Christine Flowers: No Respect: Progressives Oppose Those Who Built This City

 Christine Flowers offers her take on progressives and working-class ethnics in a piece at Philadelphia Weekly.

As I was standing at Marconi Plaza last Saturday, waiting to hear whether the city would honor a judge’s order that the wooden box hiding the Columbus statue be removed (spoiler alert, it didn’t and it wasn’t,) I had a few moments to ponder why Mayor Jim Kenney (seen in the above photo) was so intent on letting the Italian Americans of Philadelphia know just how undeserving of respect he thought we were. It took a few moments, but I ultimately realized why this former son of South Philadelphia is leading this legal, cultural and administrative juggernaut against us. 

And with this realization came a troubling corollary revelation: Kenney doesn’t just hate Italian Americans. Kenney is opposed to all of the white, working-class ethnic populations that built this city, the Irish like himself, the Poles, the Germans, the Jews, the Slavs and all the other nationalities that defined their geography and history by what parish they belonged to, what school they attended, what union their grandparents paid dues in, or where they bought their kielbasa, their baccala or their chopped liver.

If you’ve ever been at a meeting of progressive Democrats, or even of the country club sort of Republicans who like to “get along” with them, such as the ones who define as “Never Trumpers,” you will detect an obvious disdain for working-class white ethnic groups. I have “passed” in those circles, being an attorney who practices in the so-called liberal field of immigration. Those who have not read my columns or heard me on the radio or TV assume I am one of them. It’s “Imitation of Life,” just substituting mindset for race. I’m not one of them, but I look like one of them and so the guard is down. Like that fly on the proverbial wall, I have access to what they say when they think no one is listening beyond the sterile bubble of elite wisdom.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

No respect - Philadelphia Weekly