This reprehensible column about Tim Scott by Adolf L. Reed, Jr., a U. Penn. Political Science Professor, The Puzzle of Black Republicans:
… But this “first black” rhetoric tends to interpret African-American political successes — including that of President Obama — as part of a morality play that dramatizes “how far we have come.” It obscures the fact that modern black Republicans have been more tokens than signs of progress.
The cheerleading over racial symbolism plays to the Republicans’ desperate need to woo (or at least appear to woo) minority voters, who favored Mr. Obama over Mitt Romney by huge margins. Mrs. Haley — a daughter of Sikh immigrants from Punjab, India — is the first female and first nonwhite governor of South Carolina, the home to white supremacists like John C. Calhoun, Preston S. Brooks, Ben Tillman and Strom Thurmond.
Mr. Scott’s background is also striking: raised by a poor single mother, he defeated, with Tea Party backing, two white men in a 2010 Republican primary: a son of Thurmond and a son of former Gov. Carroll A. Campbell Jr. But his politics, like those of the archconservative Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, are utterly at odds with the preferences of most black Americans. Mr. Scott has been staunchly anti-tax, anti-union and anti-abortion.
Even if the Republicans managed to distance themselves from the thinly veiled racism of the Tea Party adherents who have moved the party rightward, they wouldn’t do much better among black voters than they do now. I suspect that appointments like Mr. Scott’s are directed less at blacks — whom they know they aren’t going to win in any significant numbers — than at whites who are inclined to vote Republican but don’t want to have to think of themselves, or be thought of by others, as racist.
Just as white Southern Democrats once used cynical manipulations — poll taxes, grandfather clauses, literacy tests — to get around the 15th Amendment, so modern-day Republicans have deployed blacks to undermine black interests…
Let me get this straight. Tim Scott, someone who emerged politically as part of the Tea Party movement, is just a token because he was successful, and his success proves that the Tea Party movement is racist, and … oh, I’m getting lost in this lunacy.
Professor of Political Science increasingly means Professor of Propaganda.
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Comments
You must have missed the memo. If you are white and elected to office, your job is to represent your constituents, but if you are a minority elected to office, your job is to represent your minority. C’mon. This isn’t rocket surgery.
Given the role of the Democratic party in the civil war and all the machinations that followed, Jim Crow, segregation etc, one could surely find good reason for African-Americans to support the Republican Party and shun Democrats. To suggest the opposite, as Adolf Reed does, is an attempt to re-wrire history and use it for political gain.
He won with Tea Party backing, the “thinly veiled racism of the Tea Party” backing. Maybe the thin veil is a burka and they’re Islamophobes too.
This isn’t for our consumption. It’s meant for the Upper East Side and Midtown, and for those folks in fly-over country who think like the folks in the Upper East Side. The article makes perfect sense to them.
Just as (for example) Julia did in the last election. We conservatives thought the ‘Julia’ ads were a) stupid and b) offensive in that it showed a single woman being kept forever by a sugar daddy — in this case, government.
But it wasn’t stupid or offensive to the target audience, that being single women, who ended up voting for Champ in large numbers precisely because he provided assurance that he would look after what was important to them (contraceptives and free stuff).
So yes, this NYT article is stupid and offensive. But it isn’t talking to us, it’s talking to the target audience. That audience wants to hear that conservatives and Republicans are still racists, and that the appearance of a black Republican Senator, product of a single parent home who worked hard all his life to get where he is today, is an aberration that can be explained away. That’s the point.
We conservatives should mock the NYT less and understand more why it writes what it writes. There is, as the old saying goes, method in their madness.
BINGO.
I don’t know a single conservative who doesn’t already know this. Condescension to your own isn’t effective either.
Dr. White wasn’t touching your stuff and he wasn’t touching you, Francis.
It is, however, articles like this, being the reason NYT may have to be bought by the likes of Bloomberg. We conservatives don’t need to know the method to their madness, we need to call out the madness and have it committed everywhere we find it.
If Bloomberg bought the Times, it wouldn’t have more than 16 pages. That’s a joke, I say, that’s a Coke joke son!
Call it out, Yes! Up to the 10-article limit I call it out, adding my comments to the website where the lefty faithful spend the rest of the day attacking my observations.
It’s highly entertaining to me and may teach them a thing or two. I recommend it to everyone and if you have more than one computer or browser you get more opportunities to point out the errors of their ways.
“In fact, the National Journal reported that Democrats elected just six minorities to majority-white districts and states in 2010. And they actually had fewer minorities elected to such offices than Republicans did.”
—as quoted by InstaPundit
Of the seven AA senators in US history, four have been Republicans.
Of the three Deemocrats…Carol Moseley Braun (joke), Roland Burris (crooked joke), and Barrackah Hussain Obama (dirty rotten outlaw joke)…well, what can be said?
Professor of Political Science increasingly means Professor of Propaganda.
Get used to it. It’s likely to get worse, maybe a lot worse, before it gets better, and it may not get better.
I see no indication that the GOP has learned constructive lessons from November’s debacles. In fact, I see no indication that it is interested in doing so. Unless it does, Real Conservatives™ (Akin-Mourdock 2016! Yeah!!) should learn to recognize messages like Adolf Reed’s as their master’s voice.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/336022/new-minnesota-social-studies-standards-america-ugly-john-fonte
And you can trace all this back to the Frankfurt School.
I ascribe it to the Bush-family/Rove/DeLay/Lott-driven intellectual bankruptcy of the GOP.
When conservatives mock the messaging of leftists who are beating the electoral cr*p out of conservatives in what was recently, and still may be, a center-right nation, I am not amused.
