Anger in the house.

"So whenever that house Negro identified himself, he always identified himself in the same sense that his master identified himself. When his master said, "We have good food," the house Negro would say, "Yes, we have plenty of good food." "We" have plenty of good food. When the master said that "we have a fine home here," the house Negro said, "Yes, we have a fine home here." When the master would be sick, the house Negro identified himself so much with his master he'd say, "What's the matter boss, we sick?" His master's pain was his pain. And it hurt him more for his master to be sick than for him to be sick himself. When the house started burning down, that type of Negro would fight harder to put the master's house out than the master himself would." ~Malcolm X~

I was thinking of this portion of Malcolm X's famous speech (from where the name of this blog comes)  while reading an article sent to me by a friend today. (h/t Greg)

The article was written by a republican brother bemoaning the fact that republicans are not showing black republicans any love.

The more I read the more sorry I felt for the brother. Imagine viewing your entire self- worth and self-esteem through the lens of how others view you.

To be fair, there are brothers (and sisters) like this on the dumbocratic side as well. Their entire life is built around the politics of their party. Nothing comes before the party. Not community, not family, nothing. It's all about the party staying in power and getting whatever rewards those in power decide to throw their way.

But back to Raynard Jackson, because his rant is the most pathetic of all.

"I am fond of saying that many times Republicans try to do the right thing, but do it the wrong way. 

Branch Rickey, former president and general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, scoured the Negro Leagues in 1943 to find the best and brightest baseball players who he could sign to integrate baseball.  He wasn’t just looking for raw talent; he was also looking for the “right” person(s).

 

Jackie Robinson was not the only good ball player in the league back then; for sure he was definitely one of the elite.  But he also had the other skillsets that would allow him to endure the racist taunts he was about to encounter as the first Black to play professional baseball with white folks.

 

Rickey chose Robinson not only because of his skill, but also because of his personality which would allow him to keep his composure under the strain of hostility he was about to face.  Rickey constantly validated Robinson specifically and constantly discussed publically the need for diversity within baseball and ultimately America.

 

Where are the Branch Rickey’s of the Republican Party today?  There are none.  The last one was former N.F.L. quarterback and former congressman Jack Kemp who died in 2009.

 

I was plucked out of obscurity by the Bush family in St. Louis when I was fresh out of college from Oral Roberts University.  They had no prior relationship with me, but they, like Rickey, scoured Missouri politics to find the best person(s) with the right political background; but also with the right temperament to proudly represent the Bush family’s name as the then vice president was about to launch his presidential campaign in 1988.  According to them, “they had been following my career and noticing my work in the Republican Party in Missouri.” 

 

My work got me noticed, but my relationships got me opportunity.  I didn’t have to run to be a delegate to our party’s national convention, I was told I would be a delegate; and thus it was so.

 

My point is very simple, I grew up in a Republican Party when relationships mattered and the party took care of their own.  This is no longer the case.

 

Republicans today spend more time rewarding their enemies versus rewarding their friends. 

 

Why would Rand Paul have lunch with Al Sharpton last November in the Senate dining room?  By doing it in the Senate dining room, he meant for the media and other members of the U.S. Senate to see them together; thus validating Sharpton as someone to be sought out for private counsel.  I wonder why there is no account of Paul making a similar validation of a Black Republican with relevant party credentials.

 

Why would Jeb Bush meet with members of the Black Lives Matter group when he has never met with any relevant Black Republicans?  Are you kidding me?  When you have no Blacks in your inner circle you tend to make foolish decisions like this.

 

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley is the most recent example of validating Black Democrats and ignoring Black Republicans.  She was in town last week to speak before the National Press Club.  I thought the section of her speech about her accomplishments as governor was very good; but the speech was horrible when she began to talk about race relations and the Black community.  I also found it to be very offensive." [Source]

 

My lord this Negro is sad. What does he think they owe him? Yes the Bushes hand picked him to be their Negro of the moment, but surely he understand that he ---and others like him---are not going to get a seat at that table.   

 

"I didn’t have to run to be a delegate to our party’s national convention, I was told I would be a delegate; and thus it was so."

 

Translated: I never had to work. I always had a place in the house.

 

The problem is, my misguided friend, your place in the house is just a room. You will never have a say in how the house should be run. Maybe it's time you tried to own your own. 

 

 

 

 

These republicans aren't helping the republic.

I was looking for some interesting reading on the web when I found the following article from David Neiwert. Now he is telling us what most of us already know, but he still makes some very interesting points. Especially when he writes about my friends in the re-puke-lican party.

"Recently the New York Times carried a report on the "noose incidents" that have been occurring with rising frequency around the country, inspired seemingly by the protests over the "Jena 6" case.The report came complete with a graphic showing where the incidents have occurred.

