More Evidence Of The Contempt For Black People

Someone asked what has the Democrats done for the black community? It is an interesting question to which I really don’t have a good answer. I know that the Democratic Party is more apt to increase minimum federal wages. But I would be hard pressed to identify anything that the Democratic Party has done that really helps the black community.

Then again, I’m hard pressed to point to anything that the Republican Party has done to help the black community lately. The party of Lincoln stood back while a hurricane obliterated the poor black community in New Orleans. I know that the conservative judges appointed to the Supreme Court by the party of the conservatives have given institutions directly opposed to racial diversity and opponents of affirmative action the benefit of judicial decisions that support their arguments regardless of how unsubstantiated reverse discrimination might be. It should be apparent that the party of Reagan supports the heavy handed approach of law enforcement and zero tolerance for people suspected of breaking the law in the black community but look the other way for similar or even worse behavior. While Governor of Texas George W. Bush would condemn a man convicted of murder to his fate with the electric chair despite the lack of hard evidence that supports the conviction, but would turn around and start not one but two wars that have our soldiers paying with their lives in order to “protect America’s freedom”. I guess the freedom not to lose one’s life in an illegal and unjustified war isn’t one of those protections our soldiers are fighting for.

I know that the Republican Party, heavily influenced by the big players in the oil industry, is more likely to sit back and let Exxon-Mobile or Texaco earn billions of dollars of profit in a week’s time while the public goes broke paying three dollars a gallon for oil in the off season. And then these people look dumbfounded when the country falls headlong into a recession with a serious depression right behind. I know this is the party that is more likely to deregulate an industry so that their profits can go through the roof while the quality of service and products plummets. I know this is the party that could have corrected the sub prime mortgage mess before it became the bane of the global community but instead decided to let market forces get out of hand. As long as the President’s scope of understanding was limited to individuals losing their homes their attitude was that the whole problem could be fixed with people exercising a little personal responsibility. Who cares about a few dominoes falling? But now that the chain of dominoes has gained speed and has spread to infect the global community and now that we hang on the cusp of financial ruin we can spend the money necessary to correct this much bigger problem. A stitch, in time, would have saved the country hundreds of billions, maybe even in the trillions, of dollars.

I guess in the end the question isn’t so much as to what has the Democratic Party done for the black community. I think what is more pertinent is what has the Republican Party done to the black community. Neither party has done much for the benefit of the black community. Nothing much has happened for the black community since the sixties. But turn the question around and ask which party is likely to do the worst damage to the black community. The answer should pop right out at you like eyeballs in the dark in a caricature of the first black President.

Sherri Goforth, an administrative assistant to Republican State Senator Diane Black of Tennessee, thought it was appropriate and even humorous to distribute a racist image that shows all the Presidents of the United States in official like portraits with the lone exception of the first black President as nothing but a pair of round eyeballs standing out against an all black background. Ms. Goforth confessed that she sent the email to the wrong list of people. The implication is that there is a right list of people who should have received the image.

Of course people have defended the image. I actually read somebody comment that nowhere is it written that it is an image of President Obama, just implied. I guess that makes it okay. I guess that was supposed to be an image of any generic black man in a picture with all the Presidents instead of the first black President. That makes sense.

This is on top of former state election director Rusty DePass of South Carolina issued an apology for his comments linking an escaped gorilla from the Riverbanks Zoo with the ancestors of First Lady Michelle Obama. Of course, people defended his racism saying that Ms. Obama believed in evolution so she must believe that the primate was related. And on top of that, Mike Green, an employee with Lexington Republican consulting firm Starboard Communications apologized for an online joke about President Barack Obama taxing aspirin because it’s white and it works.

The era of post racism is getting off to a seriously rocky start. A lot of people want to say that these are nothing more than isolated incidents. But I’m more apt to think that this is a much more realistic example of the true condition of race relations when the mask of political correctness falls away. And these examples are from people who have more than the usual influence on the mechanisms of government. Is it any wonder why we continue to scratch our collective heads in confusion trying to figure out why the state of the black community is in such relatively dismal condition? When people have such contempt for the first black President is there any doubt that there would be contempt for black people in general?