Thursday on MSNBC’s “Deadline,” civil rights activist Maya Wiley said that democracy required that we teach the uncomfortable truth that this country is “built on racism.”
Anchor Nicolle Wallace said, “Maya, I want to read you more about this Virginia governor’s race from The New York Times, ‘A new online ad released by Glenn Youngkin features a mother pushed to have Toni Morrison’s Beloved banned from her son’s curriculum eight years ago. To Democrats, the Youngkin ad was both a thrown to the days of book banning and coded insult to one much America’s most celebrated black authors after months of frantic Republican alarms in Virginia and nationwide about how schoolchildren are being educated about racism.'”
Wiley said, “Governance isn’t just the sense of running the machinery of government. It’s about recognizing that democracy requires us to be uncomfortable. One of the uncomfortable truths of this country is it is built on racism. It is built on genocide against native peoples, it is built on frankly a long history of denigrating women of all races, and all those things are not about trying to tell people to feel badly about themselves. It’s about calling our attention to what’s been broken, what remains broken, and what, frankly, we have to fix for all of us.”
She added, “In Virginia, what we’re seeing is a Republican Party that has decided it’s going to try to drive more fear in the hearts of white suburbanites.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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