“Are There Any Republicans Against Racism?”: The GOP Can’t Reboot With Bigots In Its Midst
As a matter of history, black Americans — at least those who were allowed to vote — were Republicans for decades after the Civil War. But some found Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal attractive, and most found Lyndon Johnson’s support for civil rights irresistible. They left the Republican Party.
And they’ve stayed away since the 1960s, alienated by the GOP’s Southern strategy of race-baiting and pandering to the prejudices of right-wing neanderthals. If you wonder why black voters believe the Republican Party trades in the rankest bigotry, look no further than the reaction to the George Zimmerman verdict among conservative commentators. It’s been appalling.
Let me be clear: It’s perfectly reasonable to believe the Zimmerman jury arrived at the only acceptable verdict. Many analysts, including some black commentators, have stated that the prosecution simply did not prove its case.
But several conservative pundits have gone well beyond reason, smearing Trayvon Martin, indicting his friends and elevating Zimmerman to sainthood. They’ve shown a callous disregard for the grief that still envelops Martin’s parents. They’ve suggested that whites are more likely to be the victims of discrimination in the criminal justice system than blacks.
And those commentators, luminaries such as Rush Limbaugh, are widely regarded as leading representatives of the GOP. How could it be otherwise when Republican pols kowtow before them, engage them as campaign surrogates and dare not criticize them?
Thoughtful Republicans — the moderates and right-leaning modernists who accept diversity — need to convene a meeting to take their party back and restore the brand to its pre-1960s luster. They ought to name their group “Republicans Against Racism.”
They will have to be prepared to call out and criticize the insensitive claptrap and vitriolic nonsense that gets bandied about not only by Limbaugh, but also by other well-known conservative pundits, many of whom have been in the ugly business of dehumanizing and defaming the young Martin since his death drew public attention last year. They have portrayed Martin as a thug, a drug addict, a predator who deserved to die.
To stick with a prominent example, Limbaugh recently dedicated a show to mocking prosecution witness Rachel Jeantel — whom Martin talked to on his cellphone as Zimmerman followed him. Limbaugh claimed that Martin was a homophobe who “attacked” Zimmerman, believing he was a “pervert.”
Have there been similarly outrageous comments from talking heads on the left? Of course. The verdict has prompted name-calling, hot-headed denunciations and racial demagoguery from a lot of folk who ought to know better.
But there is an important difference: There are precious few significant ties between the Democratic Party apparatus and liberal commentators. When voters think of Democratic leaders, they think of President Barack Obama, who has been quite cautious in his response to the Zimmerman verdict, as he usually is on issues of race. Or they think of Attorney General Eric Holder, who has been more voluble, but equally cautious.
By contrast, a Republican Party in disarray has no clear leaders. After his loss to Obama, Mitt Romney has retired to private life. His running mate, Paul Ryan, has retreated to budget battles. House Speaker John Boehner can barely manage his caucus, much less speak for Republicans on a national stage.
Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter and others have happily stepped into the void, presenting themselves as senior strategists for the GOP. And party leaders have allowed them to get away with it.
A few Republicans recognize the problem this poses. MSNBC talk-show host Joe Scarborough, a former GOP congressman, wrote recently that “many conservative commentators were offensive in their reflexive defense of Zimmerman, as well as their efforts to attack the integrity of a dead black teenager.” He concluded that the GOP can’t expect to attract black voters as long as so many of its emissaries are flagrantly and intentionally offensive.
Scarborough is right. Surely there are other Republicans who recognize the dangers of having their party represented by loudmouths who trade in racial hostility.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, July 20, 2013
“The Zimmerman Acquittal”: Is America’s God Racist And Carrying A Gun Stalking Young Black Men?
The not guilty verdict in the George Zimmerman case has me thinking a lot about a book I first encountered in seminary, Is God a White Racist?, by the Rev. Dr. Bill Jones. As a budding seminary student, it took me by surprise. Now, as a wiser, older professor looking at the needless death of Trayvon Martin, I have to say: I get it.
God ain’t good all of the time. In fact, sometimes, God is not for us. As a black woman in a nation that has taken too many pains to remind me that I am not a white man, and am not capable of taking care of my reproductive rights, or my voting rights, I know that this American god ain’t my god. As a matter of fact, I think he’s a white racist god with a problem. More importantly, he is carrying a gun and stalking young black men.
