Racism, White Supremacy and Obamacare Repeal

Here is an op-Ed in the Boston Globe by Michael P. Jeffries that links racism to THE agenda to repeal Obamacare.  Read the whole piece here. below I highlight a few important quotes. -Angela

OPINION | MICHAEL P. JEFFRIES

Obamacare repeal is based on racial resentment

“What white supremacy does, eventually, is normalize and spread the abuse, trauma, and destruction initially prescribed for targeted groups.” The damage prescribed by hateful ideologies is most severe within targeted groups, but it is never contained.

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The catastrophe of Trumpcare

It’s up to Republicans in the Senate to be the responsible members of their party and stop this legislation in its tracks.

•  The GOP’s punitive, cruel new health care bill
•  House passes repeal of health care overhaul

Financially secure people who criminalize and denigrate poor people for being born poor do not understand the threat that poverty poses to their own health. Those who hate and traumatize women and LGBT people do not understand how sick their idea of manhood is, and the threat that such toxic masculinity poses to their own health. Those who dehumanize people of color and people who worship different gods do not understand that ethnic cleansing is never complete. It requires the constant conjuring of new witches to hunt and more wood for the pyre, starting a fire that burns down the whole village.

Perhaps this legislative catastrophe will result in new understanding about the infectious capacity and true danger of racism, sexism, and the unmoored
pursuit of profit. Disease, gruesome suffering, and undignified death are
powerful forces that can redraw moral lines. But hoping for this moral
awakening — for the authors of this bill and their colleagues in the Senate to
suddenly realize the error of their ways — is a grave mistake. We cannot count on
those who literally toast to the death of their constituents to reverse course before
or after the legislation is finalized.

House Republicans refuse to be our caretakers, so we must care for each other. We must continue to call our representatives, continue to march, and prepare to vote for our lives in 2018.

Michael P. Jeffries is an associate professor of American studies at Wellesley College and author of three books, most recently, “Behind the Laughs: Community and Inequality in Comedy.”