Michael Eric Dyson: McConnell Is Proof America’s ‘Real Religion’ Is ‘Whiteness’

Vanderbilt University professor Michael Eric Dyson said Thursday on MSNBC’s “The ReidOut” that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was proof that America’s “real religion” is “whiteness.”

Anchor Joy Reid said, “In your new book you talk about reckoning with race in America. I think about Mitch McConnell’s centrality in the story of race in just the last 10 years. His blanket opposition and filibustering, using that good, old-fashioned Southern technique. This is a man originally from Alabama who used the filibuster prodigiously against President Obama, said, ‘You can’t even put anybody on the federal court. You don’t have the right. You’re not a real president.’ And then to try are tout his deputy becoming attorney general of Kentucky and then for that black man to lie about the grand jury proceedings so he could let white offices off for killing Breonna Taylor. I feel like Mitch McConnell is just as center to the sort of diminution of Black life that we’ve seen over the last 10 years as Trump,”

Dyson said, “There is no question about that. I talk about in the book fast terror and slow terror. Fast terror is when bombs drop and they lynch black people, when they hurt us very explicitly, by the police, who hurt and harm and kill us. Slow terror is kicking kids out of school, denying them the opportunity to be fed both mentally and physically.”

“If Donald Trump is a fast terrorist, is a fast racist, then Mitch McConnell is taking a slower train toward racial revulsion,” Dyson continued. “He is enacting some of the worst practices we have seen in the history of this nation in regard to a senator blocking the coming to fruition of legislation that could relieve the hurt and suffering of Black people. And to proudly stand up and say that he wanted to make Obama a one-term president — this shows us that the real religion in America is whiteness. The real politics in Mitch McConnell’s orbit are whiteness, the worship of whiteness at the altar of whiteness, genuflecting before the god of whiteness. Therefore Donald Trump is a the product of a womb that has generated this disfigured person in terms of politics but Mitch McConnell is part of the womb. Mitch McConnell he gives life and breath to the very denunciation of blackness that Trump has been so vehemently denounced for.”

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