For the first time, Democrat candidates for president won’t be allowed to avoid bowing at the altar of racial grievance to win the 2020 nomination.
The now omnipresent racial grievance crowd that seeks acknowledgment of their perceived victimhood may insist that neither frontrunner Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders are “woke” enough to satisfy their ideological demands.
Racial grievance means that white people are inherently guilty as a race and must atone for their sin of whiteness by redressing past wrongs, up to and including reparations for slavery, which are now on the table in the Democrat Party-controlled House of Representatives.
Already the smell of blood is in the water. For example, the politically-correct ethnic cleansing that toppled Kate Smith in April continues the Cultural Marxist assault on our societal well-being.
Joe Biden’s lack of racial sensitivity was that he was the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee that did not show sufficient deference to accuser Anita Hill in the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court nomination hearings in 1991. Before the cow bell was hung on Brett Kavanaugh last year for being a conservative, Justice Thomas suffered the same “he said-she said,” harangue from the specious Hill. What did Biden do wrong for which he has now been called upon to apologize to Hill for by at least two other Democrats in the presidential race? Biden allowed tough questions to Hill by other members of the Senate panel.
To show allegiance to racial grievance culture, Joe Biden has hired a black woman as a political advisor who famously said after Hilary Clinton’s defeat in 2016, “we don’t need any white people running our party at this time.” This is an amazing statement, but now completely acceptable and in the mainstream of the Democratic Party. Imagine if a white person said something in reverse about black people.
In another recent public setting discussing black women in American society, Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders was asked what specifically he would do for black women if he were elected president. When Sanders reminded people that he had walked with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights era, people in the audience rolled their eyes and uttered audible groans. Racial compromise and harmony be damned. The conference participants wanted their victimization acknowledged and validated by Sanders, and to have him pander to it as well.
And it is not just in politics. The recent perp-walking through history of Kate Smith, American singer and national hero, represents the new normal of the Left’s politics of personal destruction. First they came for the Confederate monuments, and then they attacked Justice Kavanaugh. Now, baseball’s New York Yankees and hockey’s Philadelphia Flyers are both re-litigating history so that the past won’t upset the uncomfortable present.
According to Wikipedia, Smith "stirred patriotic fervor" during World War II and contributed to selling more than $600 million (equivalent of $10.2 billion in 2018) of war bonds during a series of marathon broadcasts. No other show-business star eclipsed her as a revenue raiser to finance the United States' war effort.
Earlier in April, as the baseball season began and without much notice, the Yankees pulled Kate Smith’s famous rendition of God Bless America from the Seventh Inning Stretch because Smith had sung a song in 1931, NEARLY 90 YEARS AGO, about slavery that used a pejorative to describe black people. Never mind that black singer Paul Robeson sang the same song as Kate Smith in the 1930s, and that the song in question was actually an indictment of slavery. Playing a recording of Kate Smith singing God Bless America is now considered “insensitive” by the Yankees.
Support Canada Free Press
The fact that the Yankees are the arbiter of racial sensitivities is indeed ironic considering that in 1931, in the same year that Kate Smith sang, “That’s Why Darkies Were Born,” the Yankees had NO BLACK PLAYERS, and would not integrate their team until 1955, a good eight years after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball with the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Even crazier than the Yankees, the Philadelphia Flyers on Sunday, April 21, removed THEIR statue of Kate Smith outside Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Arena where they play their hockey home games. Before removing the statue, the team placed a hideous black bag over Kate Smith, so she would no longer offend, who knows whom. Why are the Flyers even nuttier than the Yankees? Kate Smith is intricately linked to the Flyers’ history having played her God Bless America for good luck since the 1970s. She even sang the song live before Flyers’ games in the old Spectrum arena in the 1970s. In nearly 50 years of Kate Smith either singing God Bless America or playing her resounding rendition, the Flyers have an astounding 101-31-5 record in key games, a sparkling benchmark of success. Conclusion: The Flyers are Kate Smith, like it or not.
We can’t have a functioning society based on grievances for past wrongs. Kate Smith deserves to be judged on her full body of work, as a performer and patriot, rather than for one song. The same goes for U.S. military legend General Robert E. Lee, even though he was a slaveholder. Also deserving the same standard is Kavanaugh, who was persecuted in his confirmation hearings for alleged actions when he was a teen-ager, rather than lauded for his phenomenal legal career.
Identity politics are designed to divide and conquer. We need to leave history to the historians with proper explanations going forward. The fact is that anybody who believes in traditional American values is a target of retribution. We can trace what Thomas and Kavanaugh experienced back to Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, his 1971 guidebook on the politics of personal destruction.
This whitewashing of history and white people in general will continue unless we learn from and accept the past rather than demolish it. The Yankees connection to Kate Smith was tangential. The Flyers, however, could have erected a sign next to Kate Smith’s statue explaining the history, and how the standards of 1931, are not those they embrace today. That would be true service for a team in the “City of Brotherly Love.” Whether it’s sports or politics, racial grievance solves nothing.
Daniel Wiseman is an independent political commentator, who focuses on national and international affairs. He spent nine years as a professional journalist in Wyoming before working in fund-raising, non-profit management, and is now working in New York City. Wiseman focuses his writing on how to bring the United States back to its Constitutional moorings. He writes exclusively for Canada Free Press.
For the first time, Democrat candidates for president won’t be allowed to avoid bowing at the altar of racial grievance to win the 2020 nomination.
The now omnipresent racial grievance crowd that seeks acknowledgment of their perceived victimhood may insist that neither frontrunner Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders are “woke” enough to satisfy their ideological demands. 
