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I've long heard descriptions of the Republican Party as racist. It's always been a source of confusion — which in turn leads to frustration, and ultimately rage — for me, but always before I've tried to internalize that anger.
I don't really know why I decided to externalize that feeling this time. Maybe it was just another straw, and finally it was one too many. In any case, I will not allow a column by commentator Leonard Pitts to go unanswered. Not this time. Not again.
He's hardly alone, of course. Leftists and Democrats have called Republicans "racists" for decades. Even some people I count as good friends have accused me of being a racist, just because I'm a Republican. And they have accused the Republican Party of institutional racism, without an ounce of evidence to back it up. But today I'm not going to take it without response.
In their efforts to win elections by piecing together near-unanimous conglomerations of minority groups, the Democratic Party has championed the notion that everyone is a member of an oppressed minority, and everyone deserves some "extra" consideration from "the system." In doing so, Democrats have fought for inner-city unemployment, illiteracy, imprisonment and perpetual poverty. Teachers' unions, which have forever found a patron in Democrats, do more harm in urban schools — where a vast majority of students are black — than they have done in any other part of the country.
Democrats have insisted that violent criminals are just "misunderstood" and ought to be released back into their homes, where they can continue to prey (as they have done for decades) on members of the very communities where they came from. In all too many cases, the victims of crime are black or Hispanic. Indefensible levels of taxes, regulations, government waste and central control of peoples' lives have obstructed economic development — more so in the mostly-black communities of inner cities than in the country at large.
With that record of human destruction, the only thing Democrats can do to win votes is call Republicans racists.
Yet there is only one major political party in America that was founded because no other would abolish slavery.
There is only one major political party in America that championed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act — and long before that, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.
A president from only one major political party in America has sent the U.S. Army into an American city to enforce school desegregation at gunpoint.
There is only one major political party in America that seeks to treat all Americans as equal individuals under the law, rather than categorizing millions of human beings into narrowly defined groups that must compete against each other and can achieve success only at the expense of another.
That is the Republican Party.
On the other hand, there is only one major political party in America that has championed slavery. There is only one major political party in America that has seceded from the Union, has taken its states to war against its countrymen, has shot bullets at fellow Americans, and has assassinated a president, for the right to own another human being, just because that other human being was of a different race.
There is only one major political party in America that proudly claims among its members a United States senator who was once a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Indeed, when Klansman David Duke ran for governor of Louisiana claiming to be a Republican, Republican President George Bush campaigned against him. Duke's opponent was known criminal Edwin Edwards, a former governor. The slogan of that campaign was: "Vote for the crook, it's important."
There is only one major political party in America that filibustered — for days on end — passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.
There is only one major political party in America that has, in the last 25 years at least, nominated to the Supreme Court a judge who claims members of one race are inherently smarter than members of another race.
That is the Democratic Party.
The Republican Party is far from infallible. And the Democratic Party is far from worthless. But from all my years of watching politics and studying history, I've learned this much: If one party is guilty of institutional racism, it is the Democratic Party; and if one party deserves praise for championing the equality of all human beings, it is the Republican Party.
The columnist Mr. Pitts can continue to insist that the GOP has a "race problem." He can also stand between Bob Barker and Taylor Swift, and write that Swift is way too old.
‘He got a pretty heavy dose of narcotics’
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Adam is back in the recovery room after 45 minutes. His eyes are barely
open and he doesn’t talk much at first.
11 months ago
6 comments:
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. This is laughable.
in the last two weeks alone these stories fly in the face of what you're saying and show why we think racism permeates your culture:
http://www.racismreview.com/blog/2009/06/23/pat-buchanans-conference-welcoming-white-racist-themes/
http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0609/Nixon_saw_interracial_pregnancy_as_grounds_for_abortion.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/16/tennessee-gop-staffer-ema_n_216085.html
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/06/south-carolina-gop-operative-doesnt-deny-racist-tweet-against-obama.php?ref=fpblg
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/14/rusty-depass-south-caroli_n_215439.html
That's just a small sampling of what 2 weeks in the news cycle looks like for the GOP.
you provided 5 examples of individual people privately saying things that are racist.
my column described hundreds of years of championing slavery, Jim Crow, school segregation and celebration of the Ku Klux Klan — compared to 150 years of abolition and fighting for civil rights.
you're free to think my culture is permeated by racism. But that doesn't mean you're right.
