by Guy Page
As Gov. Phil Scott faces pushback in Vermont and nationally for a vaccination program prioritizing BIPOC Vermonters, Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger last night rejected the idea that “government should not bias any class or grouping of residents over others.”
During his State of the City Address yesterday, Weinberger asked “all Burlington residents to imagine a future where we have eliminated racial disparities and where everyone in the Burlington community feels true belonging.”
“Speaking directly to fellow white people,” according to a press release from the mayor’s office, Weinberger said: “I know that explicitly targeting government effort and resources toward BIPOC Vermonters causes discomfort for some. Much of this discomfort comes from a belief that the government should not bias any class or grouping of residents over others. However, this assessment ignores our history. For centuries, the policies and practices in this country explicitly discriminated on the basis of race in many aspects of our society. These policies created vast and enduring harm, and remained in place through much of the 20th Century. We are going to need to use strategies that are also race-based to address that harm. When we do that all Burlingtonians, not just Black and brown residents, will benefit.”
Weinberger pointed out to his “fellow white people” that discrimination harms the economy: “Last year, the financial services giant Citi released a report that puts a number to this cost, and found that $16 trillion has been erased from the U.S. GDP over the last two decades due to discrimination.”
Weinberger pledged to increase the Racial Equity, Inclusion and Belonging Department budget, hold a city Juneteenth celebration, develop a plan to eliminate homeowner disparity among black residents, and continue to “grapple with public safety transformation.” At present only 18 homeowners of the city’s 6,000 city owner-occupied homes are black, Weinberger said.
Cover photo: Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger and Racial Equity, Inclusion and Belonging Dept. Director Tyeastia Green
Categories: Society & Culture
Attempting to “fight” racism with racism – only causes: racism.
No leader in this nation has the right to defy the U.S. Constitution; the historical reality that it has been done in the past is unfortunate and wrong, but continuing to violate the very principals of this founding document now is is abhorrent.
Everyone, including our governor & Burlington’s mayor know this to be a basic truth, but they are cowards pandering to extremists and attempting to placate the oft violent left in order to save their own skins.
Vermonters who are 40 and over and wish to be vaccinated, be damned.
Welcome to the new “normal”: Two wrongs DO make a right.
Weinberger and Scott both thumb their noses at the rule-of-law. The Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution – with its Supremacy Clause as the supreme law of the land – and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 all declare racism illegal, and yet they openly flaunt it. Others can play this game too. And we should. It’s time We the People begin to pick and choose which laws we decide to follow and which laws we decide to ignore. I’ve already begun to in my life and I’ve found it to be liberating. Disrespect breeds disrespect. Lawlessness breeds lawlessness.
Right, Tom…..Only problem with actually doing that is the law, especially Soros-funded district/state attorneys are more than ready to arrest & even prosecute “conservatives” for just about anything whilst they are giving passes to Antifa & BLM criminals left & right including even releasing hardened convicts straight out of prison.
They still gotta catch us though 😉
So once again I have to pose the mathematical problem 1 wrong + 1 wrong = 1 right ?
Re: “However, this assessment ignores our history. For centuries, the policies and practices in this country explicitly discriminated on the basis of race in many aspects of our society.”
Mr. Weinberger’s assessment does, indeed, ignore our history – or at least that part of our history that contradicts his political narrative, which is most all of it.
For Millennium, the policies and practices in the entire world ‘explicitly discriminated on the basis of race’ – and on the basis of religion, and on the basis of gender, not to mention discriminating on the basis of tribal affiliation, or of clan, or of family, or of geographic location. The entire world was, and in many ways still is, a brutal place to live.
Yes, our human condition is evolving. But not everywhere. And certainly not everywhere, all at once.
Ostensibly, Haiti is recognized as the first nation to permanently ban slavery in the context of the Atlantic slave trade that began with the Portuguese in 1526. But that didn’t happen until 1793, six years after the U.S. Constitution was written. In fact, it wasn’t until the 1833 Haitian Abolition Act that slavery was formerly ended there, and, even then, Haitians had slaves elsewhere in the Caribbean until 1838.
The point is that man’s formally governed inhumanity toward their fellow man has existed since agricultural societies were established in Mesopotamia nearly ten thousand years ago. And before that hunter-gatherers were anything but enlightened philanthropists. But Mr. Weinberger seems to think that our inhumanity toward other humans didn’t exist until 1619 – a mere blink of an eye in anthropological terms.
Are we humans the perfect specimens of paradisal enlightenment? No, of course not. We’re all flawed. But Mr. Weinberger seems to think some of us are more flawed than others, when, in fact, we are all ignorant.
This isn’t just ignorance on Mr. Weinberger’s part. He has as much access to the historical record as do I. In my humble and unenlightened opinion, if anyone is perpetuating our current society’s dehumanizing discrimination, its people like Mr. Weinberger, who, on one hand, ignore the greater context of history, and, on the other hand, declare one’s silence on the matter as incriminating – thereby forcing the affirmation inherent in subsequent commentary such as mine herewith. This ignorance is precisely how and why discrimination persists to this day, from any perspective – black or white, male or female, Christian or Jew or Muslim or Buddhist or Atheist, rich or poor, good or evil, etc., etc., etc..
“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster… for when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” ― Friedrich W. Nietzsche
No matter what we do it will never be enough. If outcomes aren’t equal, obviously we’re still racist and we need to try harder, spend more money etc etc on and on. You know what? It’s not always racism because outcomes aren’t equal. There’s many factors that go into someone doing well in life; throwing more money at it and conveying special privileges won’t necessarily create equal outcomes.
One can only imagine the tortured course needed to extract the impact on the GDP do to the existence of “racisms”