Guest Post by Adam
It’s not so much a rule as an instinct: I generally cringe when the first thing someone says to me is how comfortable they are with black people. (Uh, thanks?) It’s partially because I’m one of those people who happens to believe everyone’s a little racist. But that doesn’t really matter to me, what matters is whether people actively indulge those inclinations, and the Republican Party has a recent history of doing just that.
Douglass McKinnon’s Op-Ed isn’t quite that bad at first, but the main point of his essay seems to be to establish himself as “not racist” and by extension, the Republican Party:
I am a Republican and conservative who finds much about Barack Obama to admire. I am also a Republican and conservative who spent my formative years growing up in abject poverty and being homeless a number of times. During that time, I often lived in majority black neighborhoods and was many times the only white child in class.
When asked what, if any, positives I took away from that time, I always say, “my immersion into black America.” To me then, to me now, and to me always, black America is a great America. To this day, I feel more comfortable with that community than anywhere else.
McKinnon, however, cringes when someone states the obvious.
It is for that reason and more that I was so disappointed with Obama’s recent comments regarding Republicans and race. At a fundraiser in Florida before a majority African-American audience, the senator said, “We know what kind of campaign [Republicans are] going to run. They’re going to make you afraid. They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. ‘He’s young and inexperienced, and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?’”
What, the Republicans? Make a big deal about of barack HUSSEIN obama’s middle name? Yeah right.
Obama isn’t making that statement in a vacuum, or even in the context of the last few months, he’s making it about a party that saw the election of its greatest champion begin in a town where three civil rights workers were murdered. He’s making it in the context of a political culture that has seen race used as a wedge issue by Republicans, in which the last two Republican presidents before W. were being advised by the guy who said this:
“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger,’ ” said Atwater. “By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.”
Somehow, while referencing the Op-Ed in which Bob Herbert used this quote from Lee Atwater laying out the racism of his political philosophy, McKinnon manages to be “saddened” as well as “offended” (I don’t know about you, but reading that column makes me sad for an entirely different reason). What is offensive about Herbert’s column is presumably the same thing that is offensive about Obama’s comments in Florida, which is that the GOP has in the past, and will continue to use racism as a political strategy. In fact, they already have by trying to run against the blackety black scariness of Barack Obama in Louisiana against Don Cazayoux and Mississippi against Travis Childers, and both times the strategy backfired by driving up the black vote.
But in keeping with one of the more bizarre aspects of our current racial conversation, saying something is racist is actually more offensive than doing or saying something racist. McKinnon muses:
As a Republican with a conservative point of view, I have written more on the greatness of black America, and the need for my party to reach out to that community, than just about anyone I know. Many of the single black moms I knew were some of the most “conservative” people I had ever met. They were death on a cracker when it came to law and order, going to church, staying in school, right and wrong, and personal responsibility, and it was and is my belief that their “real-life” success stories could only make the Republican Party a better and less hypocritical entity.
I’m sure they would be if the GOP wasn’t openly campaigning on anti-black sentiment, often on reductive caricatures of the urban black and poor often regarding the very women McKinnon names above. There are some very conservative folks in the black community, but rather than support McKinnon’s point that the GOP isn’t racist, it further indicts the party as so hostile to black folks that it has trouble attracting those who share their politics.
I am not a racist. I, like Obama, am simply an American who wants the best for my country and its people. As the campaign progresses, it is my hope that the gifted and caring senator from Illinois will choose his words a bit more carefully.
Millions of Americans have waited for this time in history. The high road is his to travel.
I hope Obama is careful with his words too . Not because Obama is wrong, but because, as I said above, people tend to be more outraged about accusations of racism than actual racism, the very dynamic that fuels this Op-Ed. But as far as the high road is concerned, it would be nice if some folks in the Republican Party could actually find it first, or if the GOP would listen to those Republicans that do. A good start would be not attempting to whitewash the party’s past.