Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and believer that everyone who disagrees with him is a racist Wesley Lowery took his American Whitelash book tour to MSNBC’s Alex Wagner Tonight on Tuesday to promote the idea that the founding of the country set up a “racialized caste system.”
Wagner wondered how the country could fight this alleged whitelash, “I just wonder, I mean, the degree to which we have not only normalized white rage and white violence, but institutionalized it as well.”
She also saw racist origins in policing and the founding, “If you look at the origins of police forces, some of those sprang from slave patrols, like, when you have a country that is founded, that has institutionalized racism, how do you get to a more perfect union when you can begin to see not just the existence of white nationalism, white rage, white racism, but begin to combat it. I mean, how do you unwind that?”
Lowery responded by hyping that, “I write in the book when we referenced it a little bit that so much of our American history has been a tug of war between diametrically opposed forces, right?”
Also putting the founding on the side of “forces of white supremacy,” Lowery continued, “the literal foundation of our government being a racialized caste system, where white people are fully human, other people were not, right?”
Naturally, Lowery never explained how federalism or separation of powers constitutes “a racialized caste system,” especially in present day after the Civil War Amendments and Civil Rights Movement. Instead, he claimed:
And on the other side, you have these anti-racist forces who are pulling and pushing. I think one of our difficulties is that we tend to overestimate, and white Americans, polling shows, tend to overestimate or overinflate what they believe that progress towards that has been. While, other Americans, those likely to be victimized by these systems, suggest that far less progress has been made than their colleagues.
Oppose Lowery and his progressive vision for the country and you are just a reactionary:
In this moment, when we see those massive demographic changes, the rise of a black presidency, a new civil rights movement, cultural changes, what we see our white Americans who the majority of whom, according to the polling, by the end of the Obama years, believe they themselves face racial discrimination in the United States of America, right? That white Americans now believe in essence that they are in oppressed racialized groups and I think that that speaks to a lot of the reactionary politics that we see.
The rest of the interview would feature Lowery making similar claims that he made on CBS earlier in the day on Republicans inspiring violence and accusing Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis of being racists.
This segment was sponsored by Priceline.
Here is a transcript for the June 27 show:
MSNBC Alex Wagner Tonight
6/27/2023
9:36 PM ET
ALEX WAGNER: I just wonder, I mean, the degree to which we have not only normalized white rage and white violence, but institutionalized it as well. Right? If you look at the origins of police forces, some of those sprang from slave patrols, like, when you have a country that is founded, that has institutionalized racism, how do you get to a more perfect union when you can begin to see not just the existence of white nationalism, white rage, white racism, but begin to combat it. I mean, how do you unwind that?
WESLEY LOWERY: Well, and I think that, you know, I think that’s one of the official questions. I write in the book when we referenced it a little bit that so much of our American history has been a tug of war between diametrically opposed forces, right?
Forces of white supremacy, and I don't mean that colloquially, I mean the literal foundation of our government being a racialized caste system, where white people are fully human, other people were not, right?
And on the other side, you have these anti-racist forces who are pulling and pushing. I think one of our difficulties is that we tend to overestimate, and white Americans, polling shows, tend to overestimate or overinflate what they believe that progress towards that has been. While, other Americans, those likely to be victimized by these systems, suggest that far less progress has been made than their colleagues.
In this moment, when we see those massive demographic changes, the rise of a black presidency, a new civil rights movement, cultural changes, what we see our white Americans who the majority of whom, according to the polling, by the end of the Obama years, believe they themselves face racial discrimination in the United States of America, right? That white Americans now believe in essence that they are in oppressed racialized groups and I think that that speaks to a lot of the reactionary politics that we see.
