Leftists are real one-trick ponies. Everything they disagree with is "racist". The accusation of racism is about the only argument they've got most of the time so I guess they have to keep grinding away with it, no matter how implausible the accusation is.
"In the context of American politics, socialism has seldom been about the economy or state power alone, despite its political-economic roots. Instead, it has been a slur, synonymous with the charge of communism, but with meaning extending beyond this term as well.
Black leaders in particular have faced this accusation. In 1964, amid the momentous occasion of congressional approval for the Civil Rights Act, Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina declared its passage the result of "Negro agitators, spurred on by Communist enticements to promote racial strife."
Martin Luther King Jr. was not an exception to this allegation, but a direct target. Indeed, he faced immediate pressure to distance himself from close aide, intellectual mentor, and key organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, Bayard Rustin, who once had ties with the Communist Party.
When Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, among other Southern politicians, voiced criticism of Martin Luther King Jr. and other activists, they did so not on racist grounds, but on anticommunist grounds – a more publicly acceptable stance given the cold war climate of the time. But in hindsight we can easily connect the dots, if there were any doubts about their shared sense of white racial entitlement.
Understanding this history also informs the present. The passion surrounding the expression "socialism" has less to do with the actual meaning of the word, than its associations with foreignness, anti-Americanism, and racial difference. If its reemergence and use sound antiquated and anachronistic, the motivations for its revival become clearer when placed in a context of latent white anxiety toward a black president.
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Posted by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).
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