Liberals believe that blacks are supposed to serve liberalism, not that liberalism is supposed to serve blacks.
You forget. We must pray for the day when all men are judged by the color of their skin, not the content of their character. And for the day when all the plantation-jumpers can be rounded up & put safely back in the corral.
So saith this ‘professor’ of PoliSci. No more egregious an oxymoron has ever been invented than “political science.”
The Professor is probably a dem plantation black servicing his white liberal massa in the big house. He is pampered & perfumed for this faithful service.
So according to Reed if a white southern politician in the mid 1960’s was ‘utterly at odds’ with the preferences of his white constituents, then he had no business promoting civil rights?
Or is Reed saying racial unity is only valuable when it advances left wing causes?
That whirring sound you hear is King spinning in his grave.
Ask yourself why no high ranking member of Democrat leadership EVER repudiates this kind of absurd rhetoric?
I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again. I apologize for repeating myself. It’s how Democrats get political power.
No Republican presidential candidate since 1964 has ever gotten more than 15% of the black vote. The average is about 10-12%. With Obama as a candidate, McCain and Romney only got about 4% of the black vote.
Democrats know their virtual monopoly on the black voting bloc is critical to winning elections. If they, or their allies in the Democrat Media Complex and Academia have to falsely smear the Tea Party and black conservatives to maintain that near monopoly, they will not hesitate to do so. They target anybody and everybody who threatens their stranglehold on the black vote. And who threatens that more than anybody? Black conservatives, especially the ones who manage to get themselves elected.
The vitriolic hatred directed at Mia Love and Allen West was brutal. Black intellectual conservatives get it too: Thomas Sowell, Larry Elders, Walter Williams, Shelby Steele, Carol Swain have all been viciously attacked.
Racist for electing too many whites
But just as racist for electing blacks.
Perfect Orwellian logic of the left.
Fits with their gun logic:
20 dead children because the adults had no guns.
Democrats blame adults for having too many guns.
Democrats are going full-
autoevilThey are like guardians who treat their wards with contempt. They simultaneously want to control and abort us.
Speaking of one million men and women never to be heard, ban scalpels and vacuums.
Midwest Rhino:
It’s not just Democrats, but they are overwhelmingly corrupt, and therefore a lost cause. They literally sacrifice children for their material greed.
This attack on Tim Scott by Professor Reed, a black political scientist is an identical parallel to the recent attack on Robert Griffin III, the outstanding Redskins quarterback, by a black ESPN commentator. Black people who show any sign of having conservative principles get immediately delegitimized by other blacks as “not black enough” or “not truly black.”
You know, here’s the other thing.
If the polling numbers are to be believed, Americans with dark skin colors voted for O in such large percentages that any “token” we elect on our side of the aisle actually represents, proportionally, a much greater segment of like-minded individuals that are “like him.”
If Mr. Scott makes the “score” that Rags reported above 5-3 in our Senatorial favor, that makes 5 Senators out of whatever 20- or 30-odd percent of the population, as opposed to 3 Senators for the 60- to 70-odd majority.
Not to mention any other segregated portion of the voting populace, or any other level of government.
Stretching a bit too far to find a silver lining? Perhaps. But it’s a funny thought to throw back in their token-deeming faces.
Regarding black Republicans, it is all about success rather than dependency period.
Success provides for independent thinking where a particular vote may not be guaranteed while dependency ensures a sure vote without thinking.
At least that’s the way that I see it…
An awful lot of “black Republican tokens”.
I think what’s going on with the Democrats is called cognitive dissonance, and their synapses are misfiring.
A common characteristic of articles of this nature is they require absolutely no thought or research. It’s why there are so many of them. A “writer” can sit down at their computer and bang out tripe like this and then be recognized as a great mind by those with minds just like theirs.
They can also write whole books. I expect we’ll see Thomas Frank write a book, What’s the Matter with Black Republicans?
In Frank’s own words regarding the unwisdom of Kansans,
…on closer inspection the country we have inhabited for the last three decades seems more like a panorama of madness and delusion worthy of Hieronymous Bosch: of sturdy patriots reciting the Pledge while they resolutely strangle their own life chances; of small farmers proudly voting themselves off the land; of devoted family men carefully seeing to it that their children will never be able to afford college or proper health care; of hardened blue-collar workers in midwestern burgs cheering as they deliver up a landslide for a candidate whose policies will end their way of life, will transform their region into a “rust belt,” will strike people like them blows from which they will never recover.
Perhaps Frank should start with, What’s the Matter with Detroit?
People who followed the Republican senate primary in Virginia last year might have heard of one of the candidates – EW Jackson. It was his first state-wide exposure (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._W._Jackson). My impression is that he made quite an impression. Of course, George Allen won the primary, but Bishop Jackson remained in the spot light, founding Ministers Take a Stand in an effort to bring the conservative message to black churches. Bishop Jackson has been persuaded to run for Lt. Governor here in Virginia(here’s his website: http://jacksonforvirginia.org/). If you’re in Virginia, please consider supporting Jackson by becoming a delegate to the state Republican convention in May. If you’re not in Virginia, please consider helping via a donation.
With a name like ‘Adolf’, this guy should really not venture into race politics.
[…] » And the Award for the most snide and offensive NY Times Op-Ed of 2012 goes to … ̵… […]
Projection alert:
“I suspect that appointments like Mr. Scott’s are directed less at blacks … than at whites who … don’t want to have to think of themselves, or be thought of by others, as racist.”
That’s how a Dem-leftist thinks: “I’ll vote for the black guy just to show everyone I’m not a racist. (Unless the black guy is a Republican, in which case I’ll attack him with openly racist insults and campaign for the white Democrat to defeat him.)”