R.I.P. - The Myth of the Racist Right

R.I.P. - The Myth of the Racist Right

by Ron Miller

It was a watershed moment. When pollster Frank Luntz asked the mostly-white focus group of South Carolina Republicans to respond with raised hands to the question, “Let’s go in alphabetical order. How many of you think Herman Cain won the debate?,” nearly all hands went up.

“We can stop right there!,” Luntz exclaimed. He went on to say he had never seen anything like it in all his years of conducting similar focus groups. Only one person entered the viewing room a staunch Herman Cain fan but, by the end of the first GOP presidential debate of the 2012 campaign season, just about the entire room was aligned with Cain.

“Something very special happened this evening,” Luntz said.

Indeed. And the larger implications of this singular event are even more special.

For decades now, the most pernicious lie being told by liberals about their opposition on the right is that they are inherently and irredeemably racist. This lie has brought intelligent discussion to an immediate halt, stifled serious examination of the malfeasance of the liberals in using an entire race of human beings as laboratory animals for the past half-century, and rewritten history to an extent that would make George Orwell proud.

Are there racists among conservatives? That’s like asking “Do humans sin?” It’s a silly question and the answer is obvious.

Is conservatism as a philosophy inherently and irredeemably racist? No. Conservatism, at its core, believes in the individual right of man to govern himself and not be subjected to the caprice of other men, and that right is bestowed on all of us, regardless of race, by our Creator. Therefore, conservatives as a whole are not racists, and those racists among us are motivated by factors other than their conservatism.

On the other hand, the Democratic Party, the standard bearer for modern liberalism, has completely washed itself of its history of virulent and violent racism dating back to the Reconstruction era, if not before. It conveniently ignores the fact that none of the civil rights legislation of today, including the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act, would be on the books if it wasn’t for the Republican Party. It also conveniently ignores the subtle racism of their patriarchal policies toward black people.

Liberals like to say that the racist elements of the party, primarily southern Democrats, left their ranks after the civil rights movement of the 1960s and became Republicans, but even this widely accepted myth crumbles under scrutiny.

I wrote about the GOP’s “southern strategy” in my book, SELLOUT: Musings from Uncle Tom’s Porch, and even I didn’t delve far enough into the data to offer a sound analysis devoid of myth. I accepted the mantra that even some leaders in the GOP chanted, and described the strategy as a cynical attempt by a political party to win disaffected voters through appeals to their prejudices, one of which was race.

An analysis of the data, however, reveal that race couldn’t have been the centerpiece of the southern strategy because 1) President Nixon and the GOP were firm and vocal in their support for civil rights, and federal affirmative action programs began on Nixon’s watch, 2) it wasn’t until the 1980s that white Southerners trended more Republican than Democrat, and 3) this argument discounts the leftward lurch of the Democratic Party that alienated not just Southerners, but middle-class Americans in general, on a wide range of issues other than race.

Moreover, the strategy was implemented at a time when the South was becoming less racist, not more, and the demographics were changing. In truth, the southern strategy was not predicated on racist whites leaving the Democratic Party, but the Democratic Party leaving middle-class America behind and adopting a more radical identity. The fact that some who left the Democrats to become Republicans were racists does not indict the party or its central principle of conservatism, as their decision had more to do with their limited political options than a concerted effort by the GOP to attract them.

It also does a disservice to the South which, despite its evolution, is once again under assault for its conservative values, and being labeled as racist in spite of evidence to the contrary.

Two southern states, Louisiana and South Carolina, elected Americans of Indian descent, Bobby Jindal and Nikki Haley respectively, as their heads of state. Florida’s lieutenant governor, Jennifer Carroll, is black. The two black conservatives in the U.S. Congress, Tim Scott and Allen West, hail from South Carolina and Florida respectively.

The elections of Scott and West are particularly noteworthy because of the overwhelming support each of them received from the Tea Party movement, which has also been smeared by the Left as racist.

These “racists,” however, chose Tim Scott,a black man, over the son of the late segregationist Strom Thurmond, and the son of the late Carroll Campbell, former governor of South Carolina, in last year’s GOP primary. It is the same class of voters, those likely to vote in the South Carolina GOP primary, that chose another black man, Herman Cain, as the winner of the presidential debate.

These “racists” sent Allen West to the U.S. Congress as the first black Republican to represent that state in the U.S. Congress since the 1870s.

In my travels, I speak to a lot of Tea Party and GOP groups and, if they could nominate their favorite candidate for president today, it would be Allen West, with Herman Cain right behind him. The warm and genuine reception I receive from these same groups further amplifies the truth I’m speaking.

You can speak the myth until you’re blue in the face, but racists simply wouldn’t support a black person for public office, especially the highest office in the land, and not with the unrestrained enthusiasm and affection that I’ve witnessed. This is apparent to anyone who pays attention and whose brain isn’t swimming in the liberal Kool-Aid.

Most conservatives oppose President Obama because of his philosophy and his policies, not because of his race. Most conservatives embrace Herman Cain, Allen West, Tim Scott, and other black public figures because of their philosophy and their policies, not because of their race.

