MAGA is the NAACP for a lot of poor and working-class whites. It's a pressure group started to single-mindedly address the concerns of one group of people who believe they are sweltering in the heat of injustice.

Its leaders are very often a combination of preacher and politician, and its members have marched on Washington. They're the ones out in the streets with signs demanding freedom from gun laws and vaccines. It's a rumbling, grumbling, sometimes cannily led, sometimes buffoonish screech for rights.

I spent nearly 40 years in newsrooms. To compare the NAACP to MAGA is sin. It's heresy, because, in the nearly all-white newsrooms where I spent my working career, nothing was more sacred than the racial equality we did not practice.

I oughta know. Every year for 10 years, I wrote my paper's weepy, underpowered Martin Luther King Jr. Day editorial. The best thing you could say about that editorial is that it never made a white editor angry.

I've never lived in any city where the majority of the Black population belonged to the NAACP, but it was that organization that set up the picket line in front of City Hall whenever a white city councilor slipped up and said what he really believed about race.

I've lived in cities where Donald Trump got 30% of the vote, but it was his supporters carrying signs that said, "Let Us Work" during the pandemic, and it was his supporters publicly burning Colin Kaepernick jerseys. "Burn, baby, burn," is a slogan that can be yelled by the militant wing of any organization.

Black Lives Matter and The Black Panthers. The Proud Boys and The Oath Keepers, fighters for the rights of groups crushed by everything from factory closings to gay marriage, to police brutality, to outright legal segregation. The Black Panthers thought power was a gun. So do the white people of Missouri.

The slogan "Black Lives Matter" is nearly as impossible to put a value on as the slogan "Make America Great Again," but both represent the howl of a group that feels cheated and threatened and despised.

And, of course, there was always the answering stereotype. The hog fat, promiscuous welfare queen whose first name invariably ends in "esha," the pimp hat, the Cadillac with the heart-shaped rear window, the unintelligible urban Uncle Remus accent, and its white brother, the hip-shot, fat-gutted trailer-dwelling piney woods white boy, complete with an oversized pickup truck, undersized resume and two first names, a la "Billy Ray." The MAGA hat is the 1970s pimp hat turned inside out. If we've achieved any racial parity at all, it's that, in 2022, the female of both species is increasingly likely to have a name that ends in "esha."

Race and class are ugly things, and if we can't breed them out, or legislate them out, we'll have to fight them out, like we've been doing since slave ships, since Nat Turner, since Lester Maddox, since Antietam, since whites hanging Blacks in trees and Blacks roaring into newly desegregated white city neighborhoods like Sherman roared into Atlanta.

One thing is certain. Martin Luther King Jr. wasn't blown out until he started preaching that the poor Black and the poor white had enough in common to fight on the same side, against the same enemy.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion, and read features by Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Devil's Elbow: Dancing in the Ashes of America." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle, and iBooks.

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