The Democratic Party as the Party of Race

The Democratic Party as the Party of Race

 - by Roger L Simon

 

As someone who was a sixties civil rights worker, wrote movies for Richard Pryor (successfully) and Whoopi Goldberg (unsuccessfully), and has had the pleasure of working with many talented African Americans at PJ Media for nearly seven years now, I think I have earned the right to write what should be painfully obvious to everyone — most of the racism in America today is from blacks (aided and abetted by white liberals) toward whites.

In fact, it’s getting to be outrageously so. The rude treatment of Mitt Romney at the NAACP convention is yet another data point in what has become an all-too-predictable scenario.

Much of the reason for this stems from the extreme dependency of the Democratic Party on race politics. With union membership dwindling, the party would literally disintegrate without the overwhelming support of African Americans and Hispanic Americans. Without at least the perception of racism, the Democratic Party has only marginal support. The party is forced to encourage it for its survival.

 

A whole network of connections, careers, and lifetyles has evolved from that, many of them largely counter-productive. Indeed, the argument can be made that the Democratic Party has destroyed the lives of minorities in order to save itself. Their programs, from the Great Society onwards, have done nothing substantial to improve minority lives, only to encourage dependency. The proof of this failure we see before us today in the dreadful statistics on black and Hispanic unemployment, far worse than the already horrendous national numbers. The more minorities are “helped,” the worse their lives become, the less equal we are.

The Democratic Party is then the true racist party, trapped in nostalgia for a time when genuine racism — Jim Crow, etc. — stalked the land. They have to assume significant white racism still exists because not to do so threatens the fabric of their being. A Tea Partier has to be a racist so you can dismiss his ideas without having to confront them or even think about them. Mitt Romney is just another rich white man so you don’t have to deal with what he is saying, you don’t have to evaluate whether he has a solution to a mutual problem.

It’s all racist as I understood the word in the sixties — making assumptions about other people so you don’t have to consider their humanity — only it’s now in reverse. This isn’t to say that whites undergo severe oppression. They don’t. But the racial climate of our society is increasingly polarized and the survival of the Democratic Party, as presently constituted, is the cause. Everyone’s life suffers as a consequence, with the exception perhaps of those who make a living off race-baiting. That the minorities being exploited suffer most of all is almost a cliche. Unfortunately, it also happens to be true.

Correcting this depressing conundrum will not be easy. It is a long time in the making and is based on numerous mythologies and misconceptions, not to mention deeply entrenched habit. It is also based on vengeance, a vengeance fanned by the liberal media for the preservation of their own power and to validate that same nostalgic self-righteousness. But vengeance is an especially powerful creator of racism (remember Gandhi: an eye for an eye and the world will die). Because whites behaved in an atrociously racist manner toward blacks in the past cannot be allowed as any sort of justification for the reverse. That is a prescription for perpetuated mutual destruction.

And yet that remains the spoken/unspoken predicate of election 2012. Just as America rejoiced in electing Barack Obama in 2008 as the first (part) African American president, we are being asked to reelect him for similar reasons. But it would also be racist, perhaps more so, actually to reelect him for similar reasons. The color of Barack Obama’s skin is and should be irrelevant. And yet, of course, it has not been and continues to be the trump card of the Democratic Party. If Barack Obama were white, he would be one of the least likely candidates for reelection in American history. Instead, despite demonstrated incompetence, he remains in contention, perhaps even the favorite. Under current conditions, however, the reelection of Barack Obama can be seen only as a triumph of racism.

http://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/2012/07/13/the-democratic-party-as-the-party-of-race/?singlepage=true