Not all Republicans are racists but it would be folly not to argue that most racists in the United States are Republicans. The
Grand Old Party’s stance on racial and gender inequality has been a
hallmark of the Republican Party since the early 1950s. But it wasn’t
always that way.
Scholars debate when exactly the tides turned and the Democratic and
Republican Parties morphed into the ones we know today, yet no
presidential historian of merit can argue that the Republican Party of
the 1860s and the Republican Party of today are in any way related other
than name.
A far right wing pundit could weave tenuous factual threads from the
past and present into a blanket confirmation-bias argument, however the
reason the current G.O.P. still banners Lincoln as their political
patriarch is, simply put: human rights. And had Lincoln been a
flag-waver for states’ rights (which is one of the tenets of the current
Republican Party), the U.S. would have been cleaved irretrievably into
two countries.
The original Party of Lincoln’s legacy is that of a beacon for human
equality — a lantern that today’s Republicans have repeatedly, and
legislatively, snuffed out.
Southern Republicans began openly splitting within their party while
the Emancipation Proclamation was still being drafted. And those rabble
rousers would, over time, become the leaders of the Republican Party
that we know today: wealthy white men afraid of losing their social and
political stature bound together in their mutual racial and
gender-biased bigotry.
And during this time, the pro-abolitionist faction within the party
who fought for the rights of freed slaves — who overturned President
Andrew Johnson’s veto on the Civil Rights Act of 1866 — were ironically
known as the Radical Republicans. However, not surprisingly, their
archenemies were the Southern conservatives. The seeds were already
planted for a major shift within the Grand Old Party, and it would yield
a bitter fruit, ripe for the pickin’, in exactly 100 years.
___________
The Democratic Party has long been the party of the people, enacting
social reforms, creating social programs that help the poor or infirmed,
and passing laws that protect the rights of all American citizens.
Those civil-rights battles were fought piecemeal through many
presidential administrations but the one thing they have in common is
that after Lincoln they were all signed into law by Democratic
presidents.
See how the presidents rank overall.
The second wave of equality came under President Wilson, who
succumbed to the demands of Suffragettes and helped pass the Nineteenth
Amendment allowing women to vote. (The fact that Wilson opened up an
entire new block of voters seemed to all but assure a third term for the
stroke-addled president. But that would not be the case, and just like
axed kegs of Scotch whiskey and busted bottles of beers on the eve of
Wilson’s decidedly unpopular Prohibition, Wilson’s reelection went down
the drain.)
President Franklin Roosevelt, with his implementation of the New Deal
featured a stipulation that at least 10 percent of welfare assistance
be allocated to African-Americans (who coincidentally made up 10 percent
of the population at the time and were also within the 20 percent of
the population who were living below poverty levels).
Roosevelt’s so-called “Black Cabinet,” (Federal Council of Negro
Affairs) which was comprised of forty-five African-Americans (the most
famous being Mary Jane Bethune) in lower level federal executive
positions, began to swing more blacks toward the Democratic Party. In
1932 most blacks voted overwhelmingly Republican but just four years
later Roosevelt, along with members of the Black Cabinet working in
tandem with urban mayors (most notably in Chicago), won over the black
vote throughout the country.
Prior to 1948 the South was steadfastly Democrat until segregationist
Dixiecrats
lead by South Carolinian senator Strom Thurmond began whittling away at
their party – all under the bunting of “states’ rights.”
By the time President Lyndon Johnson barreled though the first civil
rights legislation since Reconstruction with the Civil Rights Acts of
1964 and 1965 the party schisms had changed irrevocably.
It was southern-styled, boiled-in-wool racism that officially altered the Republican Party.
Democrats
below the Mason-Dixon Line broke with Johnson, a fellow Southerner,
fought against desegregation and other morally soiled remnants of the
Southland’s “peculiar institutions.” And as blatant racist ideology
began to infiltrate the Party of Lincoln, Republicans who stood for
racial equality had nowhere to stand and thus crossed the aisle to side
with the Democrats.
It was southern-styled, boiled-in-wool racism that officially altered the Republican Party.
Continuing with President Carter’s push for the women’s Equal Rights Amendment and to President Obama’s recent support for
gay rights (specifically marriage equality), the Democratic Party has consistently been the party of the people since Wilson.
