -- best stay woke, keep your eyes open."
The phrase had a major revival in the Black community, as NBC News notes, in 2014 after Michael Brown was murdered by Ferguson, Missouri white police officer Darren Wilson. "Stay woke" meant "keep an eye out for white cops who want to kill you" and to stay alert to and aware of other aspects of structural racism in American society.
During the Trump administration, white supremacists began trashing the use of the word, eventually including within its scope the queer community as well as Black people. Today, when Republicans use the word as an epithet, they're specifically referring to these minorities and people who defend their right to live safely and unmolested by bigots and racists.
Which brings us to the GOP "War on Woke."
When I was growing up as a lower-middle-class white kid in the 1950s, both Black and queer people were either invisible, "bad guys" on TV and in movies, or essentially minstrels.
There was Liberace, Flip Wilson, and Sammy Davis Jr., but if you were white and watched American TV, listened to American radio, or read American newspapers you'd be forgiven if you didn't even know gay, lesbian, or trans people existed and thought that Black people were content to live in "ghettos" where they'd periodically and for no discernible reason begin burning down their own neighborhoods.
Back then, much of the inability of non-white, non-cis minorities to break into the media was the result of explicit and lawful segregation and discrimination, although demographics were also at work. The country was overwhelmingly white, and that was the result of law and immigration policy.
The naturalization act of 1790 only allowed "white people" who had lived in this country two years to qualify for citizenship. In 1924 we began to allow immigration of non-whites as a result of the Johnson-Reed Act (which also created the Border Patrol), but at a rate that couldn't exceed 2% of their ethnic population in this country as of the 1890 census.
It wasn't until 1965, with a heavy push from Democratic President Lyndon Johnson, that Congress officially changed the law to make our immigration policy colorblind.
That law, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, is one that many Republicans and virtually the entire white supremacist movement in this country assert must be reversed, because it's allowed people of color into America as immigrants.
The last thing Trump and his Bois want is racial or religious harmony in America. They thrive on hate and division, which the morbidly rich billionaires and big corporations behind them also appreciate because it takes the focus off issues of economic justice and the destruction of the middle class.
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