Cold turkey

by | Sep 1, 2016 | Civil Rights, Editor's Blog, NC Politics, Race | 13 comments

Regardless of whether they were Democrats, Republicans, or some other party, conservatives in this country have been consistently wrong on matters of race for the entire history of our nation. They opposed ending slavery when our Founding Fathers wrote the constitution. They brought the country the Civil War to keep slavery in the South. They established Jim Crow and the one-party South at the turn of the 20th Century. They opposed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in the 1960s. And today they are wrong on voter suppression laws targeted primarily at minority voters.

Sometimes, the Supreme Court has sided with conservatives on these matters. That didn’t make them right. Dred Scott and Plessey v. Ferguson are two of the best known misguided court decisions. The court got it wrong but history eventually caught up.

Throughout history, conservatives have used various justifications for their opposition to civil rights. They’ve also come up with euphemisms to defend their positions. We heard about states’ rights, separate-but-equal, and now voter fraud.

To be clear, they argued that states had the right to discriminate against black people. Separate-but-equal was always separate but never equal. And today, voter fraud is rare enough to be virtually non-existent but disenfranchisement has been used as an ugly political tool since the beginning of the Republic.

Modern conservatives need to take a look at the principles of twelve-step programs to get off of their addiction to using racism as a means to an end. They need to admit their complicity and publicly disavow the tactics. They need to admit that a higher power, democracy, can help them solve their problems. They need to admit their past transgressions (i.e., own up to the Southern Strategy). They need to apologize to minority populations they’ve harmed and then make amends by helping them recover from institutional racism. And they need to re-educate the people they’ve exploited after feeding them a diet of fear and loathing to secure their votes.

The biggest threat to Democrats and liberals is conservatives disavowing racism as a political tool. Many minority voters would be drawn to a number of conservative positions like school choice, fiscal responsibility, and freedom of religion. But they aren’t going to side with conservatives when their rhetoric is filled with dog whistles and derogatory comments.

It’s not going to be easy. Republicans have built a 50-year electoral strategy based on maximizing the white vote. Now, the scared and angry white voters outnumber the small-government, fiscal conservatives who used to drive the party agenda.

The Supreme Court ruling yesterday is just more evidence that it’s not going to work for conservatives to ween themselves off of racial division as a political tactic. They need to go cold turkey. A twelve-step program might help.

 

13 Comments

  1. Ebrun

    You’re supporting a losing cause, D.g. Private schools, Charter schools and home schooling are becoming more and more popular. Now with Opportunity Scholarships available from the state, low income families can also exercise their school choice.

  2. Ebrun

    Bureaucrats and liberals politicians want to mandate what schools our kids should attend and what they are taught. In a free, democratic country, parents and individual families must have the ability to make the former decisions and influence the latter.

  3. Ebrun

    I know you think bureaucrats and liberal politicians know what’s best for kids, but you just won.t able to convince all parents of that. You can send your kids to public school if you feel that that is best for them. Others will not feel the same way about what’s best for their kids.

  4. Ebrun

    The vast majority of Opportunity Schalarship recipients are minority students. So whatever schools their families choose for their kids to attend can’t be “all white.” What an absurd claim!

    Fiscal responsibility involves holding down the growth of government spending to the rate of inflation and population growth. It also involves saving enough public resources to help the state survive the next economic downturn.

    Honest elections mean only eligible American citizens participate in U.S. elections.

    School choice involves families deciding what’s best for their children rather than bureaucrats and liberal politicians.

    Less regulation provides opportunities for small businesses and entrepreneurs to thrive and prosper.

    All of these conservative ideas are designed to promote the economic and social well-being of all citizens regardless of race or ethnicity. At the same time, they act as a constraint on the growth of the welfare state and paternalistic government run by liberal elites.

  5. Ebrun

    Mr. Mills’ essay and Thecomments on this thread demonstrate that liberals just can’t wean themselves from incendiary racial politics. But as more and more minorities realize that policies like honest elections, school choice, opportunity scholarships, fiscal responsibility, border security, lower taxes, less regulation and traditional claims of privacy are beneficial to all groups and communities, not just white citizens, playing the race card will be seen more and more as leftist demagoguery designed to gain political support by promoting racial discord and mistrust.

    • Jay Ligon

      Parents of slain children and victims of racial violence are not playing cards; they are searching for a strategy for survival. A racist cannot see that, because the racist doesn’t want to see it.

      White supremacists like to believe that racism does not exist. The willfully ignorant may assuage their complicity in horrific acts of racism and violence pretending White Supremacists to do not exist and the Klan is not real, but smug ignorance of the facts of life is a banal form of evil. Dangerously stupid bigots do not bring about a society which can boast of honest elections, good schools, and a better quality of life.

