"Trumpania" and the politics of race.

The Field Negro education series continues.

Tonight I post an excellent essay from my friend, Chauncey Devega.

(Check out his terrific  blog, here when you get a chance.)

"The sociological imagination is the connection between personal experience and the broader social and political world. This concept is one of the most powerful frameworks for understanding the human experience and how we locate it within a given society and/or cultural milieu.

As such, the sociological imagination has been invaluable in my efforts to make sense of politics in the Age of Obama, the rise of “Trumpmania,” and the radical rightward move of the Republican Party and movement conservatism. Because such interactions are both disturbing and fascinating, I routinely take “human safaris” to overt white supremacist websites and the comment sections of Fox News and similar right-wing entertainment disinformation media. I also respond to conservatives via social media who are made enraged, hurt, and angry by the topics and themes explored by my essays and other work.

While the right-wing media exists in a state of epistemic closure—where the logic, reasoning, and rationales of the troglodytes stuck within are bizarre and exist outside of empirical reality—it remains essential that we pull back the veil and look inside: The machinations that are produced therein are a threat to the Common Good.

One of the repeated narratives which I have encountered from Donald Trump supporters online (and in person) is that they are not “racists,” are the “real victims” of “political correctness,” and how there is no “evidence” or “proof” that the ascendance of Donald Trump’s pro-fascist, right-wing producerist, Herrenvolk movement is driven by racial animus or bigotry.

Much of these responses—beyond trolling, deflection, and evasion—are standard right-wing talking points for the post-civil rights era and the Age of Obama. An unwarranted sense of victimhood as well as grievance mongering is a perpetual state of affairs for conservatives, from the civil rights era to the present.

Other Trump supporters and Republicans are befuddled by the claim that their party’s present state and its presumed nominee are the result of decades of the “Southern Strategy” and the politics of white racial resentment. Some of them are ignorant of their own political party’s history and present. Others lack critical thinking skills, and a good many are propagandized by the right-wing disinformation machine. Systems-level thinking is a skill conservatives find very challenging, and the majority are simply exhibiting the binary thinking, fear-dominated heuristics and cognition, as well as authoritarian tendencies that are common to their brain structures and political personalities.

Ultimately, in my conversations with Donald Trump supporters (and conservatives too), I often arrive where the journey began. Racism is not an opinion. It is a fact. The power of the color line and how it influences almost every dimension of American (and global) social and political life is not an “unknown unknown.” The fact that historically, white supremacy and white privilege overdetermine the positive life outcomes and life chances of white folks relative to black and brown people is one of the most consistent and repeated findings in all of the social sciences.

New work by Jason McDaniel and Sean McElwee examines the relationship between white animus and support for Donald Trump. Their findings are one more data point in a long and well-documented story about the relationship between racism and conservatism.

Writing at Salon, they have examined the preliminary findings of the 2016 American National Election Studies. McDaniel and McElwee came to the following conclusion:

Research suggests that right-wing views are strongly correlated with negative feelings towards groups considered as “others.” Trump clearly draws on these attitudes: his supporters have negative feelings towards most of the groups we examined, with the exception of the police and whites. We also find that white identity leads Trump supporters to have more negative feelings about Latinos and Muslims, and this effect isn’t true among whites who support other Republican candidates…As Marc Hetherington and Drew Engelhardt have shown, the parties have increasingly polarized across racial lines (with more racially conservative whites joining the Republicans, and racially sympathetic whites joining in the Democrats). This is due to an intentional strategy on the right to manipulate racial animus for political gains.

McDaniel and McElwee also show that:

The Trump phenomenon may be the last gasp of the old world order, in which white men ruled and anyone who didn’t conform would be ostracized. Trump supporters appear to resemble the supporters of Wallace and Nixon, with their support for the police and whites, and their disdain for those who don’t conform to the “Silent Majority.” The work above suggests that Trump supporters might be motivated less by positive feelings about Trump and more by negative feelings about groups they dislike that are motivated by the perception of threats to their identity as white people in America. If Trump stands for anything, it is the restoration of his supporters threatened racial identity by standing against gays, lesbians and other groups his supporters dislike.

