If we’re all busy fighting each other

Ian Reifowitz, part of the Daily Kos community, explains what Elizabeth Warren is doing differently in her campaign speeches. She’s calling out the nasty guy’s race baiting and saying that it hurts blacks and whites.

In a speech centered on corruption Warren, speaking about the nasty guy said:

He tries to divide us, white against black, Christians against Muslim, straight against queer and trans and everyone against immigrants. Because if we’re all busy fighting each other, no one will notice that he and his buddies are stealing more and more of our country’s wealth, and destroying the future for everyone else.

And from a Netroots Nation speech a year ago.

In Trump’s story, the reason working families keep getting the short end of the stick isn’t because of the decisions that he and his pals are making in Washington every day. No, according to Trump, the problem is other working people—people who are Black or brown, people who were born somewhere else, people who don’t worship the same, dress the same, or talk the same as Trump and his buddies.

And it comes in all sorts of flavors: racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia. It comes in all sorts of forms: nasty personal attacks, trolling on Twitter, winking at white supremacists. It all adds up to the same thing: The politics of division. Politics that tries to pit Black working people against white working people so they won’t band together. Politics of division that tells Americans to distrust each other, to fear each other, to hate each other.

Because while we’re busy doing that, Mitch McConnell gets to raid the Treasury and give a trillion bucks to their rich friends, destroy healthcare for millions of families, and wipe out Social Security and Medicare. They want us pointing fingers at each other so we won’t notice their hand is in our pockets.

Well, it stops here. It stops here. It stops now. It stops with this movement and this moment and this election. It is time for us say no! to the politics of division, to say no! To the ugly use of bigotry and fear.

We say, No, you will not divide us! We are here to bring working families together, to demand a government that works for all of us. That’s why we’re here.

Reifowitz summarizes a bit from the book Merge Left: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America by Ian Haney López:

Warren’s approach—which unmasks Trump’s race-baiting as a direct effort to fool economically vulnerable whites into voting their race rather than their class—will gain the most votes among both those whites and the voters of color who will rightly be skeptical of any progressive who ignores right-wing race-baiting completely. This is different from simply saying “Trump’s a racist and that’s why you shouldn’t vote for him.” Such a message is simply not as effective, either among the group López identifies as “persuadable whites” or among voters of color.