Newt Gingrich Owes African Americans an Apology

Newt Gingrich owes African-Americans an apology.

He absolutely knows what he is doing.

His constant calling President Obama “the food stamp president” is nothing more than racial politics, no less reprehensible or excusable than when Lee Atwater and the GOP used the image of Willie Horton to take down Michael Dukakis in 1988.

Gingrich has settled into the language that “liberals” or “elite liberals” are the only ones who “despise making money.” That is incorrect, but it isn’t a morally and ethically reprehensible statement or behavior.

But going to South Carolina and using language that feeds into the racial fears and misconceptions that come up in conversations with far too many white people, is a moral and ethical outrage.

Can you not get the votes, Mr. Gingrich, without putting black people down and feeding into the misconceptions of way too many white people?

Statistics released by the United States Department of Agriculture show that 35 percent of all food stamp recipients are white, compared to 22 percent black, and 10 percent Hispanic. If you, Mr. Gingrich, would say that, or something to that effect, the insult you have heaped upon the descendants of African slaves who built this country would be non-existent.

I wonder if Gingrich, or any candidate, has the chutzpah to tell people part of the reason that the unemployment rate amongst black men, especially young black men, is that too many white employers still refuse to hire them? I wonder if Gingrich, a historian, has the courage to talk about the fact that black people have lived through an era where at one time, there were blatant signs put up, “Black (or Colored) people need not apply,” as African-Americans sought to find work?

The signs are gone, but the emotions, feelings and beliefs that made people feel justified in putting such signs up are far from being gone.

I wonder if Gingrich has the courage to stand up and say, since he is wanting to be president of ALL of the people of this nation, that the undercurrent racism of this country will be met with and dealt with in his administration if he is elected president, so that the course of this nation will be turned, finally, away from post-Civil War and Reconstruction white resentment of black people which has never died, to a 21st century, Christian endeavor to deal with our racism honestly, for the good of the nation.

Many, too many, white people say, and believe, that “this is a white man’s country.” In her book Rising Sun, author Sharon Davies gives an account of a young white girl who is appearing before a grand jury because she has converted to Catholicism, against the wishes of her parents. In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan was not only against black people and Jewish people, but it also hated Catholics. This young girl’s parents were amongst the Catholic-haters, and, enraged that his daughter had married a Catholic boy in secret, her father had shot and killed the priest who married them.

In her testimony before the Grand Jury, the young girl was asked if her husband was a white man (he was from Puerto Rico and was allowed, by Alabama state law, to say he was “white.”) When the girl said he was a Spaniard, the Grand Jury members scoffed, and one juror said, just remember, “this is a white man’s country…always has been and always will be.”

A young Hugo Black, who would become a member of the United States Supreme Court, was one of the girl’s defense attorneys …and he was also a member of the Klan, as were many of the jurors.

That feeling has not gone away and Newt knows it, and he thus knows that saying President Obama is “the food stamp president” feeds right into that belief and the sentiment that there is a need to “take the country” back. The charge is that Mr. Obama is the most liberal president in history. Say that. True or not, it’s fair. It is fair political rhetoric.

Say that it is true that more people are on food stamps than at any other time in our history, but that statistics say that more white than black people are on those food stamps, and they needed to do it because the economic mess that Mr. Obama inherited from the GOP was so horrible that had he not made a way for more people to get food stamps, a lot of Americans, black, white and brown, would have not been able to eat!

Make the argument against President Obama openly about economics, and not sneakily about race.

Americans who have found themselves not only using but needing food stamps for the first time in their lives are ashamed for having to use them, but at the same time are grateful that this president did what he thought would best help them.

It is true that some people, black and white, who receive government assistance, are abusing the system. Say that, Mr. Gingrich, and nobody will be able to accuse you of playing the race card or indulging in racial politics. When you say that President Obama is “the food stamp president,” say that his policies have resulted in more black and white and brown people getting food stamps than ever before. Then your statement will not be racially charged and racially polarizing.

I know that politics, or the game of politics, is not supposed to be fair, but it is high time that racial politics stop being the trump card for politicians reaching for the White House. African-Americans, and indeed all Americans, deserve better.

African-Americans have provided the labor upon which the economy of this nation was built. It is high time white politicians say that out loud, and stop the craziness and stop using words that only make the decay in our nation caused by racism worse.

