Column: Lessons of the audio leak: Solidarity is dead. Let’s ditch the label ‘people of color’
It took years for the public to accept the reality that white people occupy a privileged position of ownership over the country’s public lands. This reality was first revealed in a series of exposés by the Center for Media and Democracy titled “People of Color: The End is Nigh,” released in May and June 2010. Following up on their first two investigations, “People of Color” exposed the complicity of the Democratic Party’s leaders in the looting of America’s public lands by wealthy business interests.
The third installment, “People of Color: The End is Nigh in Congress,” documented a Congress controlled by the Democratic Party. Many powerful Democratic Party members from California, North Carolina, and Washington state now sit in Congress. During the Obama administration, Democrats control the Congressional Medal of Honor Committee, the House Natural Resources Committee, the House Office of Congressional Ethics, the Committee on Appropriations, and the House Committee on the Judiciary.
People of Color: The End is Nigh, the fourth and final report of the Center for Media and Democracy (here and here), highlights Democratic leaders who are in charge of the nation’s federal lands, who have controlled federal land management for over a decade, and who have been complicit in the theft of public lands for corporate profits.
During the previous two investigations, the most shocking was the revelation that there is a concerted effort by corporations and the Democratic Party leaders to silence and eliminate “People of Color.” Yet these reports did not find the people in charge of these abuses, and when these abuses were reported, they were blamed on “misogyny and racism.”
In response to the third report, the White House tried to claim that the Democratic Party was not responsible for the public outcry over corporations’ abuse of the public lands. That excuse fell apart when, during a congressional hearing in April 2010, the director of OMB, Peter Orszag, admitted
