Liberals Can Have All White Rallies Too! |
On the way back from D.C. after attending the Rally To Restore Sanity And/Or Fear one thing about the rally really stood out: it was all white people!
Okay okay maybe not all white because there were these fantastic ladies:
And yes it’s true that I was there (I’m black) and I was with my black friend and I saw some other blacks maybe lets say 12 total. There were also some Asian (South and East). Key word is some. I hate to say it but from my perspective and I’ve polled others, the vast majority of the crowd was white. It was not necessarily all young though I did see a large number of people over 60 which did surprise me.
There are a number of reasons why this is. First of all, this is not exactly the rally that draws minorities out in droves. Someone’s civil rights being infringed upon? Let’s march! A rally for jobs and justice, like the One Nation Working Together rally in D.C. (which I also attended) on October 2nd organized by civil rights groups and union organizations? We’re there! Two white liberal comedians who snark up my teevee every night? We may not be showing up in the bus loads. Did I also mention that it was Howard University’s homecoming weekend? Yeah that too.
It occurred to me when I got home from the rally that liberals can have their all white rallies too and perhaps it might be important for us to push back against the framing that this rally was a direct competitor to the Glenn Beck rally of all white tea partiers earlier this year. Perhaps we should combine this weekend’s rally with the One Nation rally as a reflection of the diversity on the left. I’m not saying that the ideas of those in attendance are anything like the tea party and that distinction is extremely important. But the reality is that yesterday as a black liberal woman I was not surrounded by diversity in color even if it was diverse in thought processes.
Perhaps liberals need to stop pointing out that the Tea Party rallies are all white because we’ve now shown that we can have our mostly white rallies too. Then again as someone pointed out to me on twitter, the crowd at yesterday’s rally represented Jon Stewart’s demographic and it might be a positive thing to see 215,000 white people who don’t think Obama is the secret Muslim Hitler Anti-Christ born in Kenya.
The Rally to Restore Sanity And/Or Fear was mostly white but the message was a positive one and it should be placed in its proper context and not directly compared to the Beck/Palin rally. This is a framing we should reject.
Watch below as Jon Stewart gets serious at the end of the rally and delivers passionate remarks that I think need to be heard by everyone:
Oh and did we mention you should vote? VOTE. VOTE. VOTE. Let Elon explain…
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