Racism, nativism, authoritarianism, white racial identity, and grievance mongering are central to support for Donald Trump:

The results are pretty clear: compared to supporters of other Republican candidates in the primary, Trump supporters really dislike many groups in America. For these voters, Trump’s blend of casual racism and muscular nativism is the core of his appeal.

Again. Racism is not an opinion.

As they have done with other research about the relationship between white racial animus, overt racism, Donald Trump, and conservatism, the Trump supporters I shared this work with online were incredulous. Of course, they believe that there is a “conspiracy” by “liberal professors” to “make people like them look bad.” But this defensiveness and rage also show both the progress that has been made along the color line, and how much work remains to be done.

Racism and white supremacy are now civic sins to be publicly shamed by polite society. This is a type of forward movement. Of course, the election of Barack Obama—twice—was monumental, even while he also actively avoided creating specific and targeted programs to help ameliorate the damage caused to African Americans by institutional as well as interpersonal white racism.

Many white Americans actually believe that they are victims of “racism.” This fallacy is a sign of a profound disconnect between the world as it is compared to the one conjured up by the White Gaze. It also signals a feeling that white privilege and white majority group status are imperiled because of the “browning of America.” First: In the United States the categories of “whiteness” and who is considered “white” have always expanded to include new members. There is no reason to believe that such a centuries-long process will somehow suddenly stop. Second, even allowing for exaggerated readings of America’s changing demographics, “white” people will still be the single largest group, as well as control a vast and overwhelming amount of the country’s wealth, income, and other resources for the foreseeable future.

Forward-thinking and progressive-minded people also have much work to do in educating white Americans (and some others) that racism is not just the extreme of Neo Nazis, Kluxers, or other white bigots. Rather, it is a system of social, economic, and political practices that white folks benefit from—whether they intend to or not. Racism need not be conscious and intentional to cause great harm. In fact, some of the most dangerous types of racist and white supremacist practices are committed on a subconscious level and in a quotidian way because said behavior(s) is just “normal” or a “habit”… one that remains unchallenged or critically reflected upon.

As I have written here and elsewhere, support for Donald Trump’s 2016 Republican presidential campaign is not a buffet. His racism, nativism, and bigotry are not coincidental to his supposed platform of rebuilding the United States’ infrastructure or economic protectionism: White identity politics are central to his political strategy and appeal.

The mainstream corporate news media dances around and evades speaking plainly and truthfully about this fact. Instead, Trump’s people are given euphemisms such as “angry” or “white working class” voters who feel “abandoned” by “elites” and “the system.” This may very well be true. These voters are also part of a racist, nativist, and bigoted political movement that even by the horribly low bar set by the Republican Party on these matters is quite noxious and dangerous to the health of the American body politic.

It’s important to use appropriate and accurate language to describe Donald Trump’s supporters and the political cult leader himself.

These people are Trump-thug-licans.

Donald Trump has bathed, in a manner akin to that of Elizabeth Bathory, in the metaphorical blood of racism, white supremacy, nativism, and bigotry to become the GOP’s presumptive 2016 presidential nominee.

As anti-racism activist and humanitarian freedom fighter Jane Elliot has said, “Racism is not pretty or nice. It is ugly.” Like her, I do not talk gently or in a way that is overly concerned with white folks’ feelings—be they Trump supporters or not—about the reality of the color line in America and the world.

“Trumpmania” is a racist, white supremacist movement. The so-called “liberal” news media should stop pretending otherwise." [Source]

It has served them well.

"For the last 40-plus years we had a ‘Southern Strategy’ that alienated many minority voters by focusing on the white male vote in the South.” ~ Michael Steele~

I am not an educator, and I do not have a degree in history. But every now and then when I post I feel that I have to give my friends in A-merry-ca a history lesson. Why? Because some folks just never seem to learn. Or, it's just really convenient for them to forget. I was inspired to give tonight's lecture because of the following tidbit from an oped by a wingnut named Billy Hallowell writing for some website called The Blaze.

"..Then, last night, Chris Matthews made a startling association — that Rick Perry is like “Bull Connor with a smile.”

