Are Rs playing with our heads again, or am I just too tired from last nite to follow their perverse logic?
Bennett: Racial Epithet Yelled At Rep. John Lewis Is Proof That ‘Racism In America Is Dead’
By Matt Corley at 1:30 pm Bennett
On Saturday, conservative anger over the imminent passage of health care reform manifested itself in a series of bigoted exchanges with Democratic members of Congress. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO) was spit on by a protester, openly gay Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA) was called a “faggot” and Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), a hero of the civil rights movement, was called the n-word. Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) called the incidents “absolutely shocking.” “I heard people saying things that I have not heard since March 15, 1960 when I was marching to try and get off the back of the bus,” said Clyburn.
Though leaders of the Republican Party have sought to distance themselves from the outbursts, some conservatives are dismissing the incidents as no big deal. National Review’s Jay Nordlinger posted a letter yesterday claiming that the incidents proved that “Racism in America is dead.” Nordlinger called the argument “thought-provoking”:
As everyone sweats out the final Obamacare tallies, I’m struck by a couple of other stories. In one case, someone reported hearing an anti-black epithet used at a political rally. In another case, dogged police finally arrested the perpetrator of an intolerable crime. The perp is a 16-year-old kid who made a potentially offensive comment on a Wal-Mart overhead speaker. That these things are even remotely newsworthy leads me to one conclusion: Racism in America is dead. We had slavery, then we had Jim Crow — and now we have the occasional public utterance of a bad word. Real racism has been reduced to de minimis levels, while charges of racism seem to increase. I’ll vote for the first politician with the brass to say that “racism” should be dropped from our national dialogue. We’re a good nation, among the least racist on earth . . .
On his radio show this morning, conservative talker Bill Bennett endorsed the letter writer’s thesis, saying “I think that’s right”:
BENNETT: I think that’s right. Is there occasional racism, of course. But this country’s been transformed on the issue of race. You talk to young people, they don’t even understand how people could have judged people by race. They just don’t even, it doesn’t even parse. So, you know, what some of the liberal Democrats want to suggest is that Republicans and conservatives are still, you know, they have one, one scenario for this. It’s Mississippi burning and, you know, they’re still there. But the country is not there. Mississippi isn’t Mississippi of Mississippi burning. Transformed society on this issue. And everybody who is honest would admit to that.
Listen here:
As President Obama argued in his “A More Perfect Union” speech, it is foolish to argue that “no progress has been made” in America regarding race. But “the legacy of discrimination – and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past – are real and must be addressed.” In June 2009, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund released a report demonstrating that “the spate of racially-motivated hate crimes and violence against minorities and immigrants that occurred before and after Election Day makes clear that a final victory over prejudice and racial hostility remains elusive.”
Using FBI data, the Leadership Conference found that “in the nearly twenty years since the 1990 enactment of the Hate Crime Statistics Act (HCSA), the number of hate crimes reported has consistently ranged around 7,500 or more annually — that’s nearly one every hour of every day.” The FBI reports that there were 7,783 hate crime incidents in 2008, the most recent year for which they have released data.
thinkprogress.org |