Remarkably, it isn't just happening in the South: the incidents are also being reported in places like Minneapolis; Cicero, Ill.; Pittsburgh; Philadelphia; Newark; Baltimore; and New London, Conn. Equally striking was the analysis from Mark Potok, the SPLC's Intelligence Project director, who wrote: These incidents are worrying, but even more so is the social reality they reflect. The level of hate crimes in the United States is astoundingly high - more than 190,000 incidents per year, according to a 2005 Department of Justice study. And the number of hate groups, according to the annual count by the Southern Poverty Law Center, has shot up 40 percent in recent years, from 602 groups in 2000 to 844 in 2006. It seems that the September rally in Jena - much as it was seen by many civil rights activists as the beginning of a new social movement - signaled not a renewed march toward racial and social justice, but a surprisingly broad and deep white backlash against the gains of black America.Indeed, as Digby observes, "The racist beast is clamoring to be set free." The old once again is new: there's a "new racism" that pretends to be daring new thinking, dashing the molds of political correctness, but really is just the same old shit recycled. And it's not even relegated strictly to the right: Witness, for the most recent example, William Saletan's sally into the rancid fields of eugenics. That this is happening is acutely clear for African Americans, historically the chief victims of racist hate in America, as the noose episodes suggest. But it's also becoming true on a broader scale as well, with a rising tide of openly espoused ethnic bigotry manifesting itself in myriad ways, particularly on the immigration front, where Latinos are increasingly targeted by rhetoric emanating from the very highest levels of Republican leadership that manifests itself in a tide of hate crimes; and in the "war on terror," which has provided for an opening for a variety of right-wing figures to spew hateful anti-Muslim rhetoric, with similarly predictable consequences. One kind of hate feeds another; one open expression of bigotry without significant consequence only provides permission for many more to follow, and the inherent violence of such talk inevitably gives permission for people to act it out. Thus this shifting social tide has, just as predictably, brought the broader result of a significant increase in bias crimes of all kinds across the country.And the breadth of the tide also tells us that this is not really about blacks or Latinos or Muslims specifically, but is about the people who fear and despise them: white people.

It's about defending white privilege.And there has been one primary driver for this gravitational shift: generically, the conservative movement, and specifically, its wholly owned subsidiary, the Republican Party.You can hear the push to defend "white culture" from nearly every sector of the right, from Bill O'Reilly: But do you understand what the New York Times wants, and the far-left want? They want to break down the white, Christian, male power structure, which you're a part, and so am I, and they want to bring in millions of foreign nationals to basically break down the structure that we have. In that regard, Pat Buchanan is right.Patrick Buchanan: I think America may exist, but I'll tell you this: I do believe we're going to lose the American Southwest. I think it is almost inevitable. If we do not put a fence on that border ... you're going to have 100 million Hispanics in the country, most of them new immigrants from Mexico, which believes that belongs to them. What's going to happen to us, Sean, in my judgment, is what is happening right now: We are Balkanizing. We are dividing and separating from one another politically, morally -- on issues like abortion or Terri Schiavo -- racially and ethnically, when you get Jena and then you get Don Imus, and all of these things ripping us apart. All the things that used to pull us together and hold us together no longer do.Michael Savage: But basically, if you're talking about a day like today, Martin Luther King Junior Day, and you're gonna understand what civil rights has become, the con it's become in this country. It's a whole industry; it's a racket. It's a racket that is used to exploit primarily heterosexual, Christian, white males' birthright and steal from them what is their birthright and give it to people who didn't qualify for it.This is nothing new, of course.

The defense of white privilege has been a cornerstone of the GOP's electoral appeal ever since the its ardent adoption of the Southern Strategy, dating back to Goldwater and Nixon and continiuing through the Reagan and Bush years. Even Republican strategists acknowledge this to be the case.Joseph Aistrup, in his book The Southern Strategy Revisited: Republican Top-Down Advancement in the South -- a text written primarily to influence GOP politicos -- observes the following: When a GOP presidential candidate's campaign strategy emphasizes racially conservative appeals, he identifies not only himself but his party as the one that protects white interests.

