The Politics of Blackness: You say why Republican party; I say why not?
Written by BARBARA HOWARD
Whenever I see Democrats revise history,
I don’t know whether to laugh at how uninformed they are or be afraid at how
much they lie. I tend to be more afraid
because the desired end result is to discredit the Republican Party, keeping
black folk loyal to the Democratic Party.
So when I read in Leonard Pitts’ Miami
Herald column, “GOP blind to its race problem,”
that “the modern GOP was created in 1965 with a stroke of Lyndon Johnson’s
pen,” I couldn’t help but laugh. I would hope that Pitts would have done his
homework to realize that he had stretched the truth so far as to be
unrecognizable.
He wrote about an aide to Tennessee State
Senator Diane Black (R), sending a distasteful email about Obama, accusing her
and most of the party (as usual) of racism, calling them “weasels in elephants’
clothes.”
But instead of remaining silent, Frances
Rice, president of the National Black Republican Association (NBRA) set Pitts
straight. In her article, “Democrats’
Racial Hypocrisy,” she quotes Gerald Alexander, who refutes the argument that
all the racist Democrats crossed over to the Republican Party in “The Myth of
the Racist Republicans.”
She also quotes the Rev. Wayne Perryman,
who in “Unfounded Loyalty” gives the Democrats’ history in slavery, segregation
and socialism. Unfortunately, blacks
blindly joined the Democratic Party because of their complete ignorance of its
actual civil rights record. They only
know the fabricated one.
Rice listed a litany of racist comments
by Democrats, and challenged Pitts to condemn racism in the Democratic Party
with the same vigor as he condemns racism in the Republican Party.
Pitts does what all black Democrats do:
Ignore obvious racism by their own party.
How about the blogger who showed RNC Chairman Michael Steele with a
“blackened minstrel-style face, nappy hair and big, thick red lips?” Or all the
nasty comments made about him since he became chairman?
Where was the outrage when Al Sharpton and
Harry Belafonte called General Colin Powell and Dr. Condoleezza Rice “house
n****rs”? Or when black Democratic film
critic and entertainment journalist David Ehrenstein, wrote a column called
“Obama the Magic Negro?”
But folk came out of the woodwork to
condemn Rush Limbaugh for playing the song, “Barack the Magic Negro” and
Republican Chip Saltzman for sending the CD out to fellow Republicans. See my December 2008 South Florida Times
article, “Hypocrites All.”
So when Pitts and other silver-tongued
black Democrats ask, “Why should black folk join the Republican Party,” my
answer is “Why not?”
Since you don’t want to hear about the
creation of the Republican Party in 1854 by anti-slavery white men or their
passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments outlawing slavery, giving black
folk citizenship and the right to vote, or their passage of civil rights
legislation (including the 1954 Voting Rights Act Democratic President Lyndon
Johnson gets credit for), then do you want to hear about affirmative action?
No, affirmative action was NOT a
Democratic initiative. It was created by
black Republican Arthur Fletcher, the “father of affirmative action,” who was
the secretary of labor under President Richard Nixon, and advisor to four GOP
presidents.
How about welfare reform, which trained
thousands of black mothers and placed them in solid, paying jobs? Former President Bill Clinton gets credit,
but the Republican Congress created the initiative (which Obama just rescinded
by the way).
What about vouchers, which allow
low-income black mothers to send their children to private schools that they
could never afford (like the one Obama sends his kids to)?
By the way, he just struck down the
hugely successful D.C. program. Now, the
children have to go back to the crime-infested public schools where their
mothers didn’t want them in the first place.
But not a word of protest from black folk. Wonder why?
FYI, Michael Steele, Texas Railroad
Commissioner Michael Williams, Lt. Col.
Allen West and hundreds of thousands of us don’t see the Democratic Party as
the panacea for black folk, nor do we see the Republican Party as the party of
racists.
You joined the party who created the KKK
and, as Leonard Pitts admitted, “for a century …bombed schools, lynched
innocents, perverted justice and terrorized millions in the name of
intolerance.” Hello!!!
Can you imagine Jews flocking in droves
to the very group that murdered millions in the Holocaust? How about the Iranians beaten in the streets
today just happily going on to join the party of their beaters? What?
And you call us idiots?
Barbara Howard is president of Barbara
Howard & Associates and the Florida state chair for C.O.R.E. (the Congress
of Racial Equality).
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Whenever I see Democrats revise history,
I don’t know whether to laugh at how uninformed they are or be afraid at how
much they lie. I tend to be more afraid
because the desired end result is to discredit the Republican Party, keeping
black folk loyal to the Democratic Party.
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