You, Mr. Gingrich, owe African-Americans an apology. It is NOT all right to insult us, even if you are trying to kick Mitt Romney out of contention for the presidency. What you are saying and are now defending, is morally and ethically wrong. We deserve better.

A candid observation …

Paul, Santorum Need Come to Jesus Meeting

I keep thinking that somebody ought to tell Mr. Paul and Mr. Santorum that racism is…not presidential.

Both gentlemen fared well in the Iowa caucuses, and both seem to have a hunger for the nation’s highest office.

But Mr. Paul and Mr. Santorum, can we talk?

Just a couple of days ago, Rick Santorum said that he “didn’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them other people’s money.” He was speaking to a group of white people, and I guess…well, I guess he was comfortable and he knew what they’d want to hear.

In the name of God, some white folks just think black folks ought to just …shape up, right?

He later on said that he didn’t recall making the statement, but that’s only after he said, in an earlier statement, that he had probably been thinking about what he saw in the movie “Waiting for Superman,” which focuses on black kids trying to get into charter schools…

Santorum said to Sean Hannity on the latter’s television program that, well, he doesn’t make racial distinctions, and, by golly, he has some black friends! Yep, sure does. Michael Steele and J.C. Watts, both black, are his friends.

Never mind that neither of those gentlemen seem to relate to the real plight of many African Americans.

And then there’s Mr. Paul, who, back in the day, had newsletters written under his name. Now, he says he didn’t read any of “that stuff,” but the fact is that “that stuff” appeared in these newsletters and he did not disavow any of it.

What didn’t he disavow, you ask? Well, for one, his statement, “If you’ve ever been robbed by a teen-aged male, you know how fleet-footed they can be.” (italics mine) In that same newsletter, published in 1992, he said that “we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males (in Washington D.C.) are semi-criminal or entirely criminal.” He was the only member of Congress that opposed giving a Medal of Honor to Rosa Parks and opposed to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Mr. Paul said he is not a racist; in a 2008 CNN interview, he said that he’s the one who protects blacks in the inner city. He says that the statements show the tendency of the media to take things out of context.

That’s fair. The media does have a tendency to take things out of context.

He said in the 2008 interview that he repudiates all of the statements in the newsletters, and that is good. He said he has never read the stuff written under his name.

He said that the real issue is the drug laws that so unfairly impact black people, and he’s right on that.

But it’s the little things, the little tongue-in-cheek things that are said that help keep racial tensions alive, and keep marginalized people feeling, well, marginalized. It is a myth that most of the people on welfare are African American; though proportionately, the poverty rate for African Americans is higher than that for whites, statistics show that more white than black people are on welfare.

One of these presidential politicians ought to say that, don’t you think?

I know it is the job of a politician to get elected, and politicians will say anything to get elected. Ironically, I think of the words of the Apostle Paul, who said in 1 Cor. 9: “Though I am free, and belong to no man, I make myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible.” (9:19) Later he says, “Do you not know that in a race all the runners run but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way to get the prize.” (9:24) I chuckled as I read that entire passage of scripture and wondered if Paul, in addition to fiercely loving Jesus the Christ was not also a politician?

It seems to me, though, that a good politician ought to have the adjectives “honest” and “sensitive” somewhere in his or her resume. Mr. Santorum and Mr. Paul need to “fess up” to saying, or allowing to be said in their names, some pretty racist stuff. It happens. This is America, and it is no secret that many to most white people have grown up with disparaging views and opinions about black people. How great it would be to hear a white politician just “own up” and admit they’d said some things that reflected how they grew up and were taught?

When we admit our goofs, we can begin to fix them.

And fixing their apparently racist ways of looking at black people is a must, in my view, for anyone who is striving to get to the White House. The American government has not been a friend to black (or brown) people, or to women or other oppressed groups. The American government turned its head to the injustices suffered by black people and would not, did not, protect its black citizens.

The country has suffered as a result of that.

Mr. Paul and Mr. Santorum would do themselves and their campaigns a favor if they would just have a “come to Jesus” meeting with Jesus, and ask Jesus to change their thoughts and beliefs when it comes to black people, black life and black culture.

