All About The ‘Conversation’

Barack Obama wants us to have a conversation about race in America (see The Audacity Of Hypocrisy and Barack Obama, Failures And Fairy Tales), call made many times before and for the most part, ignored. Early on and throughout his career George Bush made an effort to encourage the nation into just such a conversation and was rebuffed. When he spoke of the ‘velvet discrimination of lowered expectations,’ the leftist storm troopers yawned and ignored him.

Notwithstanding the derision of the left and other political opponents, Mr Bush must have been doing something right. In his reelection bid for governor of Texas, blacks and Hispanics voted in unprecedented numbers for Mr Bush because of markedly improved schools in their districts. At the 2000 Democrat Convention in Los Angeles, the Texas delegation threatened to walk out as speaker after speaker derided the level of education on their state, as a criticism of George Bush. The delegates may have been Democrats, but they weren’t happy hearing the word ’stupid’ in association with education in their state.

Yesterday, Gateway Pundit published Dear Democrats: A Letter From Lt Col Francis Rice. A sampling:

We, African American citizens of the United States, declare and assert:

Whereas in the early 1600’s 20 African men and women were landed in Virginia from a Dutch ship as slaves and from that tiny seed grew the poisoned fruit of plantation slavery which shaped the course of American development…

Whereas the Democratic Party has never apologized for their horrific atrocities and racist practices committed against African Americans during the past two hundred years, nor for the residual impact that those atrocities and practices and current soft bigotry of low expectations are having on us today…

Whereas the Democratic Party fought to expand slavery and, after the Civil War, established Jim Crow Laws, Black Codes and other repressive legislation that were designed to disenfranchise African Americans,

Whereas the Ku Klux Klan was the terrorist arm of the Democratic Party, and their primary goal was to intimidate and terrorize African American voters, Republicans who moved South to protect African Americans and any other whites who supported them…

Whereas Democratic President John F. Kennedy authorized the FBI (supervised by his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy) to investigate Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on suspicion of being a communist…

Whereas Democratic Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, made a 14-hour filibuster speech in the Senate in June 1964 in an unsuccessful effort to block passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and was heralded in April 2004 by Democratic Senator Christopher Dodd as a senator who would have been a great leader during the Civil War…

Whereas in the House of Representatives only 61 percent of the Democrats voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act as compared to 80 percent of Republicans, and in the Senate only 69 percent of the Democrats voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, compared to 82 percent of the Republicans…

Read the whole thing.

It also bear remembering that the original district ‘gerrymandering’ was used by Democrats to disenfranchise the black vote in the south.It also bears remembering that the laws Rosa Parks challenged were enshrined by Democrat politicians.

It was the Republican Party in Congress that passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875. That forward legislation guaranteed the rights of all African Americans equal access to all public services and facilities. This was not an earth shattering or remarkable effort. This was the vision of the Republican Party from it’s very inception dating back to 1854. The party was founded as the anti-slavery party in direct opposition to the Democrats.  The Republican Party has always been the party of civil rights.

Slavery was not restricted to the Southern States. After Charleston, SC, the largest number of slave owners per capita was in New York City. The most enthusiastic opposition to Lincoln and his efforts to rid the nation the evil of slavery was most vicious from northern Democrats.

La Shawn Barbour has her own take on what is real racism-yet another real conversation unaddressed by leftists. Like all leftists elsewhere want no part of any conversation they cannot control. La Shawn eloquence belies her passion:

Perhaps Congress should apologize for decades of bloated socialist programs that caused the black family to disintegrate. Paying unmarried women to have babies is obscene, immoral, and the reason so many (too many) black children have no fathers to speak of. Treating blacks like dummies who require separate (LOWER) standards than every other race is offensive. I’m offended. Where is my apology?

Generations of blacks have been lulled into feeding from the government trough, and the damage it caused will reverberate for generations. And those numbskulls down the street are apologizing for failing to pass anti-lynching laws 100 years ago. Lord, give me strength.

I’m sick of politicians wasting time and money pandering to blacks, treating us like empty-headed children, spoon-feeding us putrid pabulum, and prostrating themselves for every perceived slight. Don’t apologize to “Black People.” Apologize to individual blacks who actually care about this mess.

Apologize for failing to protect Americans against foreign invaders. Apologize for taking our hard-earned money and giving it to people who don’t want to earn it themselves. Apologize for constantly referring to me as “African American,” implying that I’m a lesser American than everyone else. Apologize to all Americans for pushing racially divisive entitlements and preferences and insane “hate crime” laws. Thanks to your misguided paternalism, racial tension will always be front and center.

Freedom is more important than all the apologies, handouts, and excuses Congress could ever come up with. I’m living in the best country in the world, and I’d never be freer anywhere else. To blacks who grew up believing America was the most racist place on earth, if you no longer believe that and realize freedom, the right to be left alone, is the only apology you need, demand that from your senators.

Gagdad Bob resides in the real world as well. In a superb post, the master observer notes

…highlights this absurdity of the left, in that it hews to faux-eternal principles which can never change irrespective of what actually happens in what they ironically call “reality,” being that reality for them is reduced to the flatland, material world. For example, Walker asks, “How many ‘civil rights’ leaders talk as if racism is an immutable, eternal characteristic of American society? How many feminist leaders talk as if sexism is an immutable, eternal characteristic of American society? The mere passage of years, the mere enactment of statutes or adoption of polices, the decades long public relations campaign against bigotry — none of this can be allowed to make a difference” (emphasis mine).

But why does the left embrace a kind of bitter and reactionary anti-theology, in which they hold to such a negative view of the world despite what actually occurs here? As Walker writes, “the sins of America are a religious article of faith to self-appointed black leaders and to self-appointed representatives of the female sex.”
You’d think it would be uncontroversial to utter a simple truth, but you’d be wrong, wouldn’t you? I am reminded of Obama’s shamelessly opportunistic and manipulative “dialogue about race,” when the whole reason we cannot say anything useful or productive about race is that the left will brand you as racist if you do. It seems that to carry Truth is to pick up a cross and paint a target on one’s back.

…the leftist must always fool you (and, more importantly, himself) into believing that he is defending eternal principles, principles in which he doesn’t actually believe. For example, the left universally believes that it is proper for the government to discriminate on the basis of race, “gender” and “sexual orientation”, and that failure to do so should be illegal. Not surprisingly, the party of trial lawyers loves these kinds of laws, because trial lawyers are the group that most benefits from this crass power grab in the guise of a principle.

The left once unanimously maintained that we should judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. But the fact that they so readily abandoned this principle shows how they are always rooted in tactics, not principles. Likewise, up until the late ’60s and early ’70s, the left was a vocal supporter of Israel, whereas now all of the wholesale anti-Semitism in the world emanates from the left (including, of course, the Obama campaign (cf here).

When it is all said and done is Barack Obama the person you really want to lead an American dialogue on race? Should his supporters, those who defended and apologized for his 20 plus year association with what is now a long line of bigots, be given any kind of credibility when it comes to talking about race?

George Bush and Republican legislators in Texas made a difference in the lives of blacks and Hispanics in Texas, especially when it came to education- so much so that they supported him in unprecedented numbers. He made sure what kids learned would make a difference in their lives.

Barack Obama stood by a preacher who taught racism, bigotry and hate for 20 years and made sure his children were in the same pews, learning the lessons from the pulpit.

Who do you think is better qualified to lead a national dialogue on race in America?