SO I GUESS ORDINARY BLACK PEOPLE QUALIFY FOR MAINSTREAM-MEDIA INTERVIEWS ONE DAY A YEAR

Whenever it's a slow news day, you can count on some mainstream-media outlet to run a story by a reporter who's ventured into a rural diner in a Trump state to find -- surprise! -- that blue-collar white Trump voters still love Trump. Whenever it's not a slow news day, especially if the big news item is Trump saying or doing something offensive, you can count on a mainstream reporter following up on the story by traveling to yet another diner, where more rural whites will confirm that Trump's latest outrage doesn't shake their faith in him, because they like the fact that he's not "politically correct."

So it's a surprise that Sabrina Tavernise actually interviewed some black people for a story that appears in The New York Times today. Of course, it's Martin Luther King Day -- a good day, unfortunately, for tokenism.

Tavernise's interviews were conducted at churches. I'd like to believe that this wasn't because she was afraid to go to any other place black people gather.

Tavernise focuses on one point made by her interviewees -- that they believe America is backsliding dangerously.

... after a disheartening week and an even more disheartening year, black Americans interviewed on Sunday said they were struggling to comprehend what was happening in a country that so recently had an African-American president.

But it's important to notice that the interviewees also said that they believe recent events reflect a past that never really went away.

“Donald Trump is America’s id,” said Pastor [William] Lamar [of Washington], whose 180-year-old church is five blocks from the White House. “He is as American as baseball and apple pie.”

... “I don’t know that he’s listening, and I don’t know that it matters,” [Reverend] Dr. [Raphael] Warnock [of Atlanta] said in an interview. “Even if Trump were to leave tomorrow, we still have to deal with the large segment of white evangelicals who voted for Trump. My battle is not so much with Trump as it is with Trumpism.”

[Sterling] Tucker [a 94-year-old Washington civil rights activist] said that perhaps the progress the civil rights movement had fought for had missed parts of the country. Maybe black progress had engendered more resistance than he had understood.

“We moved beyond a point, but we didn’t carry the country with us,” he said. Today he hears white people complain that their problems have been forgotten as political leaders focus on black misery. “White people are saying that what has happened is you took equality from some white people and gave it to black people,” he said. “That’s where we are right now, I think.”

... Thabiti Anyabwile, pastor of Anacostia River Church in Washington ... noted that today’s problems were rooted early in the nation’s history, and observed that in contrast to Germany after the Holocaust, the American South has not been forced to fully confront the legacy of slavery and the Civil War.

“Corners of the country could put their hands in their pockets, whistle and quietly shuffle off, as if the history was never theirs,” he said.

But that history can rear its head. “We are in the grips of the revenge of an American conscience that’s never repented of its racist history,” he said. “Things that were left smoldering, embers have caught a bit of wind from our current president, and from time to time we are seeing flashes of fire.”

It would be nice if the mainstream media would interview non-white Americans more than once a year. They're "real Americans," too. We need to know that Trump opponents worry not just about Trump, but about many of the voters who are interviewed week after week in all those rural diners.