Monday, April 27, 2020

BIDEN MUST CHOOSE - CAN YOU?

Joe Biden, Democratic Party choice for Presidential candidate states that he will choose a woman as his running mate - Vice President. Then, not another word from his bunker, where we see him at a desk - invisible. Little mention in the New York Times either, with the exception of a column by Michelle Goldberg supporting Warren as her choice - mine too as noted in a comment.

Only In Sweden do we see the 10 most likely candidates lined up in a single row in Dagens Nyheter, the Swedish New York Times. Beneath each picture is a text presenting reasons why Biden might choose one of the 10 and a following text presenting reasons for him to choose one of the others.

Why doesn't the New York Times do something similar? I am sure that an article based on the DN article with similar pictures would elicit 2000 or more comments.

I present them here in keeping with one of the major reasons for my creating this blog, to present a subject that not a single columnist has ever even mentioned in the Times, the archaic system used by the US Census Bureau to classify Americans, a system in which each of the 10 above would be assigned to a a fictional race or races.

In America, even in the 21st Century, some of the women shown above will be seen almost first and foremost as the person to be chosen by Biden because she is said to belong to a particular race and could therefore draw voters to whom race-based choice is important, either as a plus or a minus.

In Sweden, in the 2019 national election, we would never have seen candidates presented as belonging to a race although one party, the SD party did make clear that it would really prefer to support candidates who are so-called ethnic Swedes, people who practice customs that the SD party sees as demonstrating the candidate's "Swedishness".

I have stopped submitting comments to the New York Times as of this date; the final one was in print yesterday, 26 April. I will be following the discussion of VP choice as carefully as possible and every time a race-based argument arises, I will try to report it here, rather than submitting a comment as has been my practice ever since in 2013 I read two books that changed my life: Authors Professor Dorothy Roberts, Professor Kenneth Prewitt.

Photographs from Dagens Nyheter - 26 April 2020