RUSH MEETS WITH BREAKFAST CLUB; SEEMS TO PROVE ‘DIALOGUE A USELESS EXERCISE
Rush Limbaugh sat down Sunday with “The Breakfast Club’…a popular syndicated radio show featuring three hosts ‘of color’…Charlamagne tha God, Angela Yee, and D J Envy.
Rush’s purpose was apparently to “dialogue” with the hosts regarding the George Floyd tragedy and to get the ‘Black perspective’ on this incident and the larger signifance it has for racial tensions in America.
From my perspective, the show was a disaster, ‘solving’ nothing, only emphasizing the hosts’ rather strange, and very rigid, view of the nation’s race relations.
To get quickly to the main point of the discussion as framed by the black host, Charlamagne, the only solution he seemed to offer to eliminate today’s racial tension in America is “to dismantle the mechanism of white supremacy” in America.
Charlamagne kept coming back to the theme of “white supremacy”, the “white power structure”; “dismantle” only solution!
I thought that, rather disappointingly, Rush did not force Charlamagne to spell out what he means by “dismantling the ‘mechanism’ of white supremacy” on which the Breakfast Club host believes this nation was founded and which is built exclusively for the white population to the exclusion of African-Americans…to their aspirations and their ultimate personal successes.
He would repeatedly go back to all the slights, wrongs, the persecutions he has suffered, as he would claim every black person has suffered and/or is vulnerable to.
(One interesting exchange had to do with the proposition, “what if George Floyd had been white and the same thing happened to him”. Rush suggested, the nation probably would have heard or known little of it. It was unclear what Charlamagne contended. Had that been the case , the policeman would not have been charged immediately? would have been dealt with harshly …? Bottom line, the offending policeman would have been dealt with far differently than as in the Floyd case.)
Again, what is the “mechanism” that requires “dismantling”?!
Taken literally, the implications of Charlamagne’s proposal are very troubling. What part of the “mechanism” ensures that the country only exists for the white population?
In C’s mind, every bad thing, or misfortune, large or small, which befalls a black person in America is because of the “White Power Structure”…the “mechanism”. And, for “Tha God”, the “dismantling” is the only solution.
There was no mention of the case of the Minneapolis policeman Mohamed Noor who shot and killed Justine Damond, after she had called police about an intruder. Noor was a Somali immigrant, Damond was a white woman. Noor was convicted of 3rd degree murder and will be sentenced later this week. (Unlike some of the other cases often cited by Charlamagne Ms. Damond was free of any suggestion of possible guilt for anything when she was gunned down.)
The conversation also did not reference the fact that we have had a black president. Our governmental structure from local to national is ‘open to all’ regardless of color; representation at the federal level and much of the local levels equate to population percentages.
One might even argue that in some parts of the country, black and minority participation at all levels of the government even exceeds representation in the overall population.
It also seems that there is no acknowledgement of the many accomplished, successful blacks in every phase of American life: business, the arts, entertainment, sports, media, etc
In listening to Charlamagne and his co-hosts it seemed clear to me that there is no ‘white supremacist’ or ‘white racist’ who is more rigid and unpersuadable of his position on such matters than Charlamagne himself. He brought up everything from Colin Kaepernick to other incidents involving police and black “victims’. Rush did not engage in any debate about the signifant differences in circumstances and actions on the part of police and “victims” as related to the Floyd case. (Michael Brown and Eric Garner come to mind…a protracted debate could relate to these cases but there would be nothing about them vis-a-vis the Floyd case persuading Charlamagne)
The usefulness of such “dialogue” is entirely absent when, to every problem or issue his response is “dismantle the white supremacy structure”.
dlh
“The Breakfast Club”…a black group, Charlamagne Tha God, Angela Yee and DJ Envy
“dismantle the ‘mechanism’ of white supremacy”; Rush never asked what that means!
