As the racist
rhetoric oozes from Republican presidential candidates, why are comments
contained in Ron Paul newsletters from the 1980s and 1990s being widely
considered more offensive than current bigoted banter uttered by Newt
Gingrich and Rick Santorum?
One answer to
that question is a politics where partisan criticisms are directed at
crippling certain candidates feared as rising stars.
Thus when
Congressman Paul began percolating up in the Iowa Caucus polls late last
year, news of his caustic comments in those decades-old newsletters
became headline news coverage.
Curiously for a
candidate tagged racist Paul has a public record of opposing the most
racist governmental offensive in contemporary America – the War on Drugs
– that societally destructive campaign other GOP presidential
candidates ignore.
The Drug War’s
documented race-tainted enforcement practices drives facts like blacks
comprising 25% of Iowa’s state prison population despite blacks there
representing just 2.9% of that state’s population.
Another answer
to that question of why Ron not Rick or Newt lies embedded in America’s
historic refusal to earnestly address racism especially pernicious
institutional racism.
Dancing around racism, individual and institutional, is as American as apple pie.
Typical
of the disingenuousness entangling that dance, racist remarks receive
much ado while silence surrounds substantive issues like the unearned
privileges arising from institutional racism that have aided the lives
and careers of each of the GOP presidential contenders.
Former
Pennsylvania U.S. Senator Rick Santorum, for example, enjoyed a
comfortable middle class upbringing after his 1958 birth because both of
his parents worked as medical professionals at Veterans Administration
hospitals.
The VA along
with other governmental and private sector employers openly
discriminated against qualified black professionals until the
late-1960s/early-1970s thus limiting blacks from income to improve their
families.
Conservatives
rarely if ever acknowledge the unearned benefits flowing to whites
(especially those in the middle and upper classes) from America’s
decades-long reign of legalized segregation.
“Racism is a
tenacious evil,” civil rights icon Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stated in a
1967 article published nine months before his assassination. This King
observation is applicable to the political practice of candidates,
mainly Republican, roiling race for electoral advantage.
King, in that article, also reminded “millions of underprivileged whites” of something they never hear from Republican GOP presidential candidates: white supremacy “can feed” egos but not stomachs. That factoid should resonate in today’s Recession ravished economy with high unemployment and rising rates of poverty...
For the rest of this article by LINN WASHINTGON, JR. in ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent Project Censored award-winning online alternative newspaper, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.
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