You're right, the fact that I think it doesn't make it right. It's the fact that those "individual people" include high ranking GOP activists, a PRESIDENT, and GOP staffers that makes me right.
Your point is insignificant because there are just as many Democrats who championed all of those things, but it's primarily Republican's who've let it run rampant in their culture.
Those are not just a few random people.
THIS IS YOUR PARTY. You're citing instances from a time where the Republican party was virtually unidentifiable from it's actions today. Lincoln was a million miles from where people like Trent Lott have taken you and Liberals are not blind to that fact.
Barack Obama is still the only president in modern history who has nominated an overt racist to the supreme court.
And there's a lot that "liberals are not blind to." That reminds me of what Ronald Reagan said about it: It's not that our liberal friends are ignorant, it's just that they know so much that isn't so.
You're making this too easy on me Will. Not only do I get to prove you wrong about Obama being the only president to nominate a racist (a claim that is patently false), but I get to show you a couple more high-ranking racist republicans:
copied sections from an Op-Ed by Michael M. Blow
REPUBLICAN RACIST JUDGES
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First, there’s former Chief Justice William Rehnquist. When the Supreme Court was considering Brown v. Board of Education, Rehnquist was a law clerk for Justice Robert Jackson. Rehnquist wrote Jackson a memo in which he defended separate-but-equal policies, saying, “I realize that it is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position, for which I have been excoriated by my ‘liberal’ colleagues, but I think Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be reaffirmed.”
Furthermore, Rehnquist had been a Republican ballot protectionist in Phoenix when he was younger. As the Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen correctly noted in 1986: Rehnquist “helped challenge the voting qualifications of Arizona blacks and Hispanics. He was entitled to do so. But even if he did not personally harass potential voters, as witnesses allege, he clearly was a brass-knuckle partisan, someone who would deny the ballot to fellow citizens for trivial political reasons — and who made his selection on the basis of race or ethnicity.”
Then there’s John Roberts, who replaced Rehnquist as the chief justice in 2005. That year, Newsday reported that Roberts had made racist and sexist jokes in memos that he wrote while working in the Reagan White House. And, The New York Review of Books published a scolding article in 2005 making the case that during the same period that he was making those jokes, Roberts marshaled a crusader’s zeal in his efforts to roll back the civil rights gains of the 1960s and ’70s — everything from voting rights to women’s rights. The article began, “The most intriguing question about John Roberts is what led him as a young person whose success in life was virtually assured by family wealth and academic achievement to enlist in a political campaign designed to deny opportunities for success to those who lack his advantages.”
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THE SONYA SOTOMAYOR RACISM LIE
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"The same Newt Gingrich who once said that bilingual education was like teaching “the language of living in a ghetto” tweeted that Sotomayor is a “Latina woman racist.” The same Rush Limbaugh who once told a black caller to “take that bone out of your nose and call me back” called Sotomayor a “reverse racist.” The same Tom Tancredo, a former congressman, who once called Miami, which has a mostly Hispanic population, “a third world country” said that Sotomayor “appears to be a racist.”
This is rich...
...A report entitled “Under Siege: Life for Low-Income Latinos in the South” that was released last month by the Southern Poverty Law Center found “systemic discrimination against Latinos” that constituted “a civil rights crisis.”
The report noted: “And as a result of relentless vilification in the media, Latinos are targeted for harassment by racist extremist groups, some of which are directly descended from the old guardians of white supremacy. ”
This finding is borne out by the F.B.I.’s hate crimes data, which show that the number of anti-Hispanic hate crimes have increased by half since 2003, while all other hate crimes have increased by 6 percent.
Politics aside, what exactly did Sotomayor say that got everyone in a huff? In a 2001 speech she said, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” She acknowledged a racial bias. That doesn’t make her a racist.
Why? Because racism exists along a spectrum. On one end is the mere existence of racial bias. Harvard’s Project Implicit, an online laboratory, has demonstrated that most of us have this bias, whether we are conscious of it or not.
Somewhere in the middle of the spectrum are the conscious expressions of that bias in the form of prejudices. On the other end, at the extreme, are deliberate acts of racial discrimination based on those prejudices. That’s where the racists dwell. Think of it this way: You know that you could cheat on your taxes; acknowledging that you are tempted to do so reveals a frailty, but only the act of cheating is a crime.
I have yet to read or hear of Sotomayor’s acts of racial discrimination. (She is nearly 55 years old. Surely if she is a racist, and a judge to boot, there has to be some proof of it in her actions, no?)"
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