Why the Right is Wrong about Race

Scriptural reflection
Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God. ~ Psalms 68:31 (KJV)

Last week, the Republican Party’s Facebook page had a photo of President Obama eating fried chicken with the caption: “Miscegenation is a crime…Repeal Loving v. Virginia. Whereas the racist stereotype surrounding the candid snapshot of the nation’s first African American president eating fried chicken speaks volumes by itself, the words attached to the graphic are equally distressing. The photo’s negative reference to both miscegenation (an archaic and pejorative term for cohabitation, sexual relations, marriage, or procreation involving persons of different races) and Loving v. Virginia, the milestone U.S. Supreme Court decision that that end the prohibition against interracial marriage as a civil rights issue, is a particularly hateful attack on the president’s biracial ancestry; interestingly, Newsweek posted a blog that the appearance of this anti-miscegenation image coincided with the news story that Keith Bardwell, a justice of the peace in Louisiana, refused to issue a marriage license to a white woman and an African American man. Bardwell later told the Associated Press "I'm not a racist. I just don't believe in mixing the races that way…I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else." When asked about this incident, Bardwell said he asks everyone who calls about marriage if they are an interracial couple and, if they say yes, he will not marry them. When trying to figure out what this picture represents about the current mindset of the GOP, the image speaks a thousand words. This follows closely on the heels of another incident where Rusty DePass, a Republican activist and former chairman of the South Carolina Election Commission, posted a so-called joke on Facebook suggesting that an escaped gorilla from a Columbia zoo was related to First Lady Michelle Obama. Although these items were removed from Facebook and the perfunctory apologies were made, these are only a few examples of the hateful insults that conservatives are circulating regarding the Obamas.

Conservatives ultimately loathe President Obama because they fear that the future he represents: that Blackness is neither a shameful defect nor a divine detriment but a bona fide asset. For too many of these irate right-wing activists and the angry mobs they spur to dizzying heights of intense outrage, President Obama represents a future for this nation and this world that means that God’s children of a darker hue will share their voices and visions to the destiny of all humanity.

Since the end of the Second World War, men and women from underrepresented groups based on race, class, ethnicity/national origin, religious creed, or sexual orientation have been so essential to galvanizing the contemporary conservative movement that without us, the current crop of conservatives would tear themselves to shreds. As historian Manning Marable contends, “the one threat that once unified conservatives was communism. Now that the Soviet Union has gone out of business, American reactionaries don’t have a common ‘enemy’” except attacking people who represent racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity in this country. The various branches of the hard-right conservative coalition—the neo-conservative militarists, the corporate industrialists, the "Constantinian Christian" fundamentalists (philosopher Cornel West’s phrase for reactionary Christian’s who conflate God and government), the Social Darwinian eugenicists, and the white supremacists—would have been at each other's throats long ago if they did not have their hatred of "Others" to keep them on the same page. Let's face it: these racist acts and statements represents nothing less than an utter lack of imagination as well as a firm desire to reassure the "real" GOP base that, despite the increased number of colored faces in high places, the power brokers within the contemporary Republican Party want to make sure that the Party of Lincoln is going to be a party of white supremacist whackos.

For instance, when Rush Limbaugh was recently kicked out of an investment group bidding to purchase the St. Louis Rams football team, a minor media firestorm erupted by conservative commentators who claim that Limbaugh was being falsely accused of making racism. At the forefront of their feeble defense is the argument are remarks allegedly made by Limbaugh—in which the right-wing radio host supposedly praised slavery and James Earl Ray, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassin as well as –that cannot be proven and therefore must be may be phony. Many of Limbaugh’s conservative comrades-in-arms proclaimed that Limbaugh was being lambasted on little more than the two dubious quotes. On October 15, 2009, Fox News host Bill O'Reilly claimed that besides one well-documented racist remark Limbaugh made in the 1970s, the case that Limbaugh repeatedly says racist things on his radio broadcasts is nonsense: "The reason that Limbaugh is not going to be able to buy into the NFL is because a bunch of made-up stuff became legend. And he got hammered." O'Reilly later added: "So what we have here are accusations without merit. But in our hypermedia age, that's enough to paint someone as a racist." So now Bill O’Reilly gets to decide and declare who is racist and who is not? However, what O’Reilly and Limbaugh’s other defenders have completely ignored is that the very nature of the current nature of the conservative movement is deeply saturated with racist and race-baiting remarks that are both well-documented and easily verifiable over a long period of time.

