My Uncommon Sense

Racism- Pot calling the snow black

rac⋅ism
–noun
1. a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human races determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one’s own race is superior and has the right to rule others.

In the past few years, I, along with other conservatives, have been called every name in the book: idiots, liars, @$$holes, facists, Nazis, etc. Most insults are brushed off as ad hominem, but one accusation seems to have stuck: racists. From Pelosi, to Carter, to Olbermann, to ACORN, to your average liberal, all use the same charge that anyone who disagrees with their political means/ends is a racist.

“I think people who are guilty of that kind of personal attack against Obama have been influenced to a major degree by a belief that he should not be president because he happens to be African American. It’s a racist attitude, and my hope is and my expectation is that in the future both Democratic leaders and Republican leaders will take the initiative in condemning that kind of unprecedented attack on the president of the United States,” President Jimmy Carter

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“I agree with President Carter that racism is playing a role in recent outbursts against President Obama.” Keith Olbermann, MSNBC

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“I do think it is disturbing, however, that if you want to go undercover, to come in to an organization, uh, that 99% has, uhh, black and brown people, that you would think to dress up as a pimp and a prostitute and sort of bully your way into these offices. I think that says a little bit about what Mr. O’Keefe thinks that a black-and-brown organization would go for.” Bertha Lewis, ACORN CEO

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“I have concerns about some of the language that is being used because I saw — I saw this myself in the late ’70s in San Francisco, this kind of — of rhetoric was very frightening and it gave — it created a climate in which we — violence took place,” Nancy Pelosi, D-CA

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It seems like the figures are in. Anyone who disagrees with President Obama, the Democrats, or their allies, is a racist. For this conclusion, I look to the definition I presented at the beginning. How can a simple disagreement be considered racism when the reason for the disagreement has nothing to do with the “inherent differences among the various human races”? President Carter, Representative Pelosi, Ms. Lewis, and Mr. Olbermann all need to prove that there is an underlying racism behind the dissenters’ thoughts and actions in order to present a veracious portrayal of their character.

This is where the plaintiffs end up showing their true colors: black and white. They have no proof, instead claiming to know dissenters’ thoughts better than the dissenters themselves. Not only is this claim imprudent, it sheds light on their true intentions. They aren’t attempting to point out a snake in the grass, they are attempting to discredit the dissenters by labeling them as malicious, radical, fringe, and racist. At the same time, they employ race as a tool to be intellectually dishonest and to attack the political opposition. They fail to realize that we are all the same race, the human race, and in wrongly calling dissenters “racists”, they show themselves to be the true racists. To assume that the dissenters are racist, simply because they disagree, is a close parallel to the superiority complex presented in the definition of “racism”. It is the intellectual dishonesty that has plagued our nation since its birth.

A final issue I must address is the age-old claim that the Republican party itself is racist. Its history proves it. This claim has been repeated over and over and over and over and over and over. Each time I hear it, a little piece of me dies, as I don’t understand how anyone could be so negligent of our nation’s own history.

Let’s go back to the beginning. The Republican party was founded in 1854 by anti-slavery activists. A number of you just crapped your pants. President Lincoln, the first Republican President, freed the slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation and then the 13th Amendment. Though he was assassinated prior to the final vote for the 13th Amendment, he was its largest supporter and was the first to push for the Amendment. Almost every, if not all, piece of Civil Rights legislation that has ever been passed was done so by Republicans. Women’s suffrage was supported and passed by Republicans. As Everything I Know iIs Wrong

Republicans led the fight for women’s rights, and most suffragists were Republicans. In fact, Susan B. Anthony bragged about how, after voting (illegally) in 1872, she had voted a straight Republican ticket. The suffragists included two African-American women who were also co-founders of the NAACP: Ida Wells and Mary Terrell, great Republicans, both of them.

Republican Senator Aaron Sargent wrote the women’s suffrage amendment in 1878,though it would not be passed by Congress until Republicans again won control of both houses 40 years later. It was in 1916 that the first woman was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, Republican Jeannette Rankin. The first woman mayor was elected in 1926, the Honorable Bertha Landes of Seattle, another great Republican.

It is interesting to also point out that all of the black members of Congress up to this point were Republicans as well. Even the first Latino Congressmen and Governors were Republicans. The first Jewish Congressman was a Republican. The first Asian-American Senator was a Republican. But alas, I digress. Enter the 20th Century, and the overwhelming majority of Republicans pass more civil rights legislation, often times overpowering the Democrats. It may be beneficial to take a look at the Democratic Party’s history from a civil rights perspective so we can compare the two.

After the Civil War and President Lincoln’s assassination, Democratic President Andrew Johnson attempted to veto the Civil Rights Act of 1866, but the Republicans in Congress overruled his veto. Democrats in the South create the Jim Crow Laws, segregation clauses, and a number of them create the Ku Klux Klan. Democrats as a party oppose every piece of civil rights legislation into the 20th century. After the Great Depression and WWII, the civil rights movement picked up steam. More and more Democrats began supporting the bills, but still no where near as wholeheartedly as Republicans. In fact, the majority of Republicans supported civil rights legislation almost 5X more often than Democrats.

“The Republican Party was not so badly split as the Democrats by the civil rights issue. Only one Republican senator participated in the filibuster against the bill. In fact, since 1933, Republicans had a more positive record on civil rights than the Democrats. In the twenty-six major civil rights votes since 1933, a majority of Democrats opposed civil rights legislation in over 80 % of the votes. By contrast, the Republican majority favored civil rights in over 96 % of the votes.”

With this overwhelming amount of evidence proving that it was the Republican Party, not the Democratic Party, that heralded civil rights, modern day liberals often resort to empty catch phrases such as “Well the Republican and Democratic parties switched during the 20th century,” and “The Republican Party started off supporting civil rights, but for the past 50 years or so, they have opposed civil rights legislation.” The first is simply not true. Do they really believe the two parties simply switched names? What changed were the two parties’ theories on economics, not ideals of entire platforms. The latter is an interesting statement, but still an empty claim. Many prominent Democrats have repeated this claim, but when pressed for evidence, they come back with nothing but air. The most common claim used in an effort to support the idea is that Nixon and the Southern Strategy were racist and brought the racists into the Republican Party, thus making the Republicans the modern party that opposes civil rights. The thing is, no one can tell me how the Southern Strategy was racist. Nixon didn’t promote racist legislation nor use racism during the campaign. Quite the contrary. Nixon, a well known civil rights leader, boasted about his support of civil rights. If he was supposedly using racism to win the South, why would he boast about how he supported civil rights? Remember, this is Richard Nixon, the same man who Dr. Martin Luther King endorsed in 1956. The same man who gave an executive order creating the practice of affirmative action. The same man who supported every piece of civil rights legislation through the civil rights movement. When you begin to piece it all together, you realize that the Republicans as a party weren’t racist and aren’t racist. You also begin to see the liberals who cry racism for who they really are: intellectually bankrupt demagogues.