Issues of race continue to crop up in our political discussions. Even as most Americans don’t have issues with racism, it’s an issue for some. And by “some,” I mean Democrats.
To hear the Democrats tell it, Republicans are always racist. However, history has proven that the Democrats are the ones who see voters in terms of color and ethnicity.
Which party favored slavery? All you have to do is look back at the contentious issue of the “peculiar institution” to see that Democrats in both the North and the South favored keeping slavery in place. On the other side of the coin, only the GOP can claim abolition as part of its origin story.
Democrats were responsible for horrific Jim Crow laws and suppressing black voters. In later years, the Democrats were the ones attempting to thwart civil school integration. Even Lyndon Johnson, the president who signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law, wasn’t immune to racism.
“These Negroes, they're getting pretty uppity these days and that's a problem for us since they've got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness,” Johnson reportedly said when he was a senator. “Now we've got to do something about this, we've got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference.”
Even Barack Obama, our saintly first black president, isn’t immune to racism. Last year, the Condescender-in-Chief — who is biracial and whose black father hailed from Africa — denigrated the presidential candidacy of Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), who is the descendant of slaves and once represented the congressional district where the Civil War began.
Joe Biden was notorious for his racial pandering. Don’t forget that he told voters in 2020 that if they didn’t vote for him, they “ain’t black.” Just last week, Obama had a Bidenesque “you ain’t black” moment of his own.
"Because part of it makes me think — and I'm speaking to men directly — part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren't feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you're coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that,” Obama reportedly said, as my friend and colleague Matt Margolis reported. "And now you're thinking about sitting out or supporting somebody who has a history of denigrating you because you think that's a sign of strength because that's what being a man is? Putting women down? That's not acceptable."
Assuming that all black voters are monolithic and should vote the same way no matter what is racist. Assuming that black men don’t want to vote for Harris because she’s a black woman is racist and sexist. Can you imagine what would happen if a white former president said that all white voters should vote for white candidates?
Flashback: Wokeness Emphasizes Race as Much as the 'White Supremacists' It Claims to Combat
Today’s Democrats have become the purveyors of casual racism in their efforts to pander for votes. Take a gander at Kamala Harris’ “opportunity agenda” for black men:
Black men deserve a president who cares about making their lives better. pic.twitter.com/cUCdsvvYZ6
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) October 15, 2024
As my friend and colleague Stephen Green put it:
Her latest pitch is to black men, who ought to be a lock this late in the campaign. Nevertheless, Harris is out there promising $20,000 small business loans to black men — forgivable loans, i.e., bribes. She's also apparently given up appealing to white moderates. On Monday, she entertained notions of multitrillion-dollar reparations. Reparations are something that "has to be studied," she told Charlamagne tha God on his podcast.
Reparations and loans that you don’t have to pay back sound like forms of bribery. Then Harris wants to legalize weed so that black people can “succeed in this new industry.” In other words, she wants to make it okay for black people to become drug dealers. How racist can she get?
The thing is, even though Harris is (half) black, her ideas sound like they’re coming from white progressives and their stereotypes of black voters. As Erick Erickson puts it, “Free weed and reparations may be things white people think black men want, but what they really want are jobs and cheap groceries, which they cannot get from Kamala Harris but remember having the last time Donald Trump was in the White House.”
“Trump, the media tells us, is a racist,” Erickson continues. “The white progressives running Harris’s campaign actually are if they think weed is what black men want for their votes.”
The Democrats are trying these pandering ploys even as they constantly accuse Trump — and by extension all Republicans — of racist behavior without corroboration. As black voters, especially men, trend toward Trump in greater numbers, the racist attacks ring ever more hollow.
That doesn’t mean that the Democrats won’t stop accusing their opponents of racism. It also doesn’t mean that they won’t stop being casual racists themselves.
