The MHP Show

Last week Melissa Harris Perry had one of the rudest guests on her cable show I 've ever seen,
or ever recall seeing.
The woman was some sort of conservative who kept interrupting Ms. Perry each time this host opened her mouth. Her points weren't particularly well-taken, either, which was all the more
irritating. Most of them were simple-minded Republican talking points.
Finally, I suppose the woman uttered one too many of these nonsensical points when she trotted out
the " business leaders incur too much risk to hire in a regulatory climate in which they may have to pay more taxes". So dumb. If  business is saying that, it is for reasons having nothing to do with
believing what they're asserting. If business cares to meet demand, the demand is there when people have enough well-paying jobs to be big consumers,
able to afford to buy what is being offered for sale. Taxes as always, are somewhat built into prices. So that if workers earn a living wage, they will pay the cost of products unless said products become  sizably overpriced.
But the "risky" bit hasn't been adequately debunked by politics or news. So we have to keep hearing it, in case enough of us will believe it. Ms. Perry finally couldn't take this guest any longer, though;
she pounded on her table saying something like- "I am so sick of hearing about this risk!  Do you know the risks people take, the risks incurred being poor? Being poor is the riskiest thing in America!"
Ms. Perry takes criticism for not abandoning the poor in her speech and research. However, she does
exactly as she should do, because if the poor are not enfranchised, we in the middle class will soon
be added to their ranks. Besides, we're American. There should be no reason we would tolerate millions of citizens having the living standard of the poor in Saudi Arabia. We don't have princes
in our country.
Then, later, during the Democratic Convention, Ms. Perry was contributing at a table with her cable
network co-workers when the subject of voter suppression came up. As an astute historian, sometimes painfully aware of her own history, Ms. Perry mentioned The Redemption Period in American history, as one reason so many black citizens didn't even try to vote for years. Suddenly, there was a
bit of a hush at the table. Actually, the hush had come right before she gave the period name to the fear she referred to in black people. It seemed everyone at the table looked at her with terror until she
said she meant Redemption. Then people nodded they did know. And so anyone noticing at that moment would be aware Ms. Perry didn't need to go further.
Everyone agreed how hard won the right to vote has been for Black people in America.
Redemption, which Michelle Obama obliquely referred to during the last Democratic Primary after
her husband won Iowa. She was telling black people not to be afraid for them, but to support them.
Actually, when the candidate Obama won Iowa, black people's heads did snap around, and we did begin to support him, nearly at the moment we found out he'd beat even Mrs. Clinton.
What Melissa Harris Perry referred to however, was the period immediately after the Civil War.
People like Thomas Jefferson had everyone believing slaves really were dumb, couldn't read, couldn't
write, were afraid of their own shadows when a time for bravery presented itself, but happy and laughing and dancing and singing when a real danger might be at hand because they were not bright
enough to know the difference.
Not much of his propaganda had any resemblance to truth, and he knew it, even in 1787 during his
address to the Virginia legislature. However, his reputation made people at ease with his nonsense.
Even today, people forgive Jefferson many things, when there is no reason to forgive them, and I feel certain he was proud of all his lying about slaves anyway. By the time he owned slaves, they were
learning the lay of the land, and had accepted they would never get home. He couldn't have liked
the look of that. And see- they did have the good senses to fight in the Union Army less than a century later.
So believing all Jefferson had said and surely his cronies had backed him up, the average American was shocked and enraged when very soon after the Civil War, black citizens sent their own representatives to Congress.
The white elected officials were so incensed, they one day drug every elected black citizen down the
steps of the Capitol, and hung them right in the trees on the Potomac River. Thus the period of
Redemption began.So when the NAACP (National Association For The Advancement of Colored People) and Dr. Martin Luther King of the SCLC the (Southern Christian Leadership Council) and Representative John Lewis of SNCC the (Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee)  and the students of CORE the (Congress Of Racial Equality)  began to speak of voting rights, along with other civil rights, less than one hundred years after Redemption, so very, very, many in black communities thought they must all be mad, for more reasons than one.
Once. Ms. Perry was talking so quickly she had a moment as a guest of her colleague on the Up With
Chris Hayes show. Then, when all at the table realized she had said a harmless thing, she was able to
go on speaking. I was literally giggling, which is not always a thing a grown woman gets to do.
She is so smart, and so funny that she is immensely fun to watch. I really hope she lasts and lasts,
even though American history, at which she is expert, is not always itself so smart or so funny.
At another point during convention coverage, Ms. Perry nearly mentioned the Gov. Dubya time as
Texas governor, during which he decided three white men tying a black man to a truck, and dragging
him until he was beheaded was not a hate crime. James Byrd Jr. became just another martyr to "white-washed" interpretations of the letter of some law allowing black people to be slaughtered without
anyone answering for the racist elements of a crime.
Black people have to be willing to accept insult added to injury in order to be considered "reasonable" in so many cases of their victimizations.
Ms. Perry, when she noticed reluctance in her colleagues to engage the details of one reason she was so delighted to be rid of Dubya, she began to comment on a change in the conversation at the table.
So inflammable, I guess, to put American politics in a framework of American history.