Hey, old Democrats, its time to acknowledge and rebuke our Party's 20th Century past not bask in it

Perhaps the time has come for older Democrats to acknowledge and rebuke the Party's past. Younger - you know, under age 60 - Democrats are demanding it and Trump Republicans are hoping we won't.

The first matter is the Kamala Harris (age 54, born a black Baptist/Hindu woman in California in 1964) exchange regarding "busing" with Joe Biden (age 76, born a white Catholic male in Pennsylvania in 1942). For perspective, Harris was 4 years old when Biden, then age 27, greeted his first born son. These are two people of two different generations from two different parts of the United States.

Often assumptions are made about "liberal" California that are historically untrue. Harris' busing experience is because in the 1960's Berkeley was segregated by neighborhood just like most of urban America in northern states.

It was Lyndon Johnson's 1964 Civil Rights Act that split the segregationist South out of Joe Biden's and my Democratic Party which led to today's Republican domination. It was the right thing to do. And Berkeley decided to bus kids because it was the right thing to do (read the article linked above).

It is very clear that Biden had, and still has, mixed feelings about all of this as do many old Democrats. Most of us in California thought it took way too long for the East Coast dominated Democratic Party to dump the Southern Democrats who seemed to have turned the Civil War loss into a victory.

This subject also relates to the current controversy over the use of "concentration camp" to refer to the places where Americans of Japanese descent were concentrated during WWII. We older California-born Democrats likely have a different view about the Japanese-American concentration camp controversy. Perhaps in my case it may be because 28 members of my high school class were born in the camps.

But then 41 members of my class were Hispanic. Some were migrant farm workers. Some were descendants of residents in California when the United States launched a war against Mexico and occupied what we now call the American Southwest - much like the Germans occupied France in WWII. Many of their parents and/or grandparents were impacted by the so-called Mexican Repatriation mass deportation of Americans of Mexican heritage between 1929 and 1936.

If you add in my two Black classmates (issues: slavery and segregation), the two Chinese classmates (issue: the 1892 - 1940 Chinese Exclusion Act, the only U.S. law ever to prevent immigration and naturalization on the basis of race), and the three Native American classmates (issue: genocide, forced relocation, and removal of children), the governments in the Union (with U.S. Supreme Court approval in some cases) committed heinous acts based on racial bigotry against the parents and/or grandparents of about 20% of my classmates.

So it was very disturbing to me when an argument developed over the use of the word "concentration" as the adjective describing the WWII camps in which the U.S. concentrated the Japanese-American population.

The National Archives in its "Educator Resources" section offers a lesson "Japanese Relocation During World War II" which title sounds like their homes were purchased to build some highway or other government facility and they had to be "relocated" to another town. Actually, it was the military rounding up some Asians against whom bigotry was historically common and putting them into concentration camps, assuming you understand the common definition of the verb "to concentrate" as meaning "put or bring into a single place, group, etc." This was done by the Democratic Party's most revered President Franklin Roosevelt despite thorough reports prepared over several years submitted to him and  FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover which dismissed all rumors of Japanese-American espionage on behalf of the Japanese war effort.

In other words, the Democratic Party in the 20th Century had a practice of sacrificing the freedom and well-being of non-white racial and ethnic groups to win elections or win votes in legislative chambers. If some Party leaders still think that way, the young - you know, Democrats under age 60 - are suggesting the Party should lose because when it matters it is no better than the Trump Republican Party.

Most certainly, old Democrats shouldn't be basking in that past! That means you, Joe.