The Elephant In The Room Is White

The Republican Party has for some time tried to ignore the elephant in the room. Beside the fact that it’s huge and slow moving, Republicans are only now recognizing its lack of color. House leader John Boehner is actually red-faced—with embarrassment. 

How do I say this and remain politically correct: Black, brown, and other-hued Americans are just not great fans of the Republican Party, and apparently, the feeling is mutual. Black people have seldom been invited to the party. Only recently—very recently—has the party been anxious to include people from South of the Border. All of that is likely to change, but slowly. Such ponderous groups take their time crossing the savannah.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party has become the white people’s party. Their political heritage, regardless of where they were born, actually lies in the South, in the plains, mountains, and rural sections of what was once the Confederacy.

This rather un-colorful group earned its reputation in 1957. For the first time since Reconstruction, armed U.S government troops “occupied” one of the United States. (I understand now why Republicans are so afraid of the government.) Arkansas governor Orval Faubus defied a federal court order to desegregate Little Rock High School, preventing a group of black students from entering. The National Guard was sent in to protect the students. The “Little Rock Nine” were labeled “pawns and guinea pigs” of liberal social experiments, and forever after, conservatism tacked right in a storm of racial inequality.

Republicans today are not bigoted, they just want the country back the way it was in the ’50s. (In the South, white folks walked on one side of the street; black people walked on the other; and “Whites Only” signs separated the two.) Today’s conservatives aren’t racist; they just can’t abide a black president, especially if he’s smarter than they are.

Early in his career, Ronald Reagan, shared the podium of prejudice with Orval Faubus and other segregationists; they preached the doctrine of “separate but equal.” State agencies at the time warned that Reagan had created a “dangerous deterioration in the Federal enforcement of civil rights.”*

In 1995, conservative Senate leader Bob Dole introduced legislation to end all Federal affirmative action programs. He later dropped the issue when he ran for President.

Mitt Romney’s recent disgraceful disparagement of the “47 percent,” plus his assertion that Obama won because of  “gifts” lavished on blacks, women, and young people, repeated the slander of an un-enlightened age.

Just this week, Mississippi ratified the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery – only 148 years late, but who’s counting. Gary Wills wrote in 1975 that, “American politics is the South’s revenge for the Civil War.”

Several knotty issues exist in the political rope currently leading the Republican Party:

• The Tea Party-crazed House of Representatives threatening to push us over the fiscal cliff
• Refusals to adopt “Obamacare,” even after it was validated by the Supreme Court
• Rand Paul’s promise to “nullify anything the president does to impose new gun controls”
• The Senate’s routine, obstructionist veto
• The debt ceiling
• Newt Gingrich’s attempt to withhold disaster relief
• The government shutdown
• The culture wars
• Religiously held views on same-sex marriage

The Republican “We Will Nots” are soaked in extremism and smell of racism. It is no coincidence the knots have been tied while our first African American president is in office.

* Source: The New Republic, February 25, 2013.

Jac Flanders is the author of “What I Learned On The Way Down” - eBook and paperback at Amazon.com.