Posted on 11/25/2004 8:29:49 PM PST by CHARLITE
Did you ever think you would read these words in a San Francisco Chronicle column?
A Latino attorney general? A black woman as secretary of state?
Who would have imagined it 50 years ago--or even, more recently, say, during the Clinton administration? Give President Bush credit for breaking barriers that his Democratic predecessor never got around to.
Just don't tell that to white liberals thrilled with the idea of minorities doing well--as long as liberals can claim credit. If they can't, or if the minorities happen to be conservative, things can get messy.
The American people are about to get a sense of just how messy, now that Bush has nominated Alberto Gonzales to head the Justice Department and Condoleezza Rice to run the State Department.
Senate Democrats don't have the votes to thwart the nominations, but that won't stop them from trying to bloody the nominees before they take office. Witness what happened 13 years ago during the confirmation process for Clarence Thomas, who went from Pin Point, Ga., to Yale Law School to a seat on the Supreme Court--but not before being subjected to what Thomas called a ''high-tech lynching'' for challenging liberal orthodoxy on affirmative action, abortion, and other issues close to the hearts of Democratic constituencies.
Those words appeared in a Chron column written by Ruben Navarette of the Dallas Morning News. Somehow our ''rogue editor'' slipped this one past the Chron's PC only-Republicans-can-be-racists ''editorial board.'' It was probably a stroke of luck that Phil Bronstein and Mrs. Scheer were out in the parking lot of the Mission Whole Foods store loading up the Volvo with tofu, turkeys, and organically grown sweet potatoes. But seriously, Naverette's column hits the Volvo-driving liberals where it hurts most. It strikes right into their precious, romanticized, attachment to the civil rights era. Somehow they can do this even though many of them live in less-than integrated neighborhoods like Tiburon and Rockridge. And they like to label themselves as ''progressives.''
Most denizens of the Chronicle newsroom, like many liberals and Democrats, still live in a 1960's world where conservatives and Republicans wear white sheets and do everything they can to keep minorities down.
Yes, Virginia, Mississippi is still burning. And why not? Stirring the embers of racism still (but not for much longer) gets votes for Democrats. Even in October 2004, Democrat presidential nominee John Kerry waved the bloody shirt of racism claiming in Florida ''we remember the one-million black votes disenfranchised in the last election,'' knowing full well that it was a bald faced lie. Even worse was the infamous leaflet of the liberal 527 group America Coming Together (led by Clintonista Harold Ickes) which showed firefighters using hoses against blacks in the 1950s saying ''this is how they kept us from voting then; don't let THEM do it again.'' And the media tell us that Bush is a divider.
Of course, Ickes tries to change history by ignoring that it was Southern Democrats like Senators Ernest Hollings and Robert Byrd, who were members of the Ku Klux Klan, but the media overlooks this detail of the South. When confronted with this hateful ad on the Hannity and Colmes Show last week, even leftist black studies professor Cornell West was forced to condemn the ad.
The so-called mainstream media are little better, while this election season was an absolute rout for Democrats, that didn't stop CNN from going ''All-Obama, All the Time'' on election day, celebrating the election of Barack Obama, a black Democrat as senator, while ignoring the election in Louisiana of Republican Bobby Jindal, the son of Indian immigrants, to Congress. Of course, prior to election day the media played up all rumors of disenfranchised black voters, refusing to call liberal groups on their despicable tactics of crying ''voter fraud'' even when none existed. Veterans of campus culture wars will recognize that liberal left tactic of claiming ''hate crime'' or ''rape'' or even faking the same to ''bring attention to the issue'' while liberal administrators nod approvingly.
So despite the changing times, it no surprise that the liberal race-baiters are silent when the black and brown ones step off the reservation and--gasp--become conservative? As we've seen in the past week, Rice, Powell, and Gonzalez are all ostracized by white liberals like Ted Rall or Pat Oliphant as ''not being a true black'' or an ''authentic Latino.'' See, to the patronizing white liberals only race-grievance liberal black dinosaurs like the Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and U.S. Civil Rights Commissioner Mary Frances Berry are ''true''' representatives of their race. To them, Colin Powell, Condi Rice, and Clarence Thomas are ''traitors'' who dare to ''act white.''
Remember New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd's sneering ''How dare he, after all we've done for him'' column last year directed at Justice Clarence Thomas for having the nerve to object to the left's racial bean-counting schemes at the University of Michigan? Hell hath no fury like a white liberal scorned.
Republicans under Karl Rove understand that this lashing out on the part of Democrats is a realization that their old tired race-based politics no longer holds sway. As evidenced by President Bush's garnering of 44 percent of the Hispanic vote in the general election, Republicans will pursue an optimistic, futuristic pro-growth, pro-family, patriotic, ownership-society message to Hispanics, who value family, faith, and country. Democrats, still tied to victimhood groups like the NAACP, offer nothing but pessimistic grievance politics tied to government-based affirmative action. President Bush's snub of the NAACP was a not-so-subtle message that the organization's race-baiting politics will not be welcome in the 21st Century.
Republican appointments of blackx to high profile cabinet spots such as secretary of state and national security advisor will beat the Democrats ''traditional'' black appointments to Housing and Urban Development and resonate with black voters. And Democrats know it. Bush polled as much as 16 percent among black voters earlier this year, prompting Democrats to panic and again revert to hysterical race-baiting as we saw from Kerry and ACT and two years ago when Maryland gubernatorial candidate Kathleen Kennedy Townsend desperately played the race card to Baltimore blacks before losing to Republican candidate Robert Erlich.