Meanwhile, under the leadership of Michael Steele, the first African American chairman Republican National Committee’s the GOP revamped their website a few weeks ago with what it hoped would be a snazzy, eye-catching, hip new design, especially Steele's ridiculously named blog, “What Up?” which was intended to fulfill his promise of an edgy, "off the hook" outreach initiative that would take the GOP to “urban-suburban hip-hop settings.” Although the site did get quite a good deal of attention, none of it was favorable; in fact, most of the comments were pretty scathing in nature. Critics and detractors like the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart and MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann correctly lambasted the party’s new website’s flawed content and format including Steele’s blog, the blog was renamed virtually overnight. Nevertheless, as national party chairman, Steele tries to give the GOP an extreme PR makeover without even acknowledging the enduring legacy of the Republican Party's "Southern Strategy" which systematically used racist stereotypes and euphemisms such as "busing", "affirmative action", "welfare queens", "quotas", “illegal immigrants”, and "underclass", etc. to whip white voters' racial anxieties into a full-blown frenzy to be effectively manipulated by Republican candidates ranging from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush in order to win elections and dominate US politics. Another, more subtle example of this approach was evident each time W offered up his once-trademark stump line about "the soft bigotry of low expectations." The GOP operatives made certain that as the former president made this statement, fundamentalist Black church congregations or African American school children were often targeted as the most fitting mosaic backdrop for national issues such as faith-based initiatives or "No Child Left Behind" but these gestures proved to be little more than lip service and photo-ops to milk his "compassionate conservative" facade. More importantly, Steele does not say a mumbling word about the fact that many of the key players in the conservative movement—like Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Orly Tatiz, and Glenn Beck among others—have been major voices behind making sure that the "Southern Strategy" remains a persistently poisonous element of today’s partisan politics. Therefore, while making a crass political overture to target a broader spectrum of voters, Michael Steele and the GOP presented Africans Americans specifically and all American citizens generally with an inherently inaccurate and dishonest portrayal of how race and racism functions in contemporary American politics.

Why are conservatives so pathologically obsessed with mobilizing public support for white supremacy and xenophobia in the Age of Obama? Because conservatives recognize that America is the most multiracial, multicultural, and multiethnic society on the globe, they envision that by pushing people of color out of school classrooms, television programs, middle-class neighborhoods, and voting booths is necessary in order to push back all the gains of political rights and freedoms of the last half-century. With the Obama-Biden campaign of 2008, conservatives are feeling threatened and are demonstrating a desperate urgency to shore up their personal power and vested interests even using white supremacy to achieve their goals. The growing demographic shift in the United States from a predominantly white nation to a more racially diverse society, conservatives seek to crush all efforts to solidify the civil rights and human rights victories of the past century in the efforts to tap into what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called “the great wells of democracy.” The problem with this creeping fog of white conservative fears is that it completely ignores the reality that the vast majority of American electorate is no longer middle-aged, white, or of European descent but is steadily becoming younger, darker, and more international in nature. It is important for all people—regardless of political perspective and cultural background—to recognize that both equality and diversity are part of God’s plan for humanity. As the scriptural passage suggests, people of color—particularly women, men, and children of African descent—will have a role in shaping the future of this nation and the world. Their failure to see the promise and potential of people of color as a blessing rather than a cure is why the Right is wrong about race.

Something You Should Check Out…

Race Matters by Cornel West analyses moral authority and critical debates concerning race relations in the United States. When first published in 1994, this book became a runaway best seller that helped to make West the nation’s foremost public intellectual. Fifteen years, his insights are still as invaluable as ever. West’s thought-provoking essays address several controversial issues of vital concern to African Americans: nihilism in black America, the crisis of black leadership, affirmative action, Black-Jewish relations, sexuality, and other. His writing style is scholarly yet straightforward and he does not mince words. Throughout the book, his viewpoints are passionately radical (or should we say radically passionate?) in his insight regarding the urgent need to promote a “love ethic” as the solution for many of America’s woes regarding race and racism. By virtue of the controversial subject matter West discusses in this book, not everyone will agree with his point of view but, more than anything else, he wants to make readers at least think critically about the social problems we face as a nation. As an introduction to thinking more deeply about the contemporary state of racial identity and American culture at the dawn of the twenty-first century, West’s Race Matters is a wonderful start.