Tomjoe: Race and Republicans

[Farren]

We got into a conversation in another thread about, essentially which party in the USA attracts more racists, which kind of lost its focus.

I appreciate that the following people represent a subset of rather than all republicans but this is a significant subset talking about Condi Rice' comments on slavery:

Rice hits U.S. 'birth defect' (http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1992969/posts)


Ms. Rice.....your forefathers were betrayed by their brothers....and sold into slavery. The white man brought them here to help settle this country..... and God blessed you in that white men helped set them free......so you could be blessed even more......by being born to live in the greatest nation on earth....with freedom and prosperity.

...

“Europeans by choice and Africans in chains”

Uh, not quite, unless you mean the Europeans who came here seeking religious freedom could have given up and followed the state religion back home.

...

Eggxactly, Moonman!

She’s got bad teeth, no boobs and loves the Palestinians and other enemies of Israel and the U.S.! How could ANY patriot want Sleeza for VP?

...

Children and women are taken into slavery today,
and Dr. Rice gives US money to the slavers.

Stockholm syndrome? or just a stupid use of
American taxpayer money for Dr. Rice’s fawning
before slavers, murderers, and terrorists.

...

Well honey, you just made the case for euthanasia.

What a maroon.

...


How about a truly GREAT, non-RINOed black female American named Prof. Carol Swain of Vanderbilt? This lady is TOUGH, believes in law and order and a sealed Border and is very well-spoken, so much so that Lou Dobbs has her on his show now regularly?

...

Well, Condi, guess what. Some of us WHITE folks were poor and did not get a head start either. But we took a good look at the opportunities that America offered and went for it. Why don’t blacks do just that? You certainly did..now explain the others!

...

f she is so proud to be black and wants to be a role model, what's with the straightening of the hair? Same goes for Michelle Obama.

It actually is a form of self-hatred and denial. Natural hair can be beautiful.

Some of the most racist people are blacks in the manner in which they treat each other.

...

Kwame a river

...

“and many republicans want this a-hole as a VP???”

As far as I’m concerned, she just jumped the shark.

...

I guess all the talk of her intelligence and education was just hype. Just like HRC.

...

Condi is another mealy mouth dufus. In pure pander mode. This is the least racist nation on the planet. Tons of affirmative action and welfare money available. If you don’t like it GTFO. Find a better place to live like Zimbabwe maybe

...

Maybe she should go back to Africa, where she could get a "founding" experience.

...



It goes on and on. Can you find a similar group of Dems? Can you understand why foreign Internet users would form a pretty clear impression about which party in the USA is home to all the old-fashioned racists?

[Uthgar the Brazen]

I will state this clearly for all peoples of the Earth to see, assuming they have internet access and all that stuff:

Teh intr4w3bz makes people stupid.

[TomJoe]

A whole thread directed at me. Cue the Peter Gabriel music.

:notes: Big time ... :notes:

Honestly, I can't be bothered to wade through the mess that is FreeRepublic and I also can't be bothered to purposely search the internet for idiocy. I can point you to the fact that many people will vote Republican in the general election, but come local politics, will vote Democrat. I believe LadyShea alluded to this particular phenomenon in Alabama in a thread here at FF. Does that make them a "group of Dems"? I'm sure you'd disagree.

ETA: I will do this though. I'll point to California and the huge gap between black and hispanic (and to a degree asian) democratic voters.

Marcela Sanchez - Beyond the Campaign Trail, Addressing a Racial Divide - washingtonpost.com (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/27/AR2008032702328.html?hpid=news-col-blog)

Paula D. McClain, Duke University political science professor and co-director of the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Social Sciences, has found that a majority of Latinos maintain stereotypical views about African-Americans. In the center's most recent survey of blacks, whites and Latinos in Durham, N.C., Memphis, Tenn., and Little Rock, Ark., the majority of Latinos interviewed said they believe that all or almost all blacks are on welfare. Seventy-two percent of Latinos in Durham, for instance, said they believe this, eclipsing the 18 percent of whites who hold the same view.

[Farren]

Fair enough.