Because the country is not a lily-white place, gentlemen, and the country cannot be as great as it has the potential for, if all of its people are not treated having been created equal.

A candid observation.

RuneScape Wiki: The Ancient Curses are a set of prayers obtained as a reward after completing The Temple at Senntisten. →

Democracy Understood

Sometimes, what we want to be true and what actually is true do not intersect.

What we want to believe in, in America, is that we live in a democracy – meaning, to most of us, that there is an ideal to which we adhere: that “all men are created equal,” and that they are endowed with certain inalienable rights…” That is, at least, what I grew up understanding “democracy” to be.

But what seems to be more true is that we live in a capitalistic society – in which all people are not created equal, nor should anyone expect that to be the case.

Of course, when the Declaration of Independence was written, as well as the Bill of Rights and the United States Constitution, the words “all men” meant white, landowning men. The framers of our precious document never intended for the phrase to be understood as one that included people of all nationalities and/or races, nor did they intend for it to include women. “We the people” did not include what was then and what would become the vast populace of this country. The boundaries of race, class and gender were set up from the very beginning of the life of this nation.

As time passed, we idealized our founding documents, and we decided that the phrase “all men are created equal” meant that the Founding Fathers had a love for “all people.” On that basis, the downtrodden decided that according to our Constitution, they had the same rights as anybody and everybody else. This was America, where everyone was free, or was at least supposed to be.

The stark contradiction between our idealization of the words of the Constitution, Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence, however, was there from the beginning. Slavery was an American reality, and in spite of a horrible Civil War fought, a war which accounted for more American deaths than any modern war, nobody really wanted them to be “free,” and certainly, nobody believed black slaves to be “equal” to whites. President Abraham Lincoln, though he freed some of the slaves, particularly those who lived in the South who were needed to help fight for the Union, never thought they were equal to whites, nor did he think black people, slave or free, should have the same rights as white people.

Enter capitalism. The right to be “free” was based in capitalistic theory from the beginning, it seems. The wealthy landowners had the power from the beginning, and to them, “freedom” was the ability to make money! That’s why people want to flock to America; our free enterprise system means, theoretically, that “anyone” can make it here. The prevailing thought seems to be that if you are down and out, then it is somehow your own doing.

That just is not true. As I have watched our country in this current economic crisis, and read about how the country fared during the years (and afterward) of the Great Depression, it has become increasingly clear that the capitalistic system is constructed to protect the monied class. “Too big to fail,” though distasteful, seems to be a part of capitalistic ideology. It feels like America’s economy is graded on a curve, much like exams I took in college were graded. In a curve, some will fail. It’s built into the system. What used to be true in America is that there were a fair amount of people “in the middle” who could make it, and the number of the very rich was small, proportionately.

Now, however, that middle section of people is getting smaller and smaller, while the number of very rich and poor to very poor is getting larger.

That is the way a capitalistic system works.

The tension between the “haves” and “have nots” has been a standard reality in America. President Franklin D. Roosevelt fought for the common people during his presidency, and he had a pretty broad swath of support at the beginning; the country was in such dire straits that even big business let him have his way in shaping the New Deal. FDR knew that in order for a capitalistic system to work, its people had to work so that they could make money and spend money.

But after a while, big business grew uneasy as big government, acting on a democratic principle that “all people” should be able to work and make a good living wage, spent money in order to create programs for literally millions of people.

Big business, people who understand capitalism and how it works, are not all that concerned with millions of people making a living wage. I would imagine they would say “it’s not personal. It’s business.”

If we understand that we live in a capitalistocracy as opposed to an ideally defined democracy, we might not stew as much as we do about the economics of these days. The arguments back in FDR’s days – the need to balance the budget, cut government spending, lower taxes …were the same as they are now. FDR fought against what he believed to be economic policy which adversely affected the masses of American people, but he knew that he was making big business angry.

Perhaps the most telling statement about this country, and what it is, came from President Calvin Coolidge, who said,”The business of America is business.”

That sums it up fairly nicely and succinctly, does it not?

As I understand what America is, the relationship between big business and big government, I seem to pause. I realize that not only I but a vast number of people have been confused about this word “democracy.” We are not supposed to be a nation where everybody can make it, and if they cannot, can be assured that the government will stand in the breach.

I get it now.

A candid observation…