When George Zimmerman told Sean Hannity that it was God’s will that he shot and killed Trayvon Martin, he was diving right into what most good conservative Christians in America think right now. Whatever makes them protected, safe, and secure, is worth it at the expense of the black and brown people they fear.
Their god is the god that wants to erase race, make everyone act “properly” and respect, as the president said, “a nation of laws”; laws that they made to crush those they consider inferior.
When the laws were never made for people who were considered, constitutionally, to be three-fifths of a person, I have to ask: Is this just? Is it right? Is God the old white male racist looking down from white heaven, ready to bless me if I just believe the white men like Rick Perry who say the Zimmerman case has nothing to do with race?
You already know the answer: No.
The lamentation of the African-American community at yet another injustice, the surprise and disgust of others who understand, stand against this pseudo-god of capitalisms and incarceration that threaten to take over our nation.
While many continue to proclaim that the religious right is over, they’re wrong. The religious right is flourishing, and unlike the right of the 1970s, religious conservatism of the 21st century is in bed with the prison industrial complex, the Koch brothers, the NRA—all while proclaiming that they are “pro-life.” They are anything but. They are the ones who thought that what George Zimmerman did was right, and I am sure my inbox will be full of well-meaning evangelical sermons about how we should all just get along, and God doesn’t see race.
Please send them elsewhere.
As a historian of American and African-American religion, I know that the Trayvon Martin moment is just one moment in a history of racism in America that, in large part, has its underpinnings in Christianity and its history.
Those of us who teach American Religion have a responsibility to tell all of the story, not just the nice touchy-feely parts. When the good Christians of America are some of its biggest racists, one has to consider our moral responsibility to call out those who clearly are not for human flourishing, no matter what ethnicity a person is. Where are you on that scale? I know where I am.
By: Anthea Butler, Religion Dispatches, July 14, 2013
“The Sadness Lingers”: Some Questions Will Never Be Answered, Some Facts Will Never Be Altered
One thing still hanging in the air when the lawyers in the George Zimmerman trial finished their closing arguments was sadness — heavy and thick, the choking kind, like acrid smoke.
Some questions will never be answered. And some facts will never be altered — chief among them, that there is a dead teenager with a hole in his heart sleeping in a Florida grave, a fact that never had to be.
Zimmerman told Sean Hannity last year that his shooting of Trayvon Martin was “God’s plan” and that if he could do it all over he would do nothing different. (Later in the interview, Zimmerman equivocated a bit on the topic without identifying what specifically he would change.)
I don’t pretend to know the heart of God or the details of his “plans,” but I hasten to hope that he — or she — would value life over death, that free will is part of a faithful walk, that our mistakes are not automatically postscripted as part of a divine destiny.
I would also hope that Zimmerman, having sat through his murder trial in the presence of the dead teen’s grieving parents, might answer Hannity differently. Maybe the answer he gave last year was part of a legal defense. Maybe now he would have more empathy.
Somewhere, behind the breastbone, where the conscience can speak freely without fear of legal implications or social condemnation, surely there can be an admission that, if he’d done some things differently — like staying in his vehicle and not following the young man — Martin would still be alive today.
That’s why the sadness lingers. Martin will never be free from the grave, and Zimmerman will never be free from his role in assigning Martin that fate. The two are forever linked, across life and death, across bad decisions and by opposite ends of a gun barrel. A life you take latches onto you.
For the rest of us, the questions are:
What happens when the legal verdict is rendered and the social cause continues?
Is this case a springboard to high-level discussions about police procedures and the presumptions of guilt and innocence, or will it be a moment in which cultural constructs of biases and presumptions are calcified?
Do we need a clean, binary narrative of good guys and bad guys to draw moral conclusions about right and wrong?
Should your past or what you wear or how you look subtract from your humanity and add to the suspicion you draw?
Can we think of bias in the sophisticated way in which it operates — not always conscious and not always constant, but rising and then falling like rancid water at the bottom of a sour well?
And this, too, is why the sadness lingers. There is a mother who will never again see her son’s impish smile or feel his warm body collapsing into her open arms. There is a father who won’t be able to straighten his son’s tie or tell him “You missed a spot” after a shave. There is a brother who will never be able to trade jokes and dreams and what-ifs with him well into the night, long after both should be asleep. The death of a child blasts a hole into the fabric of a family, one that can never truly be mended. I refuse to believe that was God’s plan for Martin’s family.