BTW just so you know I didn't go trawling for that just wandered into it from another site.

[godfry n. glad]

I'm not quite sure what's goin' down here, but I'd like to butt in and point out that it's obvious that the greatest portion of racism, in this case, discrimination against blacks, is in the Republican Party. This is because huge numbers of former Democrats from the South, being primarily those who resisted desegregation, known as the Dixiecrats, defected to the Republican Party....This is why the "Southern Strategy" has worked so well since Nixon.

[BDS]

We Democrats are well known for hating white people, especially white males, and extra-especially rich white male Republicans, like Dick Cheney. If that isn't racist and sexist, I don't know what is!

[Watser?]

You don't know what is.

[Dingfod]

I'm not quite sure what's goin' down here, but I'd like to butt in and point out that it's obvious that the greatest portion of racism, in this case, discrimination against blacks, is in the Republican Party. This is because huge numbers of former Democrats from the South, being primarily those who resisted desegregation, known as the Dixiecrats, defected to the Republican Party....This is why the "Southern Strategy" has worked so well since Nixon.Many of them are still registered Democrats.

That said, almost all of the most overt racists I know are Republican. Most Democrats I know are only subtle racists like myself and feel guilty about it.

[Brimshack]

I think this is a good time to remind oneself that values are less of a yes or no thing than a which-is-more-important thing. The question for most people isn't whether or not they are against racism so much as it is whether or not that is sufficiently important to override their thoughts on gun control, abortion, taxes, regulation, environment, economic development, national security, etc. For most Republicans race takes a back seat to the other issues. It isn't necessarily that they endorse racism (at least not consciously), but in a race between a bigot who is strong on national security and promises them lower taxes and an anti-bigot whom they suspect will weaken our country's defences and impose more taxes and regulations on them, ...in that case, I think most Republicans will opt for the former, even if they don't like his racism.

(Whoo-hoo! massive run-on sentence, and I'm leaving it. Let freedom ring!)

I think Nixon and then Reagan made a conscious choice to garner the bigot vote, and I don't even think they did it out of personal prejudice. It was an opportunity and they seized it. Ever since then, simply by keeping their policies consistent with bigotry the Republican party has kept that vote.

As my sister once told me, most liberals don't understand that most Republicans don't like Jesse Helms or Strom Thurmond. But of course, she said this when both were still Congressmen and honoured members of the Republican party. ...okay, so she was probably right. Most Republicans rejected their racism, but only in principle (and how meaningless principles can be). That rejection was not important enough to them to do anything about it.

And with that said, I think most of those comments apply only to overtly racist feelings. I haven't even addressed the many ways in which latest prejudice manifests in the politics of even your average, nominally anti-racist Republican. That would require looking at Democrats too.

[Kevlar]

My grandparents were old school Southern Democrats, and they were very racist. Kind, sweet, old white people... but don't get them started on black people or you'll hear something akin to a klan rally. You will hear the "N" word dropped like they were gangster rapping. You have to understand that all these feelings were rooted in extreme fear after the fallout of the civil war. Their hatred wasn't exactly like my generation's, it was more like the fear American's had of Muslim people after 9/11.

At the same time they hated Reagan and the evangelical movement. In an odd way, they were what we would call liberal in most other senses. As a matter of fact, my grandfather is the one who started me on the path to atheism.

My parents were the ones that became the evangelical republicans, much to my grandparents chagrin. They thought of their selves as being non-racist because they never allowed us to us the "N" word, but that was the extent of the tolerance lesson.

So in my family, it was definitely the case that we were racists that transitioned from Democrat to the Republican parties, but we had no converts.

[Adam]

Brimshack makes a good point. It's not that Republicans, in general, are overt racists, it's simply that the GOP has found that it can appeal to those voters who are overt racists without disgusting its non-racist members badly enough for them to leave. It's a simple game of how many people I can appeal to via coded references to race versus how many people I'm going to turn off badly enough to lose their votes.

[Clutch Munny]

"We're not racists. But if you are, well, then we're the party for you!"

[godfry n. glad]

Egg Zack Lee!