The Race Debate

By Burt Prelutsky
Monday, April 7, 2008

A while back, I wrote an article in which I pointed out that for over 20 years Barack Obama has attended Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ, whose minister, as we all know all too well, is a vicious hatemonger, and which recently bestowed its highest honor on none other than the legendary anti-Semite, Louis Farrakhan.

Among the many e-mails I received was one from an black man in New Jersey. He identified himself as a successful entrepreneur in his mid-30s. The tone of his remarks was reasonable and he seemed to be well-educated, but by the time we had had six or eight exchanges, he’d managed to convince me he was an idiot. Let us call him Mr. Christopher.

It was his contention that unless the Democrats made Sen. Obama their presidential nominee, it would destroy the party. I told him that although he was very much mistaken, I, personally, wished he weren’t. The way I see it, the Democrats have been doing their best to destroy America for the past three decades, and it’s high time they got a taste of their own medicine.

Mr. Christopher wrote: “For a party that has over the years been in favor of racial equality and has fought against racial oppression to have its most recent president, Bill Clinton, purposely use race to marginalize and divide in order to win an election is a shocking and possibly fatal blow. It will have undermined everything the party has said they stood for over the decades.”

I replied: “You are merely parroting a lie that has been sold to the people by the Democrats. It was, after all, the Democrats who created the KKK and initiated and enforced Jim Crow laws in the South. It was Earl Warren, a Republican, who was appointed to be chief justice of the Supreme Court by Dwight Eisenhower, another Republican, who ruled that separate but equal was unconstitutional. And although Lyndon Johnson was in the White House in 1964 when he pushed for the passage of the Civil Rights Act, it became the law of the land because of the Republicans. In the House, only 64% of the Democrats, but 80% of the Republicans, voted for it. In the Senate, while only 68% of the Democrats endorsed the bill, 82% of the Republicans voted to enact it.”

Instead of responding to those facts, Mr. Christopher came back with: “If Obama isn’t nominated, it will make millions of Afro Americans switch to the Republican party.”

I asked him why that would be a bad thing. “The GOP,” I went on, “would treat them with respect, as adults, not as a flock of baby birds who can’t fend for themselves.”

He replied: “Now the question is, do the Republicans want the Afro American Vote or will they continue to turn their backs on us?”

“And just exactly how has the GOP done that? From my perspective, I’d say it’s the blacks who have been bought off with so-called entitlements who have swallowed their pride and voted overwhelmingly for cynical Socialists. Why do you refuse to acknowledge that it’s black Americans who have chosen to play the role of victims, and have thus enabled the likes of Ted Kennedy, the Clintons, Reid, Pelosi, Jesse Jackson, Charles Rangel, Maxine Waters and Al Sharpton, to get fat playing the race card? The GOP has far more in common with blacks than the Democrats do when it comes to core beliefs. Republicans, like blacks, tend to be religious; the Democrats just show up at black churches at election time where black ministers, many of whom have been paid off, roll out the red carpet for the obligatory photo ops. The GOP, again like most black Americans, tend to be pro-life and opposed to open borders. The liberals are on the side of illegal aliens because they don’t see them as low wage competitors for jobs, but as millions of potential votes. Yet, 90% of black people can be counted on to vote for any jackass with a (D) after his name.”

“Still,” he wrote back, “you can’t deny that what makes us strong as a nation is that we are very diverse.”

“I beg to differ, Mr. Christopher. What makes us strong is that we are a nation that was founded by a group of extraordinary men who weren’t very diverse at all. Some of them were Christians, some were deists, but all of them were white and they all spoke English. What they were was brilliant. They created a nation that was based on Judeo-Christian concepts that emphasized justice and freedom for the individual. The diversity came later. But so great was their creation that it managed to accommodate wave after wave of immigrants, and to transform millions of people who had never experienced democracy into a nation willing to fight and die for a notion that was summed up by the Latin phrase, e pluribus unum.”

Mr. Christopher responded by directing me to a site where pictures of black lynch victims were posted. It was his intention to convince me that America was and remains a racist country where blacks must constantly fear for their lives.

I did as he asked and visited the site, and then reported back: “It would be easier to believe you when you insist that you don’t view the world through black-tinted glasses if you hadn’t started this exchange by defending a racist church, by insisting the Democratic party would self-destruct if it selected a white woman to be its standard bearer, and if you hadn’t directed me to a site that showed black lynch victims. You could have just as easily suggested that the world can be a vicious, nasty place and directed me to photos of Hitler’s victims or Stalin’s or Pol Pot’s or Saddam Hussein’s or Idi Amin’s -- millions of innocent men, women and children who had been gassed or butchered by monsters. As terrible as the lynchings were, the total number of victims between 1889 and 1918 was about 3,200, of whom roughly 2,600 were blacks.

“Furthermore, I realize that many black Americans seem to believe that the huge number of young black men in prison are only there because the legal system is corrupt and white society in general is racially bigoted. I, on the other hand, believe that most whites are pretty much colorblind. Otherwise, why would a black man with only two years in the U.S. Senate be doing so well in the primary elections? By the way, an anti-lynching bill was introduced in the House in 1918. In 1922, it was finally passed, but its forward progress was stopped in the Senate by the threat of a filibuster by Southern Democrats.”

“I hope,” Mr. Christopher wrote, “you notice that I haven’t once called you a racist.”

“Thanks,” I responded, “but if you had, I’d have just laughed at you. You see, I have such a passion for truth and logic that I can not be cowed by ugly labels. I attack hypocrisy wherever I find it, whether my targets are blacks and Muslims or my fellow Jews and Republicans. In fact, there is a reason that, as a conservative, as much as I’d hate to see a liberal win in November, I’d prefer Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama. On the issues, I don’t see a scintilla of difference between the junior senator from New York and the very junior senator from Illinois. But if Mrs. Clinton wins, even though she’s a woman, I think the Republicans in the House and Senate would feel free to oppose her policies and attack her credibility. However, if Mr. Obama were to win, I fear that a great many conservative politicians who lack my intestinal fortitude would bite their tongues rather than risk being branded a racist.”

In summation, let me just say, as I have in the past, that bigots are simply the laziest people in the world. After all, if you just make the slightest effort, you can inevitably find better reasons to despise people than their race, their religion or even their sexual proclivities, no matter how goofy they might be.