The identification of the GOP, instead of the Southern Democrats, as the protector of white interests, combined with the large infusion of blacks into the Southern Democratic parties, opens the door for Southern whites to abandon their historic ties to the Democrats.It's critical to understand, however, that the Southern Strategy wasn't geared simply toward winning votes in the South -- it also is aimed at white suburbs and rural areas where the defense of white society remains a significant cultural issue. Its reach ran well beyond the South.One way of seeing this clearly is by examining the history of "sundown towns". As James Loewen details (excruciatingly) in his study Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, there are literally thousands of towns across America -- relatively few of them in the South -- who for much of the 20th century forbade minorities, blacks especially, from living within their communities. Many of them placed signs at the town limits warning "Whites Only After Dark" or "Nigger, Don't Let the Sun Set on You Here" -- that all nonwhites were to be out of town by sundown. In many cases, especially suburbs, no signs were visible, but all-white covenants provided the same effect.Most of the "sundown towns" and "sundown suburbs" that Loewen documents were in the Northeast, the Midwest and West -- the same places where we're seeing "noose incidents," as well as attempts to pass laws aimed at driving out Latinos.These same "sundown towns" have, unsurprisingly, a history of following racial election appeals, including broad support for George Wallace in 1968, and Republican presidential candidates in the ensuing years, all of whom made use of the Southern Strategy's core appeal to white racial interests. As Loewen notes: As a result of such leadership, Republicans have carried most sundown towns since 1968, sometimes achieving startling unaninimity. ... So the "southern strategy" turned out to be a "southern and sundown town strategy," especially in sundown suburbs. Macomb County, for example, the next county north of Detroit, voted overwhelmingly for Wallace in the 1972 Democratic primary. Wooed by Nixon, many of these voters then became "Reagan Democrats" and now are plain Republicans. The biggest single reason, according to housing attorney Alexander Polikoff, was anxiety about "blacks trapped in ghettos trying to penetrate white neighborhoods." [pp.372-373]Take a look at where the nooses are appearing, where the anti-Latino and anti-Muslim hate crimes are occurring. If you look through the incidents, it's clear that many of them are occurring in precincts that, historically, were all-white by design. It's part of the continuing defense of that status quo in those communities that engenders so much of the nation's current racial divide -- with bias crimes, as always the on-the-ground manifestation.

I know that Democrats have been tempted to try to tap into this tide to their short-term electoral advantage; witness Rahm Emanuel and Co.'s attempts to advance an immigration plan that's absurdly enforcement-heavy and reform-light.Before they take that step, they need to stop and think about the consequences. Not just the electoral calculus, considering what it would cost Democrats in terms of the votes of blacks, Latinos, and Muslims who are flocking to them now because of the GOP's increasingly inchoate bigotry, but the real-life results. They need to think about those nooses, and where they come from, and simply do what is right."

And people wonder why I will vote for the dumb-ocratic candidate no matter who it is.

Do as I say not as I do.

"Hypocrisy is the compliment vice pays to virtue" ~La Rochefoucauld~

With this post I would like to talk about some serious hypocrites occupying center stage in America these days. The other night I caught a glimpse of the republican presidential debates (so male and so white) and while watching these frauds, I couldn't' help but think about what a bunch of hypocrites the Republicans are.

Let's take a look shall we. We will start with the poster boy for flip flopping, Mr. Mitt Romney. Now here is a guy who is now opposed to a woman's right to choose, yet at one point not too long ago, he was all for it. He also opposes Gay unions; yet, at one point in his career, he was all for that as well. Not to mention the second amendment thing, he was all for gun control before he decided to run for President and became a life long member of the NRA. Hypocrite!

But my good Mormon friend is not alone. Up there on the stage with his republican colleagues, was the former mayor of New York, Rudy Gauliani, who has some interesting skeletons in his closet his own damn self. Now to be fair to Rudy, I have not really seen or heard him openly point fingers at Bill Clinton. But those whose votes he is eagerly pursuing certainly have. Poor Bill still can't live down Monica; and let's make no mistake, Bill loves the ladies, but apparently so does Rudy. Talk about f****d up personal life. Here is a guy who married his second cousin and had the wedding annulled. Then he has an open affair while he is Mayor of New York, dumps his wife for his mistress, and holds a press conference to announce it for crying out loud! And of course there is John McCain, who was for the state of South Carolina displaying the confederate flag before he was against it. And was against drilling for oil in the ANWAR before he was for it. All of these men personify the new American hypocritical spirit. Oh yes, America the beautiful, a country whose founding fathers epitomized hypocrisy, (Think Thomas Jefferson and all those slaves) was built on the backs of slaves, and the massacre of millions of natives who were here first.

Hypocrisy rules the day in our religion, our personal lives, and our foreign policy as a country. For instance, we invade a country and overthrow its leader, because he stifled individual freedoms and liberties. Yet, our own leader suspends our individual freedoms and circumvents our Constitution because he felt like it. Talk about hubris. We chastise countries for not treating all their citizens equally, yet we have a history of treating our own citizens differently based on their race and their class in our own country. (Think Katrina. "George Bush doesn't care about black people" I know Kanye it sure doesn't look like it). I think of that hypocrite Bill Bennett (a Republican of course) who was preaching virtues to us, while he was dropping thousands of dollars on the crap table. Not to mention, that chicken hawk, Paul Wolfowitz, (one of the people responsible for our country being at war) who hooked his little, ahem, friend up with a serious pay raise just because she is his, ahem, friend. I won't even get into our favorite Attorney General, gonzo, who in my humble opinion, is one of the poster boys for hypocrisy in Washington. But then, he wouldn't have gotten to his position (the frat boy's right hand man and one of his chief confidants) if he wasn't.

But I will give the republicans credit, they sure know how to play the game, and while they are doing it, they have an entire country fooled. To the average Joe in America, the Republican party is the party of virtues, moral consistency, and family values. Boy are they wrong.

Hypocrite: A person who acts in contradiction to his or her stated beliefs or feelings~~Merrian Webster~

Hypocrite: The Republican Party.