Day 2

How Badly Did They Want to Say the N-Word? RNC, Day 2

Edwin Rios

Long before racist birther Melania Trump made a plea for unity, the undercard of the RNC’s second night featured what can only be described as a parade of Good Ones. These were the good kinds of immigrants, the good kinds of Black and Brown folks, people living or at least aspiring to live clean, capitalist lives on the bright side of the American Dream. Donald Trump delivered a stunt pardon of a bank robber turned Christian prison reformer. He presided over an unspeakably cynical stunt naturalization ceremony. The message of all these various gimmicks was that “hard work and determination” plus chance opportunities plus the beneficence of beaming white saviors can shape and shift the lives of the lower orders for the better.

We don’t have to enumerate all the ways the administration has in fact worked to block the various pathways to success that speakers were touting all night. The actual problems facing Black and Brown people in America were entirely beside the point anyway. Tuesday night was aimed at the wobbly moderates in the GOP’s camp who would like the loud part made quiet again.

Some other highlights:

—Abby Johnson, a one-time Planned Parenthood clinic director turned anti-abortion activist, wrongly claiming that “almost 80 percent of Planned Parenthood abortion facilities are strategically located in minority neighborhoods”—as if that would be a bad thing for Black and Latino women who suffer higher rates of maternal mortality. The New York Times reported that, actually, only 4 percent of Planned Parenthood’s clinics are located in neighborhoods in which more than a third of people are Black.

This was the same Abby Johnson, by the way, who said recently it would be “smart” for cops to racially profile her biracial son.

—The Good Prosecutor, Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, peddling tired attacks about Democrats’ “all-out assault on Western civilization” and decrying the notion that one’s skin tone dictates one’s political leanings.

I think often about my ancestors who struggled for freedom, And as I think of those giants and their broad shoulders, I also think about Joe Biden, who says, “If you aren’t voting for me, you ain’t Black”; who argued that Republicans would put us “back in chains”; who says there is no “diversity” of thought in the Black community. Mr. Vice President, look at me. I am Black. We are not all the same, sir.

Cameron, the state’s first top Black prosecutor, is in a good position to know that there are some aspects of the American experience that are shared across the Black population. He’s the guy overseeing the investigation into the cops who killed Breonna Taylor.