For those who don’t know, Connor was a Democrat and the Commissioner of Public Safety for the city of Birmingham, Alabama during the civil rights era. He infamously directed the use of fire hoses and attack dogs against peaceful, African American protestors — extreme brutality that was rooted in sheer racism.
This bizarre statement came after Matthews’ guest, Wayne Slater of The Dallas Morning News, reacted to Perry’s criticisms of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Slater explained that entitlements are only the beginning in the push for “states rights.” According to The Daily Caller, he said:

“The question is the attack on Perry is ‘Social Security is a Ponzi scheme,’ ‘Medicare needs to be changed or potentially abolished,’ which is not precisely what he said. Raising questions about the Voting Rights Act saying it is just a tool for gerrymandering in the South and the Civil Rights Act — the terms under which we’ve established — this has the look of someone who when he talks about states’ rights, states’ rights, states’ rights could make some voters, again — very nervous.” [Source] 

OK, let's try this again for the...oh, I don't know...millionth time.

Yes, Bull Conner and others like him were dumbocrats. In fact, most of your white southern racist during the Jim Crow era were dumbocrats. That fact is undisputed. What is also undisputed is that most (if not all)of those racist southern whites, fled the dumbocratic party in droves and became....wait for it wait for it..... REPUBLICANS! And this was done, thanks in part, to a wonderfully crafted political ploy called "The Southern Strategy." It was where white politicians exploited the racism felt towards blacks by fellow whites to vote against the political party which had now become the party of African Americans.

"From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats."^]


That was Richard Nixon's version of David Axelrod giving us a little insight into the strategy that now works so well for the "party of Lincoln."

Of course it all started before that, when Southern dumbocrats like Richard Russell and Herman Talmadge boycotted the 1964 party convention in Atlantic City. All because Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. Many of the southern delegates at that time refused to support the national ticket because of Johnson's actions. Throw in our boy, Barry Goldwater, --who joined the southern dumbocrats to filibuster the Act-- and the rest, as they say, is history.

That is your republican party today, the one that ran away from all things civil rights and never looked back. So no matter how much you hear wingnuts try to revise and revisit history, just remember who they were back then and why they switched. It's why every time ninety percent of the time you see something like this, and like this, taking place on the national landscape; it involves a republican.

“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger,’ ” said Atwater. “By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.” ~ reublican strategist, Lee Atwater~

Some things never change.

 

A history makeover by Haley.

*

I have no problem when folks go through a "Pauline Conversion", I really don't. Some people have their road to Damascus moment in life a little later than others. But what I don't like is a liar. Someone who tries to twist history and facts as we all know them to suit their own selfish purpose.

So anyway, I read the Salon article that someone sent to me about Haley Barbour, (h/t Greg Fuller) and the author nailed it. He broke down the "Southern Strategy" which has been perfected by the republican party, and by doing so he exposed Barbour for the fraud that he is:

"Almost 50 years ago, the Republican Party made a decision to embrace the backlash generated by civil rights among white Southerners.

Traditionally, they had been staunch Democrats, but they were also culturally conservative, and as Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic Party embraced civil rights once and for all, they were up for grabs. The Republican Party offered them a home, a steady, decades-long realignment ensued, and today conservative Southern whites comprise the heart of the GOP -- just as culturally liberal Northerners, who called the GOP home before civil rights, have migrated to the Democratic Party.

There's nothing new about this story. In fact, it's the story LBJ himself predicted when he signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and supposedly mused, "There goes the South for a generation."

But it's an inconvenient story for today's Republican Party, which still relies on cultural, racial and ethnic wedge issues to keep its base in line -- but which also needs to win over less conservative suburbanites across the country to compete in national elections. And it's a particularly inconvenient story for Haley Barbour, the 62-year-old Mississippi governor who aspires to run as the Republican nominee against the nation's first black president.

So Barbour has invented his own sanitized, suburb-friendly version of history -- an account that paints the South's shift to the GOP as the product of young, racially inclusive conservatives who had reasons completely separate and apart from racial politics for abandoning their forebears' partisan allegiances. In an interview with Human Events that was posted on Wednesday, Barbour insists that "the people who led the change of parties in the South ... was my generation. My generation who went to integrated schools. I went to integrated college -- never thought twice about it." Segregationists in the South, in his telling, were "old Democrats," but "by my time, people realized that was the past, it was indefensible, it wasn't gonna be that way anymore. So the people who really changed the South from Democrat to Republican was a different generation from those who fought integration.'" [Article]

You have got to be kidding me! By his time people realized it was the past? Yeah, OK, and I have a wonderful antique bell in my hometown to sell anyone who would like to make me an offer. It has a slight crack on the side but it would make a lovely lawn ornament.