      Difficult to convince those who can see clearly that the blind, ignorant racist has superior vision.

      • Ebrun

        “White supremacists?” Haven’t seen or heard any contemporary conservative leader endorse or promote white supremacy. Not even Mills’ invective against his political opponents has sunk that low. Apparently, playing the political race card just isn’t extreme enough for some on the far left.

  6. Kurttrail

    All racists are republicans, today!

  7. Troy

    The Republican embrace of racism is a ‘win at any and all costs’ strategy. No matter what it takes, what or who is sacrificed, they must win. By hook or by crook, the only thing that matters is winning. The acumen central to business and cutting deals; to win. Cheat, lie, and steal, but win.

    And no matter how much anyone says “I’m sorry” for whatever the transgression, no matter how sincere the apology, the deed is done. You can’t go back and change it, atone for it, appease those harmed by it. It will never undo what is done. How different would the world be if Al Gore had won Florida and the Presidency in 2000? Would we be facing the things in the world that we currently face now?

    The best way to keep from saying I’m sorry is not to transgress against others in the first place…but they have to win.

  8. Jay Ligon

    Not all Republicans are racists. Some take pride in the founding of the party as the Party of Lincoln, the emancipators of slaves. Historically, the Democratic Party supported slavery and racist laws until the 1960s.

    Brown v. the Board of Education is 1954 was the beginning of the end of segregation. Nine justices from both parties agreed to end racial segregation in public schools with a unanimous decision.

    The Supreme Court, however, was decades ahead of the legislatures. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the pivotal event which caused a migration of racists from the Democratic Party into the Republican Party. President Johnson pushed the act through Congress as a tribute to President Kennedy. It cost him dearly.

    Prior to 1964, the southern Democratic Party was a big tent. The Republican Party had been associated with the invasion of the southern states in 1860, and only Carpetbaggers and Yankees belonged to the GOP in Dixie.

    A hundred years later, Republicans made overtures to Dixiecrats in order to assure a victory for Richard Nixon. Racists in the Democratic Party were content with the party until blacks wanted to vote, to sleep in motels, to eat in restaurants and to attend public schools and universities, features of life traditionally reserved only for white people.

    When the Democratic Party began to change the laws to make these amenities possible, racists ran to the Republican party. An indication that the GOP was growing was the first gubernatorial victory since Reconstruction in 1972. Not all the growth in the Republican Party could be explained by racism. Yankees were moving into the southern states in large numbers, bringing their Republican values with them, and the South was growing richer as the economies expanded.

    The racism, as a core value, was and is a dominant aspect of Republican politics. The Chairman of the Republican Party Ken Mehlman during the George W. Bush Administration apologized to the American people for offering the GOP as a haven for racists in order to win elections. Ironically, he apologized for something which benefited him and his former boss, George W. Bush. In the State of Florida in 2000, racists had denied the vote to thousands of black Floridians, who, if they had voted, would have given a clear victory to Al Gore. Mehlman’s remorse for a history of racism in the Republican Party was refreshing but he was talking about decades-old transgressions while there were on-going transgressions he did not acknowledge.

    The ugly face of virulent racism has reappeared and grown in intensity with the election of the nation’s first black president. Now, you see and hear the Klan-like rallies at Donald Trump events, and the actual Klan and White Supremacists have pledged full support to Trump.

    The North Carolina legislature has been a conveyor belt of racist legislation since the Republicans have retaken the General Assembly. The very first moment the Voting Rights Act was struck down by the Supreme Court, racists in our legislature rushed through a series of statutes to disenfranchise black people.

    Not all Republicans are racists, but all racists are Republican.

    • Mary Jones

      Good history lesson… tired of Republicans claiming they are “the party of Lincoln”…technically they were, but to claim that now as though they, too, are the saviors of minorities is disingenuous at the very least.

      • JC Honeycutt

        I can’t help wondering if Lincoln’s remains revolve every time current Republicans refer to themselves as “the party of Lincoln”–although, given that many Republicans in the South are still fighting the Civil War (or as they call it, the War Between the States), I don’t hear “party of Lincoln” used that much in our region. Racists and bigots can (and do) call themselves whatever they think will buy them a vote or a contribution; but they’re still racists and bigots.

  9. Mr David B Scott

    The regrettable truth is that there is a class of humanity in NC, the U.S., and the world who have never accepted the belief that “All men [and women] are created equal.” Personally, I think it is a result of an innate inferiority complex of these people, always needing someone to look down on in order to raise themselves up. Instead of working with others to improve society, they become obsessed with making others seem inferior. They labor under the delusion that by lowering the tide, their boats will rise.

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