At the end of the day, which mindset is more racist?

The one that encourages individual liberty and initiative over group grievances and dependency, because we believe each individual has something to offer the world, and is capable of success?

As the great black author Zora Neale Hurston put it, “It would be against all nature for all the Negroes to be either at the bottom, top, or in between. We will go where the internal drive carries us like everybody else. It is up to the individual.”

Or is it more racist to presume we’re inherently incapable of navigating “the boisterous sea of liberty,” in the words of Thomas Jefferson? Is the mindset that wants to protect us because we can’t protect ourselves, that presumes we are children rather than men and women, uplifting or demeaning?

President George W. Bush called it “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” Black historian G. Carter Woodson rejected such condescension as an attempt to “discredit the Negro as a capable competitor in the economic battle of life.”

Success stories like Robert Taft High School in Cincinnati, Ohio, where the graduation rate among the almost all-black student body rose from 18 percent to 95 percent in ten years, and virtually all graduates are destined for four-year universities, are possible because the students were told they can do it, and nothing less than excellence is expected and demanded of them.

The motto of Anthony Smith, the black principal who took over this failing school nine years ago? “Failure is not an option.” The black students at the school now outscore white students statewide in math, reading and science.

Don’t tell me we need to be patronized in order to make it in America. We need to be challenged, because we are strong and resilient people. That is our heritage, a heritage that liberals have stolen from us, whatever their intentions.

Behind the purported compassion of white liberals for black people is a preening condescension that says “we’re here to care for you because you can’t care for yourself.”

If racism is defined as the belief that “a particular race is superior to others,” then what in the world do you call the liberal presumption about the ability of black people to make it in the world without their help?

To me, that paternalistic attitude sounds far too much like the mindset from a particularly evil part of our past, as described by historian Kenneth Stampp:

The most generous master, so long as he was determined to be a master, could be paternal only toward a fawning dependent; for slavery, by its nature, could never be a relationship between equals, Ideally it was the relationship of parent and child. The slave who had nearly lost his manhood, who lost confidence in himself, who stood to receive the favors and the affection of a patriarch.

So I hereby declare the time has finally come for Americans of discernment and goodwill to put the myth of the racist Right to rest. It will be a festive occasion, resembling New Orleans jazz funerals after the deceased have been interred in their final resting place. The passing of this myth is a cause for celebration.

Those who persist in trying to raise this myth from the dead are either weak-minded and easily manipulable, or demagogues who worship power over the truth, and are worthy of nothing but our scorn.

From now on, when you read of or hear someone uttering this inane charge, an appropriate response would be, “If that all you’ve got?” Regrettably for them, it is.

In their attempts to prop up a corpse, they have as much credibility as those who think Elvis is alive and enjoying fruity libations on some tropical island with Tupac Shakur.
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Why Martin Luther King Was Republican
by Frances Rice

It should come as no surprise that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Republican. In that era, almost all black Americans were Republicans. Why? From its founding in 1854 as the anti-slavery party until today, the Republican Party has championed freedom and civil rights for blacks. And as one pundit so succinctly stated, the Democrat Party is as it always has been, the party of the four S's: slavery, secession, segregation and now socialism.

It was the Democrats who fought to keep blacks in slavery and passed the discriminatory Black Codes and Jim Crow laws. The Democrats started the Ku Klux Klan to lynch and terrorize blacks. The Democrats fought to prevent the passage of every civil rights law beginning with the civil rights laws of the 1860s, and continuing with the civil rights laws of the 1950s and 1960s.

During the civil rights era of the 1960s, Dr. King was fighting the Democrats who stood in the school house doors, turned skin-burning fire hoses on blacks and let loose vicious dogs. It was Republican President Dwight Eisenhower who pushed to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and sent troops to Arkansas to desegregate schools. President Eisenhower also appointed Chief Justice Earl Warren to the U.S. Supreme Court, which resulted in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision ending school segregation. Much is made of Democrat President Harry Truman's issuing an Executive Order in 1948 to desegregate the military. Not mentioned is the fact that it was Eisenhower who actually took action to effectively end segregation in the military.

Democrat President John F. Kennedy is lauded as a proponent of civil rights. However, Kennedy voted against the 1957 Civil Rights Act while he was a senator, as did Democrat Sen. Al Gore Sr. And after he became President, Kennedy was opposed to the 1963 March on Washington by Dr. King that was organized by A. Phillip Randolph, who was a black Republican. President Kennedy, through his brother Atty. Gen. Robert Kennedy, had Dr. King wiretapped and investigated by the FBI on suspicion of being a Communist in order to undermine Dr. King.

In March of 1968, while referring to Dr. King's leaving Memphis, Tenn., after riots broke out where a teenager was killed, Democrat Sen. Robert Byrd (W.Va.), a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, called Dr. King a "trouble-maker" who starts trouble, but runs like a coward after trouble is ignited. A few weeks later, Dr. King returned to Memphis and was assassinated on April 4, 1968.