And, speaking of lawn ornaments; I really have to wonder how some of you black conservatives can continue to support this party. Do you really believe that they have all become Paul of Tarsus all of a sudden? Do you really believe, that in their hearts, they view you as equals? If you do believe that please keep jigging along. Don't worry, we are so used to it that we hardly notice you anymore.

Haley will keep lying, and folks will continue to expose him. But, A-merry-ca won't notice. He will run for President and he just might get elected. Hey, America elected a black man, why not a good ole boy from Mississippi?

* Pic lifted from Salon.

If you think I am "shadowboxing" step into the ring.

Here I am trying to enjoy my holiday season with family and friends. And then, for some reason, (lord only knows why) I log on the Internet to see what's jumping off on the web.


This of course is when I see this: An open attack and challenge to the field from one of my black re-puke-lican friends.

Poor cobb, he loves and embraces the conservative movement, but the feelings aren't mutual. He and those of his ilk have chosen sides, and they can't turn back now. They are stuck with the conservative movement for better or for worse. Unfortunately for cobb and his friends, when it comes to black folks,it has been for the worse. He just can't admit to himself that there are nefarious forces in his party working to keep us out, and who would use the race- card and other wedge issues to stay in power.

No wonder the black conservative is always so angry and so shrill. He has declared his allegiance and he can't go back now. So instead, he tries to create illusions and straw- man arguments to justify his erroneous and misguided beliefs. He refuses to face the reality of Nixon and his Southern Strategy; Ronald Reagan, and his Philadelphia Mississippi, moment. George Bush, 41 and his Willie Horton moment. The racist original puppet master, Lee Atwater .(may his miserable soul rot in hell) The new school racist, puppet master, Karl Rove. The racist speaker of the house, Newt Gingrich. The racist "commander the thief", George Bush, 43, who made sure that his "Southern strategy" of embracing Bob Jones was fully in place when he ran. And of course, we can fast forward to the current crop of re-puke-lican candidates for the highest office in the land. They have even expanded their "Southern Strategy" farther south. (Think Mexico, and their Paul Revere style cries that the brown people are coming) Yes cobb, there are plenty of those and more where they came from. But time doesn't permit me to get into it here as much as I would like, because I still have to enjoy my vacation.

Sorry cobb, your straw man argument about a bunch of irrelevant conservative bloggers who are high on a phony ass food chain is just ludicrous. -As if they would actually come out on their blogs and endorse a perceived racist strategy by their party- They would never openly admit to such a strategy. And you and I both know that. Do you think it's an accident that everyone associates the "Southern Strategy" with your party?

At the end of the day cobb, I feel sorry for you. You attack my site and the people that post here by calling them a bunch of "synchophants" (that's a big word, maybe woozie can interpret it for me). Yet we have nothing but love for you, because even though you don't, we still consider you one of us. Don't blame me or the people who come to the fields because you cannot juxtapose your political beliefs with the racist history and the political reality of the party you embrace. That's not their fault. You should be working within your party to try and change it, you should be using your considerable writing talents to enlighten them and make them understand your race and your people. You should not be making excuses for them and attack the people of your race for not embracing them. "Shadowboxing"? If you think I am shadowboxing always feel free to step into the ring with me. And as for being a "blight to the spirit of the blogosphere"; my question to you would be what spirit? Over here our spirits are fine, because in spite of the victimology tag, we know where we stand politically and socially in A-mery-ca. Unlike you, our conscience is free.

Anyway cobb, I hope I could help to enlighten you , and that I answered some of the questions in your challenge. Hopefully this will better help you to understand what us black folks think of your party, and why we feel--and more importantly vote-- the way that we do.


BTW, you can send the $20 you owe me to the Boys and Girls Club of Los Angeles. I don't need the money.

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.

Mission Impossible?

