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| GOP - "I can 't be a racist, my best friend is black" |
We have learned of late how truly racist teapublicans are, but that's ok. Why you ask? Because "One of their Best Friends is Black".
Some of you may recognize this from the 1960s. It was the standard moderate-to-liberal White excuse that they couldn’t possibly be racist, because … “one of my best friends is Black,” or, more in keeping with the decade, “one of my best friends is a Negro.”
It’s sort of like the 2000 RNC Convention in Philadelphia, whose stage looked like a road show revival of ‘Porgy and Bess’ but when the cameras panned to the obligatory crowd reaction scenes, it was a sea of White. Or the Sarah Palin rallies in 2008, which were seas of White, excepting the poor undercover Secret Service Detail, who were the only Black men (or Black Persons) in the arena, and must have felt pretty strange. After all, Secret Service are, by nature, undercover, and being the only Black person in a suit in an entire arena of Righty-Whities - coming to listen to racially coded language has got to be a surreal experience that few have ever experienced.
Remember back when - with former CEO Herman Cain on the stage, the once “Who Wants To Be President?” Game Show, or, perhaps, “Future American Idol” - the stage is Lily-White with the exception of Herman Cain, the non-politician candidate who gets in, while the former Governor of Louisiana, Buddy Roehmer, is consistently excluded, etc.
Why? Because “some of our Best Friends are Black.”
As if that were an excuse. But even Juan Williams, the fired NPR pundit who found that serving his new master at Faux News uses the excuse. In his book tour and to this day, he maintains that his comments that Muslims make him nervous - his defense is that he was active in the Civil Rights movement and wrote a book about how Blacks have been discriminated against.
Or, absurdly, “I can’t be a racist, because some of my best friends are Black.”
I offer this as preface, because this absurdist formulation has reared its head on many occasions this teapublcian campaign season.
But there is no doubt that the GOP is not a party for “Blacks.” Sorry. Teapublicans claim, as does Herman Cain, that if Blacks merely understand their policies, then they’d overcome their “brainwashing,” and vote teapublican.
One cannot forget that the "contemporary Republican Party" was born with the Southern Strategy, winning over the former Jim Crow South to its side of the political aisle, and as a backlash against the civil rights movement. This is a formula for a politics of white grievance mongering and white victimology; a dream world where white conservatives are oppressed, their rights infringed upon by a tyrannical federal government and elite liberal media that are beholden to the interests of the “undeserving poor,” racial minorities, gays, and immigrants.
In keeping with this script in order to win over Red State America, the 2012 teapublican presidential candidates have certainly not disappointed. Both overt racism and dog whistles are delectable temptations that the teapublican presidential nominees cannot resist. With the election of the country’s first African-American president, and a United States that is less white and more diverse, the GOP is in peril. In uncertain times, you go with what you know. For the teapublican Party, this means “dirty boxing,” digging deep into the old bucket of white racism, and using the politics of fear, hostility and anxiety to win over white voters by demagogue Obama.
Racism is an assault on the common good. Racism also does the work of dividing and conquering people with common interests. While the 2012 teapublican candidates are stirring the pot of white racial anxiety, this is a means to a larger end—the destruction of the country’s social safety net, in support of vicious economic austerity policies, and protecting the kleptocrats and financiers at the expense of the working and middle classes.
The point is as clear as a crystal ball. The issue is exclusion, and when you’re as ham-handedly race-obsessed as to put up Herman Cain in as the "token Black" for all teapublicans to an almost entirely White audience, or Ali Akbar as the token Black for all (virtually all-White) Tea Partiers, you DO have a racial problem.
If you watch Faux News, you will note the astonishing profusion of Black “political strategists,” which would seem odd, given their actual proportion of the GOP political strategist class. Couldn’t be intentional “image” manipulation could it?
But you turn the outrageous tokenism inside out and it gives you the true color of the ( Southern-based) GOP’s racial obsessions. The invisible hand always leaves a footprint, and, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.
It’s a denial of facts and a denial of reality, but then, perhaps it’s like Ayn Rand trying to convince greedy millionaires that their rapaciousness is actually moral, that they are the “Atlases” of civilization who hold the world on their mighty shoulders every time they throw a widow or an orphan into the street to get their hands on another piece of real estate.
In this case, since some of their "Best Friends are Black", they can’t possibly be racists.
Alas, accusing a teapublican in this benighted age of denial of facts is, alas, increasingly redundant.
But be careful, before you accuse me of being unfair to teapublicans, I want you to know that this is perceptibly impossible. Why you ask? Because some of my best friends are teapublicans.
NFTOS
Editor-In-Chief
Roger West
