Dr. Julianne Malveaux, PhD

Sanders and Trump have positioned themselves as outsiders, but they want insiders to roll out the red carpet for them because they jumped into a game they haven’t mastered. They haven’t worked at establishing a foundation, but they are demanding the keys to the house.

How has meanness and racial resentment become the order of the day? Whatever happened to civility? What happened to the adage that if you have nothing kind to say, say nothing? What happened with being glad for a young person who has been admitted to college?

DeRay Mckesson says he “challenged the status quo of Baltimore’s politics”, and in many ways he did. He and his team took the pain of the Freddie Gray murder and turned it into the power of a galvanizing campaign.

I suppose we have to reconcile ourselves to progress at a snail’s pace, to symbolism, not substance. Still, the image our economic freedom fighter on the twenty-dollar bill will be inspirational for all of us, especially for the young people who don’t know all of the sordid details of our history of enslavement.

African American women earn a scant 63 cents to the average man’s dollar. A black woman would have to work until around August 1st to earn as much as a man did in the previous year! As alarming as that fact is, it is equally alarming that few mention Equal Pay Day in a racial context.

Crack caused rising crime rates. Crack came from profiteers who operated with the acquiescence, if not full cooperation, of the CIA. The extremely imperfect Clinton crime bill, good intentioned though Bill Clinton says it was, was also part of the continuum of government attacks on black people that used crime as a weapon.

Americans interested in seeing the major parties adopt more progressive stances in eliminating racial and class divisions, including poverty, should seek to support an independent front, or third party, that could at least influence the policies adopted by the Democrats and Republicans.

Sane, calm voices are missing in these presidential debates. We are also missing a future focus that takes the futility of increasing militarism into consideration.