The sadness also lingers because so many parents and siblings and friends and sympathizers look on in horror at the prospect of a scary precedent — that some may walk away from this trial believing that they should do nothing different from what Zimmerman did, and that the law may either endorse or allow inadvisable actions that could lead to such an end.
Unarmed teenagers should not end up dead. I believe that most people would agree. This case, however, is about whether an unarmed teenager can engage an armed person — one who admits to having pursued him — in such a way that the teenager become responsible for his own death.
The jury has to ponder and decide that. Only Zimmerman and Martin truly know the answer; one refused to testify, the other couldn’t.
Whatever the verdict in this case is, it must be respected. The lawyers presented the cases they had, presumably to the best of their abilities, and the jurors will presumably do their best to be fair.
But no one can ease the sadness.
As Mahatma Gandhi once said: “There is a higher court than courts of justice and that is the court of conscience. It supersedes all other courts.”
In that court, it is hard to avoid righteous conviction. Maybe that’s part of God’s plan.
By: Charles M. Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, July 12, 2013
“White Sale”: The “Missing White Voter”
I’ve been writing about this for the last week in the context of Sean Trende’s analysis of ethnic and racial voting data. But MSNBC’s Benjy Sarlin has an excellent summary of the gradual but steady conversion of conservative gabbers from the belief that securing a higher share of the Latino vote is an ontological necessity for the GOP to the very, very different conviction that the GOP’s salvation lies in an enhanced appeal to the same white voters that already compose nearly all of its “base.”
After November’s stunning loss, an array of influential Republicans argued that immigration reform was the party’s best chance to claim Latino voters before they become permanent Democrats. But in a mere eight months, a counter-narrative has taken hold in conservative circles, nurtured by a shrewd group of anti-immigration lobbyists and Tea Party enthusiasts. The new argument sees immigration reform at best as a divisive distraction from the GOP’s real problem of countering “white flight” from the polls. At worst, they view it as an electoral apocalypse, a seventh seal behind which lies an unbroken line of future Democratic presidents.
Sarlin sees this “counter-narrative” largely as a backlash against “Republican establishment” voices telling conservatives something they really, really didn’t want to hear (it’s no accident that Rush Limbaugh was among the first and most consistent in rejecting the Latino Imperative proposition). But he notes that some influential figures, particularly on Fox News, have switched from one theory to another as conservative opposition to immigration reform has intensified:
[T]he anti-immigration argument appears to be gaining converts fast. On election night, Fox News anchor Brit Hume called the “demographic” threat posed by Latino voters “absolutely real” and suggested Mitt Romney’s “hardline position on immigration” may be to blame for election losses. On Monday, Hume declared that argument “baloney.” The Hispanic vote, he said, “is not nearly as important, still, as the white vote.”
Sean Hannity, a reliable bellwether on the right, has been on a similar journey since the fall. He announced the day after President Obama’s re-election that he had “evolved” on immigration reform and now supported a “path to citizenship” in order to improve relations with Hispanic voters. Hannity has now flipped hard against the Senate’s bill. “Not only do I doubt the current legislation will solve the immigration problem,” he wrote in a June column, “but it also won’t help the GOP in future elections.”
Hannity and Hume didn’t arrive at their latest destination by accident. They’re just the latest figures on the right to embrace the compelling new message that’s whipping Republicans against immigration reform while still promising a better tomorrow for the GOP’s presidential candidates.
Sarlin notes the particular role played by the highly-reputed number-cruncher Sean Trende and the influential conservative journalist Byron York (who unlike Trende has been crusading against the Gang of Eight immigration bill) in making this inherently attractive-to-conservatives argument (I’ve called it a bottomless crack pipe for the Right) respectable. Their work is particularly popular, unfortunately, among those who deliberately ignore what Trende and York say about the kind of white voters who “went missing” in 2012 and the unconventional things Republicans need to do to appeal to them:
York and Trende have some nuanced ideas about how the GOP can accomplish what Romney failed to do, many of which involve tacking left on the economy. But to the talk radio right, the main takeaway is that there are several million angry white votes ripe for the taking if the party can swing even more to the right.