Meanwhile Republicans, including Governor Romney, continue to tamp
down the rights of others by proposing the Defense of Marriage Act,
which would be the only Amendment to the Constitution that would
actually deny American citizens of equal rights.
___________
The term “post-racial America” ebbed into our collective vernacular
during President Obama’s first inauguration in 2008; we had entered a
new era and the electorate had, in effect, made reparations for our
nation’s soul. And it seemed, for a breeze of a time, to be all behind
us. Yet the bigotry continued.
If it appeared there were increased demonstrations of racism during
the 2012 presidential campaign season, there’s a reason for that: A
survey from the Associated Press reported that people who admit they
harbor prejudice against blacks and Hispanics actually increased in four
years from 48 percent to 51 percent.
As Election Day neared in 2012, the expressions of bigoted disdain
toward both the president and the first lady were cresting. Photographs
of
chairs being hung in pseudo-effigy
were being reported daily and while that may sound like child’s play to
some, the implication carries historical racial overtones. And
throughout the country, Halloween “decorations” of the president could
be seen swinging in lawns from California to Indiana, and even a
mannequin with the likeness of the president was photographed being
lynched on a truck in the parking lot of a county fair in North
Carolina.
How many college degrees must a black man get
— to what lofty ambitions must a black man aspire — how refined must a
black man’s demeanor be? How honorable must a black man be as a son, as a
husband, as a father, as a president? And to what extent must be prove
himself as a man before he can rip off the mantle of “
nigger,” “pickaninny,” and “
sambo?”
It is a testament to the intellectual inferiority of Teflon bigots
that no matter the success or mental superiority of the black man, to a
racist it’s all for naught. While most signs of belligerent prejudice
can be seen in impoverished rural areas within the
Bible Belt,
other racial slips of the tongues are coming straight from the mouths
of G.O.P. politicos: Republican Governor Sununu even mocked General
Colin Powell’s endorsement of Obama saying, essentially, that Powell, a
Republican, was only voting for the president based on his race.
In October 2012, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson (Colin’s former
chief-of-staff and fellow Republican), came out publicly and admitted
rampant racism within his own party:
“My party, unfortunately, is the bastion of those people —
not all of them, but most of them — who are still basing their
positions on race. Let me just be candid: My party is full of racists,
and the real reason a considerable portion of my party wants President
Obama out of the White House has nothing to do with the content of his
character, nothing to do with his competence as commander-in-chief and
president, and everything to do with the color of his skin, and that’s
despicable.”
Many right wing politicians’ racial biases are so ingrained, their
loathing of Obama so intense, and their prejudicial comments so common
that they barely even registered on the radar. Governor Palin’s recent
“shuck and jive” comment about Obama (a reference to cartooned
foot-dragging “darkies”) went virtually unnoticed. And while
twice-failed would-be politician Donald Trump in an attempted
extortion-esque promise to donate $5 million to a charity of Obama’s
choice if the president released his college transcript simply came off
as buffoonery, few people noticed its racial intent. Trump taunted via
Twitter:
“If my offer is refused, every undecided OH voter will be
fully aware that Obama denied $5M to charity all because he is hiding
something.”
(As an aside, Trump had the wherewithal to wager $5 million to help
people and because no one would play his game, he did not donate it.
This is further proof that his bet is not an act of altruism, but a
desperate act of egotism.)
But what most people missed from Trump’s self-celebrated “very, very
big” stunt is the racial intent in his so-called offer. Trump believed,
as did Rush Limbaugh (who has played a song on his radio show entitled,
“Barack the Magic Negro”) that the president was accepted to Columbia
University and Harvard Law School based solely on Affirmative Action.
Even if this were the case (though no evidence exists to validate the
claim) Trump’s intent to parade Obama as a man of lesser intelligence is
moot; not only was Obama the president of the
Harvard Law Review but he also graduated magna cum laude.
And those aforementioned Republicans actually consider themselves
members of the Grand Old Party. Were he alive today, Lincoln would be a
Democrat and they’d be stringing him up by the nearest poplar tree,
too.
Maybe it wasn’t a mirror that Colin Powell looked into for voting inspiration — maybe it was a
history book.
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