Ken Mhelman stepped down as RNC chairman yesterday, and the buzz around Washington is that the Republicans will offer the job to Michael Steel. That is, of course, if he doesn't take a job in the Bush cabinet as housing Secretary. Anyway, this is a move, I am sure, on the part of republicans to once again court the black vote. I mean they must look at election results time and time again, see that once again, they only got about 9% of the black vote, and pull whatever hair they have left, out. I can hear them in the back rooms now: "I know that guy Steele ran a pretty good race, and he is funny, upbeat, and telegenic. He is just the type of guy we need to reach out to the blacks" Now, they might or might not be right, and if he does takes the job, Mr. Steele just might be terrific at it.

But I have a few words of advise for Michael before he becomes the new black face of the republican party. -Sorry Condi- Your party has been despised by black folks all these years for a reason. Us black folks have this sixth sense about us, we can sense and see things that other people can't. And it has always proven to be an invaluable tool when it comes to telling us who our friends really are. Our sixth sense always tells us that your Republicans friends aren't our friend, and we aren't really welcome in your tent. Oh, you will tell us we are welcome, but somehow our sixth sense always says otherwise.

This is why no matter how much republicans try to reach out to us, it never works. Oh, we will politely tell them that we will consider voting for the republican candidate , but we never do. We will let you them our homes, and our space to tell us their position, but we ain't voting for them no matter what- At least 90% of us aren't. So Michael, this is what you will have to overcome, that sixth sense of ours that never seems to let us down.

Now, please don't get it twisted, it's not just the sixth sense. There are legitimate noticeable reasons for black folks turning against the republican party: Remember Ronald Reagan in Philadelphia, Mississippi, back in 1980, giving that infamous speech supporting states rights? Remember Nixon's 1968 "Southern Strategy? Remember Barry Goldwater opposing The Civil Rights Act of 1964? Remember Herbert Hoover? Remember republican strategist Lee Atwater's statement? "you start out in 1954 by saying Nigger,nigger, nigger, By 1968 you can't say nigger without it backfiring, so you say stuff like forced busing,states rights, and all that stuff" Mmmmmm, all that stuff huh Lee? Stuff like Willie Horton, "Harold call me", a black hand taking away a job from a white hand for Jessie Helms? But this is what you will be trying to overcome Michael, and the field is just trying to help you out. Hey, when your predecessor, Ken Mhelman, tried to apologize for the republican southern strategy, two of your biggest mouth pieces, Rush Limpboy, and Sean Hannety, denounced him.

So it's all uphill for you if you take this job Michael, and I don't know if you will be able to pull it off. You see how many black folks voted against you for the white democratic candidate in your own race don't you? This, even though you ran as far away from the frat boy as possible. That ought to tell you something: Party affiliation to the democratic party trumps even race with most black folks. So you just might want to think about that before you take the job.

Now don't get me wrong, I would love to see more black folks embracing the republican party. I, for one, do not believe that we should be monolithic in our voting. I would never want one party to take us for granted, as the democrats have done from time to time. Hey, Rosa Parks herself begged J.C. Watts to stay in Congress and represent the republican party. But hey, if it's not there it's not there. There is too much of a history here between us black folks and the party of Lincoln. Too much mistrust, too much ass given to kiss, too much David Dukes, Trent Lotts, and macaca men. And yes the Democratic Senator Robert Byrd was a former Klansman, and he did try to stymie the passing of crucial civil rights legislation in the sixties with a filibuster. But somehow black folks forgive him-it's that sixth sense again- and not Trent Lott. We never seem to forget the sh*& republicans do, but we give the dems a pass. Remember Clinton and Sistah Souljah? Of course you do; democrats can use us and get away with it, but republicans can't. Hey these old wounds were deep, and it will take a long time to heal. "Well there goes the South" I know LBJ, and it ain't been back ever since.

So good luck Mike, I really do hope you can make an impact among black folks. At least that sixth sense doesn't go off when we are around you. We really do feel like you are one of us, and that's a huge start.

****I would like to say RIP to two field Negroes who recently passed away.

Ed Bradley; sixty minutes was never enough for you my man. I loved the fact that you never forgot your Philly roots, and you kept it one hundred percent at all times.

Gerald Levert; Like your Pop, you had some serious pipes, and you left your people with some good ass music. The fields will be alive with the sounds of R&B tonight.

I'm out.