Given the circumstances of that era, it is understandable why Dr. King was a Republican. It was the Republicans who fought to free blacks from slavery and amended the Constitution to grant blacks freedom (13th Amendment), citizenship (14th Amendment) and the right to vote (15th Amendment). Republicans passed the civil rights laws of the 1860s, including the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Reconstruction Act of 1867 that was designed to establish a new government system in the Democrat-controlled South, one that was fair to blacks. Republicans also started the NAACP and affirmative action with Republican President Richard Nixon's 1969 Philadelphia Plan (crafted by black Republican Art Fletcher) that set the nation's fist goals and timetables. Although affirmative action now has been turned by the Democrats into an unfair quota system, affirmative action was begun by Nixon to counter the harm caused to blacks when Democrat President Woodrow Wilson in 1912 kicked all of the blacks out of federal government jobs.

Few black Americans know that it was Republicans who founded the Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Unknown also is the fact that Republican Sen. Everett Dirksen from Illinois was key to the passage of civil rights legislation in 1957, 1960, 1964 and 1965. Not mentioned in recent media stories about extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act is the fact that Dirksen wrote the language for the bill. Dirksen also crafted the language for the Civil Rights Act of 1968 which prohibited discrimination in housing. President Lyndon Johnson could not have achieved passage of civil rights legislation without the support of Republicans.

Critics of Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater, who ran for President against Johnson in 1964, ignore the fact that Goldwater wanted to force the Democrats in the South to stop passing discriminatory laws and thus end the need to continuously enact federal civil rights legislation.

Those who wrongly criticize Goldwater also ignore the fact that Johnson, in his 4,500 State of the Union Address delivered on Jan. 4, 1965, mentioned scores of topics for federal action, but only 35 words were devoted to civil rights. He did not mention one word about voting rights. Then in 1967, showing his anger with Dr. King's protest against the Vietnam War, Johnson referred to Dr. King as "that Nigger preacher."

Contrary to the false assertions by Democrats, the racist "Dixiecrats" did not all migrate to the Republican Party. "Dixiecrats" declared that they would rather vote for a "yellow dog" than vote for a Republican because the Republican Party was know as the party for blacks. Today, some of those "Dixiecrats" continue their political careers as Democrats, including Robert Byrd, who is well known for having been a "Keagle" in the Ku Klux Klan.

Another former "Dixiecrat" is former Democrat Sen. Ernest Hollings, who put up the Confederate flag over the state Capitol when he was the governor of South Carolina. There was no public outcry when Democrat Sen. Christopher Dodd praised Byrd as someone who would have been "a great senator for any moment," including the Civil War. Yet Democrats denounced then-Senate GOP leader Trent Lott for his remarks about Sen. Strom Thurmond (R.-S.C.). Thurmond was never in the Ku Klux Klan and defended blacks against lynching and the discriminatory poll taxes imposed on blacks by Democrats. If Byrd and Thurmond were alive during the Civil War, and Byrd had his way, Thurmond would have been lynched.

The 30-year odyssey of the South switching to the Republican Party began in the 1970s with President Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy," which was an effort on the part of Nixon to get Christians in the South to stop voting for Democrats who did not share their values and were still discriminating against their fellow Christians who happened to be black. Georgia did not switch until 2002, and some Southern states, including Louisiana, are still controlled by Democrats.

Today, Democrats, in pursuit of their socialist agenda, are fighting to keep blacks poor, angry and voting for Democrats. Examples of how egregiously Democrats act to keep blacks in poverty are numerous.

After wrongly convincing black Americans that a minimum wage increase was a good thing, the Democrats on August 3 kept their promise and killed the minimum wage bill passed by House Republicans on July 29. The blockage of the minimum wage bill was the second time in as many years that Democrats stuck a legislative finger in the eye of black Americans. Senate Democrats on April 1, 2004, blocked passage of a bill to renew the 1996 welfare reform law that was pushed by Republicans and vetoed twice by President Clinton before he finally signed it. Since the welfare reform law expired in September 2002, Congress had passed six extensions, and the latest expired on June 30, 2004. Opposed by the Democrats are school choice opportunity scholarships that would help black children get out of failing schools and Social Security reform, even though blacks on average lose $10,000 in the current system because of a shorter life expectancy than whites (72.2 years for blacks vs. 77.5 years for whites).

Democrats have been running our inner-cities for the past 30 to 40 years, and blacks are still complaining about the same problems. More than $7 trillion dollars have been spent on poverty programs since Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty with little, if any, impact on poverty. Diabolically, every election cycle, Democrats blame Republicans for the deplorable conditions in the inner-cities, then incite blacks to cast a protest vote against Republicans.

In order to break the Democrats' stranglehold on the black vote and free black Americans from the Democrat Party's economic plantation, we must shed the light of truth on the Democrats. We must demonstrate that the Democrat Party policies of socialism and dependency on government handouts offer the pathway to poverty, while Republican Party principles of hard work, personal responsibility, getting a good education and ownership of homes and small businesses offer the pathway to prosperity.

Ms. Rice is chairman of the National Black Republican Association (NBRA) and may be contacted at www.NBRA.info.