Karl Rove, who with his aid in defeating conservative ''Blue Dog''' Democrats such as Charles Stenholm of Texas, has nearly succeeded in his efforts to make the Democrats the minority party of angry minorities. His efforts might even succeed further if the Democrats nominate Donna Brazile, the former chief of staff to D.C. Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton and a liberal civil-rights era black dinosaur, as head of the Democratic National Committee to replace disgraced Clintonista Terry McAuliffe. While Donna Brazile is well respected in both parties and ran a shrewd campaign for Al Gore, she is a creature of the hard-left grievance, pity party. She is not above her own race-baiting, calling the GOP a party of ''white boys'' and suggesting famously in 2000 that ''Republicans would rather take pictures with black children than feed them.''
The racist outbursts on the part of white liberals like Ted Rall and Pat Oliphant are the last gasps of a dying party, and that is something to be thankful for this holiday season.
About the Writer: The Black Shadow is a Bay Area native and UC Berkeley grad, now transplanted to the East Coast. He remains a die-hard Raider and A's fan, and yearns for Brennan's corned beef and Golden Bear lager.
wow, that'ssome kind of writing!! Thanks for the read.
Fallacy, fabrication, mythology...Robert Byrd
Liberals just don't think minorities,especially blacks,are smart enough to do it on their own.
The ones that do succeed,and there are many,they call Uncle Toms,sell-outs etc.
Unbelievable. I wonder how they think Thurgood Marhsall made it without affirmative action? I have the answer-----he worked hard.
Look at how black history month is structured as the years go by. I remember the nuns teaching everyone in class about slaves who taught themselves to read using the bible. Now I just see kids getting spoonfed crap instead of being inspired by how far people have come in this country.
The black kids' role models today are all self-made" millionaires ----they play basketall(and fight and father children) with the NBA or they are rappers. These are the models the kids use today.
The black man down the street who is an electrician or a plumber would be considered a loser.Sad!
Bill Cosby has it right!
The black man down the street who is an electrician or a plumber would be considered a loser.Sad!
*** Yes well short sightedness and selling one's birthright for pottage is nothing new. BTW, Cosby is right and the sooner the message sinks in the better. Kids get older, they get more stubborn.
Um, wasn't it the white Southern Democrat Senators that filibustered, did everything they could to stop the Civil Rights Act, etc. from passing, and wasn't it the white Northern Republican Senators that spearheaded the way?
And why was Trent Lott trashed for saying something complementary at Strom Thurmond's birthday party, when he could have slobbered all over the KKK Senator Byrd and the MSM wouldn't have commented on that?
I read a story written by a slave named Olaudah Equiano and he became a prominent English gentleman. He taught himself when he was a slave.
The Muslims were among the first Black African slave traders, moving the Slaves from West to East on foot. The seafaring nations, England, Holland, France, Portugal, Spain, were the instigators and transporters of the Slaves to the New World, not the Americans or then the Colonials.
Aprox. 5% of all the Slaves transported form Africa found the United States as a final destination.
History taught properly would alleviate much of the racial divide that occurs in our country. Abolition was the cause of many early Americans, a just cause that eventually won out.
Unfortunately history is taught to assist the situations of the present particularly in politics.
It never ceases to amaze me when ethnic groups emulated the original oppressors by adopting Muslim names El this Al that, strange but the result of total lack of factual history.
Liberals can't quite explain how these people achieved these things without their help:
Olaudah Equiano (Gustavus Vassa) was kidnapped from his African village at the age of eleven, shipped through the arduous "Middle Passage" of the Atlantic Ocean, seasoned in the West Indies and sold to a Virginia planter. He was later bought by a British naval Officer, Captain Pascal, as a present for his cousins in London. After ten years of enslavement throughout the North American continent, where he assisted his merchant slave master and worked as a seaman, Equiano bought his freedom. At the age of forty four he wrote and published his autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African. Written by Himself, which he registered at Stationer's Hall, London, in 1789. More than two centuries later, this work is recognized not only as one of the first works written in English by a former slave, but perhaps more important as the paradigm of the slave narrative, a new literary genre.
Equiano recalls his childhood in Essaka (an Igbo village formerly in northeast Nigeria), where he was adorned in the tradition of the "greatest warriors." He is unique in his recollection of traditional African life before the advent of the European slave trade. Equally significant is Equiano's life on the high seas, which included not only travels throughout the Americas, Turkey and the Mediterranean; but also participation in major naval battles during the French and Indian War (Seven Years' War), as well as in the search for a northwest passage led by the Phipps expedition of 1772-1773. Equiano also records his central role, along with Granville Sharpe, in the British Abolishionist Movement. As a major voice in this movement, Equiano petitioned the Queen of England in 1788. He was appointed to the expedition to settle London's poor Blacks in Sierra Leone, a British colony on the west coast of Africa. Sadly, he did not complete the journey back to his native land.
Despite these attractive accomplishments, however, Equiano's most important work is his autobiography, which became a best seller, rivaled in popularity by Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. He published nine different editions before his death in 1797; including an American edition (1791), and German and Dutch editions, 1790 and 1791 respectively. By 1837, nine more editions had been published. Three editions were bound together with the poems of another former slave child Phyllis Wheatly, whose Poems on Various Subjects (1773) was the first collection of poems published by an African American. Together, their works form the genesis of a Black written literary tradition.
Many American schoolchildren seem to believe that slavery never existed anywhere but in America. They don't even know that white-on-white slavery (serfdom) was abolished in Russia in 1865, after the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 was declared by Lincoln. In fact, it would be interesting to know if any of the inner-city schoolchildren know that Lincoln was a Republican!
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