10 Ways Republicans Hide Their Racism
Posted: Thursday, April 29, 2010
by John Sammon
Sammonsays
Republicans are stupid, but they don't know it, which is one of the reasons the tea party movement of the far right chose as their symbol the Boston Tea Party of the pre-Revolutionary War, a cowardly act of mob vandalism against an unguarded ship carrying British tea in Boston Harbor.
The tea partiers of today never study history, and those few who have never evaluate it. They think the Boston Tea Party was a heroic action.
What a fitting symbol for today's tea baggers.
With about as much subtlety as a blunt-force object, members of the far right try to mask the blatant racism that has always defined them. Here are 10 ways they do:
1. State's rights. This has always been a bulwark against attempts by the federal government to legislate equality. States having rights isn't the issue, misusing the rights they've been given is. Officials in Arizona recently criminalized stereotypical Latin-looking skin (if you're a citizen you have to produce papers showing you're not an illegal immigrant), for the same reason officials blocked the school door at Little Rock in support of school segregation. Fear of homogeneity. States rights have always been used to advance racism long before Civil War Confederacy slavers championed it.
2. Racists calling someone with whom they disagree racist. Republicans call the president a racist. This is a smokescreen, or the pot calling the kettle black. Have blacks ever run or promoted a segregationist society? Limbaugh, O'Reilly and myself all grew up as boys in a white-only world. The only blacks we saw were servants on TV. That conditioning is hard to un-do.
3. Lumping blacks with government handouts. Traditionally, black Americans had to look to the federal government for enforcement of equality, because individual states wouldn't. Republicans view blacks and people of color as welfare-sucking leeches. Remember those children's cartoons where the hungry lion looks at a guy and the guy turns into a roast turkey? When conservatives look at a black person, they see a butler or a shoeshine boy with his hand out begging.
4. Small government. How can Republicans harp on how they're for small government, when they set record budget deficits during the Bush years and conduct endless nation-building wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Small government to conservatives means profligate spending on wars and weapons, but none on Americans, especially those of color.
5. Use of tokens. Conservatives realize they can't totally ignore minorities. Thus, the continuing parade of token non-white people in symbolic meaningless posts from Uncle Tom Michael Steele to Bobby Jindal, or as the Roman Emperor Caligula used to say, "use a dog to catch a dog."
6. The threat of violence and lynching. This is a right-wing hallmark with a history that needs no explanation.
7. The use of mindless symbolic euphemisms with no basis of reality. Lightening rod symbols are important to conservatives. Thus, they fixate on words like small government and taxes (see#4 above), even though they themselves spend like drunken sailors on weapons and wars. They accuse the president of being born in a foreign country, and endlessly cite his Arabic-sounding name, a Freudian give-away that in addition to their belief that blacks should know their proper underling place, the only good Arab is a dead Arab.
8. When a disaster happens to mostly people of color, like the earthquake in Haiti, or the debacle at the Superdome in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, watch conservative pundits, politicians and pastors. They will forget their occasional caution and say things like "they deserved it," or "it's God's will, they're in league with the devil because they practice voodoo."
9. Use of icons. Republicans mythologize Ronald Reagan and John Wayne because they represent a white-only simpler time when blacks knew their place. They describe this as American or "family values." The family doesn't include blacks.
10. Republicans even though they won't admit it, believe in a caste system with whites the top tier. They hide this by saying they're protecting the rights of tax payers and "average" Americans. Average means white.
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Top-level comments on this article: (5 total)Nice point of view, looking forward to read more articles from you!
Another brilliant article John!The thing I love about you is your not one to say things just so you can win popularity contest. You see things as they are and not as you wish them to be. A lost art for sure!"Your truth keeps marching on!"
Great points and insight. My only quibble is that, pre-Revolution, while taxes were certainly an issue, they were, by no means, the only issue. There was widespread dissatisfaction among those of European origin over the British Crown's limitation on settling westward, arising from treaties Britain signed with, and thereby recognizing the sovereignty of, American Indian nations. Those treaties were nullified when the revolutionary forces prevailed and westward settlement subsequently occurred en masse. For the formerly recognized Indian nations, "manifest destiny" brought wholesale slaughter and occupation. A few historians have proposed that the desire to grab Indian land to the west was a more compelling factor even than taxation, during that era. Of course, what every school child learns, and what many on the radical fringe echo, is that unfair and burdensome taxation was the impetus for the socio-political upheaval and war that led to the creation of these United States. Indians, where they are considered at all, are generally incorporated only as a justifying footnote, an additional evil to be conquered. If those on the fringe right prevail in steering the political discourse, future history will view this current, pathological racism as the footnote, justified on the back of tax-outrage.
You have got to be the biggest idiot to ever stroke a key board. You claim that conservatives are the racists when in fact it is the liberals that are the most racist group on the planet. You continue with your slave owner mentality that "MASSAH KNOWS BEST, AND HE'LL TAKE CARE OF YOU" . You demean any American of color that rebels calling them names like "Token" and "Uncle Tom". You make me sick.
Utter nonsense.
The Democrat Party has always been and still is the party of racism in America.
Prior to the Civil War, it was Democrat politicians who protected slavery.
The segregationists of the 1950s and 1960s were all Democrats, e.g., George Wallace, Lester Maddox, Bull Connor, etc. Democrat Senator Robert Byrd used to run a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. He was a still a Democrat Senator when he died last year.
Today, the Democrat Party is the party that groups us and divides us by race for the purposes of their political manipulation.
Of course, if one disagrees with a Democrat at point you will get called a racist by Democrats, just like YOU have done in this article.
The Democrats are the true racists in this country. They always have been. They still are today.
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