LA Times Columnist Equates Former Bush Staffer to a "House Negro"

Newsbusters.org ^ | 16 March 2006 | Dave Pierre

[infoguy]

In one of the more ugly and mean-spirited op-ed pieces in the Los Angeles Times this year, opinion writer Erin Aubry Kaplan likened former Bush staffer Claude Allen to a "house Negro" from the days of slavery. (Claude Allen, a black man, resigned as President Bush's senior domestic policy advisor in early February. He was arrested on March 9 for theft of items from a Target and other stores.)

What is the gist of Kaplan's nasty and condescending article ("Claude Allen's life sentence," 3/15/06)? Kaplan surmises that Mr. Allen's "compromises" and "cognitive dissonance" as a conservative black male may have taken a "psychological toll" on him. She then questions if this caused Allen to "finally crack under the pressure."

It doesn't get much more hostile and arrogant than this, folks. Writes Kaplan (emphasis mine),

"Loyalty has been the price of admission to this [Bush] administration, and black conservatives have proved to be more loyal than most.

"That has unfortunately, but not always unfairly, invited comparisons to slave times, when the most loyal blacks were those who worked in closest proximity to their white masters — house Negroes, as they were derisively known. Such Negroes gained privilege but lost standing in their own community, a price that might have been reasonable if they were eventually granted the same status as the whites they so assiduously served. They weren't, of course; race has always mattered. And it matters now, though the dynamic is more subtle and devious."

Yikes. Kaplan then asks if Allen may have been "acting out a latent bitterness for being denied a spot on the federal appeals court."

There's more to Kaplan's ugliness in her article, but you get the point.

By the way, besides being flat-out malicious and vile, Kaplan exhibits all the signs of being what talk-show host Larry Elder calls a "victicrat." A victicrat "blames all ills, problems, concerns, and unhappiness on others." (Read more about this in Elder's must-read book, The Ten Things You Can't Say in America.) The evidence of this:

"All black folk, even conservatives, know they have to be three times as upstanding just to get along."

Oh, really? All "black folk" know this, Erin? Please.

The Los Angeles Times readership has been in a habitual and steady decline in the past decade (see here and here). Is this any wonder in light of readers being insulted by caustic and unwarranted attacks such as Kaplan's?

[Izzy Dunne]

Hey - at least he didn't use the dreaded "N" word.

[SR 50]

There is no such thing as a "house negro".

[Ikemeister]

Ann Coulter's column today sums up the Democrats' attitude toward Republican Blacks better than anyone else can.

[freedumb2003]

Standard liberal racism.

They hate the blacks so much, they can't stand it. So, they use every device imaginable to keep them down on the plantation.

They do the same with latinos.

How minorities deal with the liberal combination of condescension and actively trying to kill them off through abortion is beyond me.

Outside of skin-heads there is no more racist being than a white liberal.

[freedumb2003]

Actually, there is a more racist being than a white liberal: a minority liberal.

[silverleaf]

Ths sounds like an interesting defense strategery if I decide to pull a "Claude Allen"... go to Target and run a scam by returning items I hadn't bought, for cash.

One would think a conservative "house negro" would have at least shoplifted from Brooks Brothers or Nordstrom.

[jigsaw]

"Erin Aubry Kaplan began working full-time as a journalist in 1992 for The Times and, for a short time, for a section called City Times, where she continued covering the Crenshaw district, South Central and events affecting L.A.'s disparate black communities. She also worked for New Times Los Angeles and LA Weekly, where she wrote a column, "Cakewalk." A widely anthologized author, Kaplan's articles have appeared in the London Independent, the Guardian, Salon.com, The Crisis, Newsday, Contemporary Art Magazine, the Utne Reader and Black Enterprise. She has completed a first book, an essay collection entitled, "Views and Blues from the Edge: Dispatches from a Black Journalista."."

SOURCE

[ElPatriota]

The only thing I am interested in this subject is. You mean to tell me this guy did not have a record at all on anything unlawful?

This guy is either mentally sick beyond belief or addicted to something.. God knows what. Assuming what he did is true (don't trust the media completely), this is a habit he must have picked up in his youth probably. How can anyone mask it for an entire life, just until now?

Does anyone know or have a theory?

[radiohead]

Standard liberal racism.
They hate the blacks so much, they can't stand it. So, they use every device imaginable to keep them down on the plantation.
They do the same with latinos.
How minorities deal with the liberal combination of condescension and actively trying to kill them off through abortion is beyond me.
Outside of skin-heads there is no more racist being than a white liberal.

Thought it needed repeating.

[Crispus Attucks Patriot]

Tell me about it.

Once you step off the plantation and embrace conservatism the left, (especially the Black left), they call you a traitor and strip you of your racial heritage.

I've been called a sellout so many times I'm starting to think it's my first name, hehehe.....

But hey, let 'em do it. I'm trying to make something of myself in this great nation with boundless opportunities. What are they doing besides being eternal victims?

[oldtimer2]

Can you imagine the uproar if William Buckley had called
Betty Currey , Clinton's "house negro"

[metesky]

---

Erin Aubry Kaplan

---

Erin Aubry Kaplan began working full-time as a journalist in 1992 for The Times and, for a short time, for a section called City Times, where she continued covering the Crenshaw district, South Central and events affecting L.A.'s disparate black communities. She also worked for New Times Los Angeles and LA Weekly, where she wrote a column, "Cakewalk." A widely anthologized author, Kaplan's articles have appeared in the London Independent, the Guardian, Salon.com, The Crisis, Newsday, Contemporary Art Magazine, the Utne Reader and Black Enterprise. She has completed a first book, an essay collection entitled, "Views and Blues from the Edge: Dispatches from a Black Journalista.".

[martin_fierro]

Speaking of "House Negroes" -- Remembering Ron Brown and Long Beach:

In the beginning of the book, Woodward lists Clinton's nine-member "economic team." [Ron] Brown is not on it. Nor is Brown among the 31 Democrats who comprise Woodward's "cast of characters." What intrigues the observer about this cast is it looks less "like America" than it does like, say, Idaho.

Of the 31 Democrats listed – 22 of whom are part of Clinton's official team – not one is a racial minority of any kind. Of the 70 identifiable faces (including repetition) in the photo section of the book, all are white. And this is the "domestic" team. On the national security front, minorities did not even enjoy the illusion of power. There were no Condi Rices, no Colin Powells, nothing like it.

Blacks and Hispanics in the Clinton administration enjoyed little more than the trappings of power. As Brown learned, the appointment of minorities served largely to appease key voting blocs. Neither he nor the other minorities in the Cabinet were even allowed to pick their own second in command. That person was inevitably a Clinton plant in place to do the administration's real work.

[trisham]

Kaplan surmises that Mr. Allen's "compromises" and "cognitive dissonance" as a conservative black male may have taken a "psychological toll" on him. She then questions if this caused Allen to "finally crack under the pressure."

**************

The arrogance and patronizing attitude are simply breathtaking. In Kaplan's mind, Allen's race makes him too fragile to cope. I wonder how she explains Rice and Powell, then?

[trisham]

Holy mackeral. Kaplan is black? Wow.

[sportutegrl]

"All black folk, even conservatives, know they have to be three times as upstanding just to get along."

Would that Jason Blair were held to such a high standard.

[mewzilla]

The Racist History of the Democratic Party

[Eric in the Ozarks]

"Journalista."
Clintonista.