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“I’ll have those n—ers voting Democratic for the next 200 years.” - Lyndon Johnson

Perhaps nothing is more interesting, nor more misconstrued than the collision between race and politics and it’s history. The Republican Party was founded on an anti-slavery platform and worked diligently through the Civil Rights era to support a color-blind society. Naturally, their opposition starting from slavery and into the Civil Rights era were…Democrats! You wouldn’t know this by looking at the voting patterns of Americans today. Democrats have managed to fuse race and entitlements together to create generations of victim-minded, ‘hopeless’ peoples who have been convinced that their salvation is through the graces of government.

The DNC has basically become a used-car lot for race-baiting, selling their power through manipulation of racial divides and prophesied by the quote above from our glorious 36th President. It’s a theme that is harmonized by general leftist principles of big government socialism, who lob racist accusations at their opponents while they themselves push racist issues such as affirmative action and slave reparations. This article ends with a summary of points made in a well laid out article by John Hawkins.

But American society has evolved to the point where we are closer in government and business to the colorblind society that civil-rights champions like Martin Luther King Jr. sought. Open and blatant racism is a career-ender for politicians and big businessmen. The nature of racism has also largely evolved. Controversies today are often not about racism itself, at least in the hostile sense, but rather something that I call hyper-racialism. It’s typically the Left that finds itself tripping over words and sentiments that may not be hostile in nature (an attribute of traditional racism) but are subtly racist.

Senator Joe Biden didn’t mean any harm when he referred to fellow presidential candidate Barack Obama as “…the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

It’s not Biden’s only hyper-racial commentary: “You cannot go to a 7-11 or Dunkin Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent.”

Hillary Clinton was obviously trying to be amusing when she stated that Mahatma Gandhi “ran a gas station down in Saint Louis.”

Other Democratic politicians and political operatives like Fritz Hollings, Diane Watson, Donna Brazile (Al Gore’s 2000 campaign manager) and Senator Robert Byrd are all on record making racial, if not racist, statements. Add liberal media stars like Mike Wallace, Neil Rogers and even Don Imus as well as Democrat supporting entertainers and activists such as Spike Lee, Louis Farrakhan and Harry Belafonte to the list.

Comments like these are stooped in the Leftist/Democrat belief that minorities are helpless people who have to be coddled and propped up by society. There is an automatic tone of separatism in statements like these and others by people such as Joe Biden.

It serves no purpose to label someone a racist when it’s clear (and they insist) that they nor their comments are racist. But perhaps it will educate people who say these kinds of things that racial disrespect doesn’t end with lynchings, burning crosses and bad business practices.

Race-based activism is rooted in spotlighting criticism of race; it seems the more fair or accurate a racial observation from the Right (usually a criticism of a Democratic policy spun into racism) is, the louder the cries of racism. But since the Left has become the faux ordained spokespeople of minorities, Leftists and Democrats are immune and ignorant to their own racial observations, which are often more about political positioning than about accuracy.

Really, how can one not make statements about stereotypes and cliche’s when one’s own platform survives and thrives on perpetuating those stereotypes?

Conservatives are branded racists for opposing affirmative action, illegal immigration and reparations (and because if it’s done enough times, people start to believe it). And it’s an easy perception to put forth. Democrats can claim that they themselves are the champions of minorities because Republicans and Conservatives are not legislating government power and nailing the taxpayers to fund every perceived societal limitation put on minorities. And who opposes these kinds of hyper-racial band-aids? Well it’s those racist Conservatives, that’s who!

But it’s conservatives who believe that government should not discriminate based on skin color, even if that race or minority group may benefit from government.

Then again, while hyper-racialism dominates public debate, we still find ourselves observing naked racism, in of all places, the United States House of Representatives. The Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) was founded with the purpose of “positively influencing the course of events pertinent to African-Americans and others of similar experience and situation,” and “achieving greater equity for persons of African descent in the design and content of domestic and international programs and services. [Wikipedia]

So why is the CBC itself discriminating? U.S. Representative Stephen Cohen, a white Democrat from Tennessee, as well as other white members of Congress throughout history, could not get membership into the CBC despite the fact that his constituents are a black majority. Meanwhile, the CBC membership includes black representatives who have small minorities of blacks in their districts. What’s the point of the CBC again?

So while most people, Left or Right, oppose racism shouldn’t we also question what drives the racial foot-in-mouth-disease? While it not only infects the Left (Trent Lott comes to mind), it does seem largely in their corner.

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Back to the John Hawkins article from last year - here are the highlights:

It’s an impressive record for a supposedly racist party, is it not?

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Try the quiz out, a replica of Cold Fury’s quiz: be honest, no Googling, just answer the questions. I’m curious to see the results. I’ll post the answers tonight.

[Discuss this post over at the Otto Show...]

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