Nancy Pelosi Trains to Always Start with White

Nancy, Nancy, Nancy, what will you think of next?

The Washington Examiner reports that Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is training Democrats in the U.S. House to use a very specific racial hierarchy. She hired Maya Wiley, the founder and President of the Center for Social Inclusion, to train Democratic members and staff how to address the issue of race to defend government programs:

Wiley proposed the use of "race explicit" anecdotes to illustrate problems like the economic crisis. "Explain how each racial group is affected (recognize the unique pain of each group), but start with people who are White," she wrote in her distributed remarks. "Then raise racial disparities." For example, she offered the line: "Homeownership is the American Dream. It hurts the same to lose your home if you're White, Asian, Latino or Black."

I suppose it doesn't make sense to say things like:

"Homeownership is the American Dream. It hurts the same to lose your home if you're American or American."

But how about using more inclusive language:

"Homeownership is the American Dream. It hurts to lose your home as has happened to too many of our fellow Americans."

Maya Wiley was ranked #16 of 20 on The Root's list of America's Leading Black Women Advocating Change. She comes up with unvirtuous circles, such as this one from her organization's website.

• Policies create the middle class and suburbs, but they discriminate by race
• Cities lose white population and jobs so the tax base shrinks
• Transit does not follow the jobs to the suburbs so too many people of color can't either
• Cities subsidize development to entice wealth back, but policies don't support enough affordable housing
• People of color are displaced as investment comes back to the cities

White people are the problem, coming or going. Where to site a bank branch, how much to spend on public transit, whether to address a budget deficit all become questions of structural racism.

But now she has come back around to training Democrats to "start with people who are White." It's "White, Asian, Latino or Black" forward, or backwards Blaw, blaw, blaw...