10 Ways Republicans Hide Their Racism
by John Sammon
Sammonsays
Republicans are stupid, but they don't know it, which is one of the reasons the tea party movement of the far right chose as their symbol the Boston Tea Party of the pre-Revolutionary War, a cowardly act of mob vandalism against an unguarded ship carrying British tea in Boston Harbor.
The tea partiers of today never study history, and those few who have never evaluate it. They think the Boston Tea Party was a heroic action.
Some things never change. The colonials of that day were protesting taxes as they do now, but the mob in 1773 dressed as American Indians. Numerous times in American history entire villages of Native American (Indians) were wiped out, men women and children, because they were suspected by the nearest Anglo community of some depredation. The only thing that saved Massachusetts Indians, those few still alive after the Boston Tea Party, was that the colonial's dress-up act was so goddamned clumsily stupid it fooled nobody.
What a fitting symbol for today's tea baggers.
With about as much subtlety as a blunt-force object, members of the far right try to mask the blatant racism that has always defined them. Here are 10 ways they do:
1. State's rights. This has always been a bulwark against attempts by the federal government to legislate equality. States having rights isn't the issue, misusing the rights they've been given is. Officials in Arizona recently criminalized stereotypical Latin-looking skin (if you're a citizen you have to produce papers showing you're not an illegal immigrant), for the same reason officials blocked the school door at Little Rock in support of school segregation. Fear of homogeneity. States rights have always been used to advance racism long before Civil War Confederacy slavers championed it.
2. Racists calling someone with whom they disagree racist. Republicans call the president a racist. This is a smokescreen, or the pot calling the kettle black. Have blacks ever run or promoted a segregationist society? Limbaugh, O'Reilly and myself all grew up as boys in a white-only world. The only blacks we saw were servants on TV. That conditioning is hard to un-do.
3. Lumping blacks with government handouts. Traditionally, black Americans had to look to the federal government for enforcement of equality, because individual states wouldn't. Republicans view blacks and people of color as welfare-sucking leeches. Remember those children's cartoons where the hungry lion looks at a guy and the guy turns into a roast turkey? When conservatives look at a black person, they see a butler or a shoeshine boy with his hand out begging.
4. Small government. How can Republicans harp on how they're for small government, when they set record budget deficits during the Bush years and conduct endless nation-building wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Small government to conservatives means profligate spending on wars and weapons, but none on Americans, especially those of color.
5. Use of tokens. Conservatives realize they can't totally ignore minorities. Thus, the continuing parade of token non-white people in symbolic meaningless posts from Uncle Tom Michael Steele to Bobby Jindal, or as the Roman Emperor Caligula used to say, "use a dog to catch a dog."
6. The threat of violence and lynching. This is a right-wing hallmark with a history that needs no explanation.
7. The use of mindless symbolic euphemisms with no basis of reality. Lightening rod symbols are important to conservatives. Thus, they fixate on words like small government and taxes (see#4 above), even though they themselves spend like drunken sailors on weapons and wars. They accuse the president of being born in a foreign country, and endlessly cite his Arabic-sounding name, a Freudian give-away that in addition to their belief that blacks should know their proper underling place, the only good Arab is a dead Arab.
8. When a disaster happens to mostly people of color, like the earthquake in Haiti, or the debacle at the Superdome in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, watch conservative pundits, politicians and pastors. They will forget their occasional caution and say things like "they deserved it," or "it's God's will, they're in league with the devil because they practice voodoo."
9. Use of icons. Republicans mythologize Ronald Reagan and John Wayne because they represent a white-only simpler time when blacks knew their place. They describe this as American or "family values." The family doesn't include blacks.
10. Republicans even though they won't admit it, believe in a caste system with whites the top tier. They hide this by saying they're protecting the rights of tax payers and "average" Americans. Average means white.
