Yesterday I chatted with my friend who makes me look like a raving tea-partier. I finally had to admit he seemed to be right when he dismisses all conservatives and all Republicans as “crazy stupid morons” and “just bad people”. I am so fed up with politicians who use the wink-and-a-nudge approach to letting their constituents know that underneath it all they think David Duke is on the right track. So here’s my attempt to clarify my position concerning the right in this country:
It all started with the Supreme Court decision in ………….. no, not Roe v Wade, but 20 years earlier in Brown v the Board of Education. It is ALL about race and George Will and David Frum and all the other so-called reasonable Republicans can deny it all they want, the source, in the sense of a well-spring, of Republican power is White panic and anger over seeing Blacks allowed into the public mainstream.
Will they now protest Blacks being allowed to play on ball teams as they did in my youth? No. Will they protest Blacks seen on TV, as they did in my day? No. Will they even protest a Black man touching, kissing, and even engaging in coitus with a White woman, for which, in my day, a lynch mob would have formed? No. But in a hundred ways, in a hundred comments, they show their resentment. Recently my wife and daughter were very badly treated in national chain stores, clearly not as a store policy but as a result of the attitude of the individual clerk or manager. The chain’s reaction? Zero. They understand that the employees they are paying such low wages to need to vent their anger at seeing well-off Blacks when their belief harkens back to that line in Mississippi Burning spoken by Gene Hackman, ’If you ain’t better than a nigger, son, who are you better than?’. [thanks to Wikiquotes for that Gad! ain’t the internet wonderful I couldn’t dredge up the exact quote and there it is]. That feeling is still extant in a great many people, not just Whites but even in recent immigrants from non-European countries who see themselves as superior to Blacks. As the head of the NY taxi-drivers, herself of Indian origin, said, they, the taxi-drivers, come from countries with rigid caste systems and they see immediately who is on the bottom in this country.
I am sick of conservatives publicly denying their driving animus; it pollutes any discussion. Just open up and say what you think. It’s obvious anyway.