Things Heard: e27v3
Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 at
9:27 am
- La Shawn on the Black vote, civil rights and the GOP.
- Cool tech, especially for the industrial controls crowd, which I’m sure is a big plurality in my readership … not (but it’s not unrelated to my day job). 🙂
- On oil prices and speculation.
- On Julian Schwinger, and his body of work.
- Hijinks between plants and animals.
- On moral order and nature.
- Immutable. Mutable. Hmm.
- A weekend suggestion.
- God and the slugger.
- A neat gadget.
- Every car should install one.
- An interesting take on the Myers kerfuffle.
- East and West.
- Africa. A map. I suppose it would be less impressive to drop Russia + Antartica in there, which also equal Africa in square footage.
- Two speeches. Two takes. Left. Right.
I’m short on time today, so y’all get the whole kaboodle cross posted from my blogs “Morning Highlights” feature. Question. Should I make that my normal practice? or not?
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On the black vote and the GOP article, it really is tiring to hear, “that most of the raging racists you’ve read about in history books were Democrats and that Republicans were the anti-slavery party.”
Barber then goes on to accuse folk of ignorance of history.
It is a ridiculous argument that gets repeated repeatedly.
No one is ignorant of history on this point. We know that the Dems WERE the party of racism. That the Republicans WERE the party trying to end slavery.
The point is, that is in the past. Things have changed. What Barber appears ignorant of is this change. To note that the Republicans WERE the ones closer to working for civil rights and an end to slavery up until the 1960s and then to suggest that, therefore, blacks should vote republican, is to ignore our recent history.
Charles Manson, no doubt, WAS a good little boy at one time. Saddam Hussein may well have been a nice teenager. BUT things change.
To suggest that we should support a group because they held a right position a century ago is a ridiculous argument. Blacks DID vote Republican when the Republicans represented their interests. They quit doing so in the 1960s, and they quit doing so SO THOROUGHLY that they lost the vote of nearly an entire race of people in our nation.
That should alarm a political party.
Dan,
You’re guilty of racism. The point, which apparently you missed, that Ms Barber was making is that
When you call and identify “Black=race” that’s racism. The democrats today want to identify and separate people by race, income, and creed. That’s wrong too. They’re the party of racism, classism and so on.
The fact that so many people remain keyed by such broad sweeping and fallacious generalizations that is what should alarm a political party.
I’m guilty of racism?? I don’t think that word means what you think it means.
Black folk ARE a race. So are White folk. What are you talking about?
What IS racist is to suggest that black folk are too dumb to know how to vote. To say that the Democrats are the party of racism is ALSO to say that african americans are too stupid to recognize this and vote accordingly.
That is racism or, “the belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human races determine cultural or individual achievement…” ie, suggesting that “That race” of people are ignorant, or stupid, or inferior.
And I didn’t miss that point of Barber’s that you raised. It’s not a bad point and one that I’m sympathetic to.
But it’s not the only point of the article. She also raised the red herring about voters being ignorant of history. I was addressing THAT bit of misinformation because I hear it repeated way too often.
Dan,
Race is a distinction without meaning, except in a few cases to medical issues (sickle cell for example).
Race is a completely irrelevant and mistaken concept in the social arena. Sub-ethnic identification, or in the vernacular, “tribe” is a better way to identify. It is meaningless to say, “Blacks do or are X” just as it is completely meaningless to say, “Whites think Y is good or bad”.
I don’t think that Black folk are dumb because they’ve bought into the importance of race. I think that’s the democratic message on the importance of racial distinctions is an easy, evil idea that the democrats are currently using to their advantage.
So our Black brothers and sisters who vote Democrat are not dumb in your mind, they are just not able to understand that the Dems are not acting properly? Is it that you think blacks can’t or just don’t understand?
Do you understand that when someone says that a whole group of people lack basic comprehension skills that it sounds like that person is forming a negative opinion based upon race? Or, in other words, they’re forming a racist opinion?
Dan,
I think no Democrat understands that. Not Blacks, you’re the one assigning to race.
??? The race of Democrats? What?!
When St. Paul says Galations 3:28, “there is no slave or free, or male or female” … doesn’t that mean distinctions such as race which are important for the Democrats are standing against this?