Bannon loses it, claims he can't be racist because he had a Black classmate
By all accounts, Charlie Rose’s interview on “60 Minutes” with former Trump adviser and white nationalist Breitbart chair Steve Bannon was a predictable train wreck. During the course of the interview, Bannon claimed the Pope does not know Catholic doctrine and flew into a rage when reminded Native Americans are the only Americans not descended […]
During the course of the interview, Bannon claimed the Pope does not know Catholic doctrine and flew into a rage when reminded Native Americans are the only Americans not descended from immigrants.
But one of the most remarkable lines from the interview came when Rose asked him about his attitudes on diversity:
BANNON: I was raised in a desegregated neighborhood. The north side of Richmond is predominantly black, OK? I went to an integrated school, a Catholic school. I served in the military. I don’t need to be lectured by a bunch of limousine liberals, OK, from the upper east side of New York or from the Hamptons, OK, about any of this. My lived experience is that.
Leaving aside the absurdity of a former Goldman Sachs banker and Hollywood film producer claiming liberals are just too privileged to understand his mindset, Bannon’s “integrated Catholic school” was not actually all that integrated:
https://twitter.com/kfile/status/907052682405400577
In fact, the community in which Bannon grew up was substantially shaped by white flight and resistance to integration:
Richmond's public schools integrated in 1970. The year before he graduated high school. (1992 numbers here) pic.twitter.com/0aCkDjdB3F
— SuperGrover (@fuzzlaw) September 11, 2017
Description of the neighborhood. pic.twitter.com/5bimububta
— SuperGrover (@fuzzlaw) September 11, 2017
Even if Bannon’s characterization of his school as “integrated” was not a massive stretch, to claim that attending a school with Black students makes one supportive or empathetic of civil rights or diversity is ridiculous.
Having individual Black friends, let alone classmates, does not mean a person cannot view themselves as superior to Black people, or be averse to associating with Black people, as a whole. Donald Sterling employed Black men and had an affair with a woman of color, and none of this prevented him from holding racist views about Black sports fans attending his NBA games.
If Bannon sought to prove in this interview that he values diversity, he completely failed. His idea of what constitutes diversity, and what constitutes respect for it, are shallow caricatures that could only be dreamed of by a white supremacist mind.
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