Posted on 07/10/2002 12:58:59 PM PDT by xsysmgr
Two days ago a nationally prominent speaker referred to Ward Connerly, a politically active African American in California, as both a "fraud" and a "con man." Connerly is the Board of Regents member who led the 1996 fight to pass Proposition 209, which ended affirmative action in California’s public sector. Who was the speaker who so disparaged Mr. Connerly? None other than NAACP chairman Julian Bond, who made his remarks during an address to those attending the NAACP’s national convention in Houston.
In his speech, Bond of course spent some time blasting his most familiar target: the white racism that he contends remains as pervasive as ever in America. But an even greater share of his wrath was reserved for conservative blacks, whom he deems the unwitting allies of white bigots. According to Bond, such whites essentially use black conservatives as mascots whose presence is intended only to fool people into thinking that the whites are happy to associate with blacks - thereby discouraging potential charges of racism.
"There is a right-wing conspiracy," said Bond, " . . . an interlocking network of funders, groups, and activists, who coordinate their methods and their message. . . . They are . . . the movement behind vouchers, the legal assault on affirmative action and other remedies for discrimination, attempts to reapportion us [blacks] out of office, and attacks on equity everywhere. They’ve had a collection of black hustlers and hucksters on their payrolls for more than twenty years, promoting them as the new generation of black leaders. They can’t deal with the leaders we choose for ourselves, so they manufacture, promote, and hire new ones. Like ventriloquists’ dummies, [these blacks] speak in their puppet-master’s voice."
This type of racial name-calling is nothing new for the political Left, whose members commonly dismiss as an "inauthentic black" any African American whose world-view differs from their own. The planted axiom is that "all real blacks think alike" on matters of race, a preposterous notion that civil rights activists would rightfully condemn if it were uttered by a white person. Some of the rhetoric has been ugly indeed.
Consider Jesse Jackson, whose denunciations of Mr. Connerly’s opposition to affirmative action degenerated into his calling Connerly a "house slave" and a "puppet of the white man." A few years ago Jackson also condemned Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s vote to place limits on affirmative action programs, characterizing Thomas’s vote as "a brutally violent act" that, "in effect, stabbed Dr. King, . . . paving the way back toward slavery." Along with fellow activist Al Sharpton, Jackson led a prayer vigil outside Thomas’s home to protest the Justice’s decision. Likening Thomas to a Klansman, Jackson asserted, "At night, the enemies of civil rights strike in white sheets, burning crosses. . . . By day, they strike in black robes."
Ever since his appointment to the Supreme Court, Justice Thomas has been one of the Left’s most detested targets. The late columnist Carl Rowan sarcastically suggested that "if you give Thomas a little flour on his face, you’d think you had [former Klansman] David Duke." San Francisco mayor Willie Brown called Thomas not only "a shill for the most insidious form of racism, but also a man whose views are "legitimizing of the Ku Klux Klan." Brown added that Thomas "should be reduced to talking only to white conservatives," and "must be shut out" by the black community."
The ugliness goes on and on. Political scientist Manning Marable asserts that Thomas has "ethnically ceased being an African American." Movie director Spike Lee calls Thomas "a handkerchief-head, chicken-and-biscuit-eating Uncle Tom." Author June Jordan characterizes him as a "virulent Oreo phenomenon," a "punk-ass," and an "Uncle Tom calamity." The late Haywood Burns, who was the dean of a New York law school and chairman emeritus of the National Conference of Black Lawyers, called Thomas a "counterfeit hero" whose ideals had "crushed or forever deferred" the dreams of millions of blacks. Columnist Julianne Malveaux told a television audience, "I hope [Thomas’s] wife feeds him lots of eggs and butter, and he dies early, like many black men do, of heart disease. . . .He’s an absolutely reprehensible person." Imagine the public outcry we would have heard if white speakers had uttered such mean-spirited nonsense.
From the podium of a recent NAACP convention, Thomas was denounced as a "pimp" and a "traitor" to the black community. With comparable contempt, the Reverend Joseph Lowery of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference once said, "I have told [Thomas] I am ashamed of him, because he is becoming to the black community what Benedict Arnold was to the nation he deserted; and what Judas Iscariot was to Jesus: a traitor; and what Brutus was to Caesar: an assassin. Missouri Democrat William Clay labels Thomas and other black conservatives "Negro wanderers" whose goal is to "maim and kill other blacks for the gratification and entertainment of ultraconservative white racists." Similarly, Mr. Clay described black conservative Gary Franks - when Franks was a Connecticut congressman - as a "Negro Dr. Kevorkian, a pariah," who exhibited a "foot-shuffling, head-scratching brand of Uncle Tomism."
Former NAACP executive director Benjamin Hooks denounces black conservatives as "a new breed of Uncle Tom [and] some of the biggest liars the world ever saw." Afrocentric historian John Henrik Clarke calls them "frustrated slaves crawling back to the plantation." The late Khalid Abdul Muhammad put it still more bluntly: "When white folks can’t defeat you, they’ll always find some Negro, some boot-licking, butt-licking, bamboozled, half-baked, half-fried, sissified, punkified, pasteurized, homogenized Nigger that they can trot out in front of you." It is notable that Muhammad’s words - though very crude - express precisely the same message that Mr. Bond expressed somewhat more delicately.
Perhaps the most effective response to these many inanities comes from, of all people, Clarence Thomas. "Long gone is the time," he says, "when we [blacks] opposed the notion that we all looked alike and talked alike. [But] somehow we have come to exalt the new black stereotype above all and demand conformity to that norm. . . . [However], I assert my right to think for myself, to refuse to have my ideas assigned to me as though I was an intellectual slave because I’m black."
Odd that, if they don't watch out, they'll soon cede that dubious honor to modern Islam.
Michael
And these folks expect to be taken seriously.
Well they are, by people who share their grade-school-vindictive mentality...
The late Khalid Abdul Muhammad put it still more bluntly: "When white folks can’t defeat you, they’ll always find some Negro, some boot-licking, butt-licking, bamboozled, half-baked, half-fried, sissified, punkified, pasteurized, homogenized Nigger that they can trot out in front of you."
At least Khalid didn’t stoop to euphemisms.
I wonder if did a little soft-shoe when he sang this tired old ditty?
And Julian Bond is a boil on the butt of America sorely in need of lancing.
If you want on (or off) of my black conservative ping list, please let me know via FREEPmail. (And no, you don't have to be black to be on the list!)
Because Clarence Thomas will not worship at the altar of the NAACP, they paint him with the brush usually reserved for Hitler or bin Laden or other enemies of humanity. They use broad strokes, in order to minimize his role as one of the highest arbitors of the law of this land. They belittle him. They treat him as if he were the worst form of leper, and try to exile him to an intellectual gulag.
They try to sentence others to this same gulag: Ward Connerly, J. C. Watts, Jesse Lee Peterson, Niger Innis, and many other black conservatives, whose only crime is that of free thought.
After all, we are 'too dumb' to think for ourselves; not only that, we are so dumb that we have lost our way and 'allowed' ourselves to be led by those who have nothing but contempt for blacks and other minority groups.
Feh.
I have told people regularly that Liberals would never teach black folks how to get rich (Could you imagine Ted Kennedy or Dick Gephardt telling you how to make money?). Conservatives not only do teach people how to become rich, they tell the secrets they use to do so quicker!
Show me the money, any day.
How ironic, and how tragic it is that the race-hustlers seek to marginalize and demonize them....
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