...but what makes the lying from the highest office in the land so insidious is that it's been presidential leadership which has mostly defined the attitudes of the nation; not merely in reflecting those, but in actually shaping attitudes and actions all the majority of Americans, if not opinions.
I was watching a PBS special about school desegregation, and there was a scene where three women who had been the first in their state/town to integrate a public school went back and walked up the hill where there had been a gauntlet of troopers, reporters, and folks yelling epithets and slurs as they walked up to the school back in those awful days.
The most revealing thing I found was in their recollection of how they had eventually succeeded in establishing themselves at the school - the first school year after integration found these 20 or so black kids with this formerly all-white school all to themselves because the majority of the white kids had been pulled out by their parents.
In fact, most of the white parents and legislators who had been invested in segregated public education in their southern state were willing to just shut the entire system down to avoid integrating and sending their children to school with black kids.
Turns out, the following year, most of the white kids were allowed by their parents and community establishment to come back to the school(s) in overwhelming numbers and the process of integration that we take for granted today was allowed to proceed.
Over time, barriers which seemed so impenetrable in the were cast aside as the truths of integration outstripped all of the hype and conjecture about racial relationships which had so gripped our communities for decades.
Now, with an authoritarian bent on dividing Americans who is both stochastically encouraging racism as he dismantles protections that have buttressed the defense of minorities in America since the 60's (the very start of my own brown-skinned life in Brooklyn), we can see the disintegration of the attitudes of Americans toward people of color based on the lies you observe becoming commonplace and normalized in society, and the importance of leaders who not only tell the truth, but respect and celebrate ALL people in this nation, to the denigration of none except those who would actually harm us.
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