The Guardian: American democracy is in danger and this is what will destroy it!
American academic and civil rights advocate, Kimberlé Crenshaw said that racism has been a fundamental flaw in American democracy since its inception.
According to Crenshaw, this racism is rooted in land theft, exploitation of workers, and control over the reproductive autonomy of black women, and she pointed out that these are the facts that the extremists of Donald Trump’s political movement “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) want to hide.
In the Guardian newspaper, Crenshaw pointed out, in her report for the, that the current war against the culture of social consciousness (or wokeness the term meaning being politically alert to injustice and discrimination) is in fact an attack on the history of black Americans and racial justice in the United States, and its consequences affect everyone who cares about racial justice and democracy.
According to Crenshaw, the war against social consciousness isn’t just a war against social theories that criticize anti-racist policies, but against all the advances made by the civil rights movement in racial justice.
Crenshaw highlights the failure of mainstream media to address the racist aspects of Trump’s policies, citing as an example the storming of the US Capitol by Trump supporters on January 6, 2021, where the Confederate flag, a symbol of hatred and racism, was raised.
Guardian stressed that the media’s reluctance to confront MAGA’s relationship with racist extremist groups obscures from the public the link between racism and the erosion of American democracy.
Crenshaw points out that Trump’s false claims of widespread voting irregularities in the previous presidential election targeted cities with high population densities of black and brown Americans, such as Philadelphia and Detroit, and the media’s ignoring of this racist aspect of the claims of voting fraud that Trump repeats contributes to distorting the racist reality of his rhetoric.
Guardian continued, that the struggle against anti-racism and anti-diversity policies, which intensified after the George Floyd protests, reflects a broad effort to undermine racial justice and democracy, and Crenshaw stresses that saving democracy requires confronting these racist attacks.
Crenshaw concludes that Americans must struggle to preserve their history, confront current political realities consciously, and defend democratic values against ongoing efforts to suppress racial justice.