White voters stayed home, Limbaugh said in May, because “they didn’t think the Republican Party was conservative enough….”
“Their idea seems to be gaining currency,” Frank Sharry, executive director of immigration advocacy group America’s Voice, told MSNBC. “Right after the election most of the conservative commentariat said they had to do something to get right with Latino voters. Now there seems to be this bizarre conversation that could only happen in the conservative bubble about how Romney didn’t win because he didn’t mobilize enough white voters.”
Underlying these claims is a belief that Romney lost because he was a blue-blooded moderate who failed to connect to conservative white voters on a visceral level. Nominate an American bad-ass in 2016 and those missing whites will reappear in a hurry.
Bingo. It’s more or less the same rationalization conservatives offered for losing in 2008, as well: a nominee too moderate for the “conservative majority” who was laboring under the false premise that his past support for comprehensive immigration reform would win him Latino support.
The bottom line here is that selling conservatives on a particularly self-serving version of the “missing white voter” theory is the easiest sale imaginable, and they are accordingly buying it like hot cakes. That’s bad news for those who favor immigration reform, and even worse news for those who dream of a political environment in which racial and ethnic conflict is not constantly lurking in the background.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, July 2, 2013
“Fox News Adopts George Zimmerman”: Few Have Done More To Help Trayvon Martin’s Shooter Than Sean Hannity
The case may be Florida v. George Zimmerman, but it might more aptly be called Florida v. George Zimmerman and the conservative media, as the accused killer has found devoted defenders on the airwaves of Fox News and in the digital pages of conservative blogs.
Few outside Zimmerman’s defense team have done more to help him than Sean Hannity, who on Friday declared that Zimmerman had already won the trial. “As far as I’m concerned, this case is over,” the Fox host said after playing testimony from a witness who said he saw Trayvon Martin beating Zimmerman “MMA style.” The day before that, Hannity said on his radio show that the judge should dismiss manslaughter, let alone the second-degree murder charges.
“So the question is why are we here? And the answer to that question is purely political. Politics influenced the decision, the media influenced the decision,” Hannity said, succinctly revealing why the conservative media has found itself vocally defending someone who admitted to killing teenager Trayvon Martin. It goes like this: Liberals and the media made hay out of the fact that Zimmerman was initially not charged in the killing of Martin. Liberals and the media are bad. Therefore, Zimmerman must be good.
Hannity and others have sought to portray Zimmerman as the real victim here, of a left-wing media “lynch mob,” a term used by Ann Coulter, Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips, David Horowitz, and conservative watchdog Accuracy in the Media, among others. When NBC aired an edited 911 call that made Zimmerman look racist, that was all the proof conservatives needed.
And if reflexive hatred for the media wasn’t enough, add to the volatile mix gun rights and perceived racism against whites. “Mr. Zimmerman — who, again, the New York Times refers to as a ‘white Hispanic’ and the rest of the media has now picked that up, ’cause that fits the template. You need white-on-black here to gin this up,” Rush Limbaugh said last year on his radio show. Hannity couldn’t help but bring up the New Black Panthers in an interview with Zimmerman, which focused on how unfortunate it was that the defendant’s name had been dragged through the mud.
Zimmerman’s father wrote an e-book calling the NACCP, the Congressional Black Caucus and other African-Americans the “true racists.” The CBC, for instance, is “a pathetic, self-serving group of racists … advancing their purely racist agenda.”
Indeed, Zimmerman and his family have often egged on the right-wing media’s support, adopting their language about the dreaded MSM. “The media is very good at putting their own spin on what they want the narrative to be,” Zimmerman’s brother Robert said in court earlier this month. “I’m not employed by NBC, CBS, ABC or anybody else. So I don’t have bosses, I just try to be as honest as I can.” In fact, Zimmerman got himself in trouble for being too close to the conservative media when his legal team quit last year, citing a phone call to Hannity that they had not authorized.
At times, things have gotten ridiculous. Fox News even recently speculated that Martin could probably kill someone with the Skittles bag and Arizona Iced Tea bottle he was carrying.
Meanwhile, conservative blogs set to work painting Martin as a dangerous thug. The Daily Caller obtained Martin’s Twitter feed, selecting tweets that made him look most intimidating. For George Zimmerman, his lawyers are not his only defense team.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, July 1, 2013
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