Democrats Are, By Definition, Racists
by digby
I think that despite the fact that Jeffrey Lord was roundly criticized, even by conservatives, for saying that Shirley Sherrod was lying when she described a beating of a black man in custody as a lynching, his comments today to TPM reveal a larger critique that may well have some resonance on the right:
“I have felt for a long time that my friends on the American left, in the Democratic party have just had this atrocious history with racial issue,” Lord said. “I mean it just can’t possibly be any worse. I’ve gone back and read all the platforms for the Democratic party starting in 1840 which was the first one.”
What’s changed in the last generation, according to Lord, is simply the nature of the Democratic party’s racism.
“What struck me about [the Sherrod speech] was that sort of little, casual aside, where she says something about health care, and ‘I’ve never seen people so mean’ … The implication is — and she uses the phrase at one point ‘the black president’ and ‘we endured the Bush years’. And the implication to me was that she was saying ‘if you didn’t agree with Obamacare then you’re a bigot,'” Lord said. “The essence of the formula is ‘scare race X to death that race Y or Z is coming after them in some fashion, and then, you know, you get all the votes and the money, etc, etc, etc. And that all that’s gone on over a couple years of history of the Democratic party is that the races have changed.”
“What is the difference, really, between Jimmy Byrnes trying to pursue a “white” agenda, and Sonia Sotomayor’s wise Latina comment?” Lord asked rhetorically.
For Lord, the key inconsistency is that Democratic southerners were to blame both for Hall’s murder, and for ultimately overturning the conviction of his killers, and yet, decades later, Sherrod sympathizes with the Democratic party.
“I understand that people on the other side are going to go poopoopoo and the Nixon Southern Strategy and all that kind of thing,” Lord said. “To think that this was just, all these people just switched their party and made the Republican party segregationist is just nuts. I was there.”
What about the black people who all switched their party?
That’s pretty slick, actually. The Democrats have always been the racist party and still are today now that whites are suffering discrimination everywhere at the hands of the people of color — who switched to the racist party the minute they achieved civil rights. (It’s always something with “those people” …)
It’s not that the right hasn’t been saying this in other terms, but this draws it all together in one nice little package. It is completely divorced from reality of course, completely leaving out the civil war, Jim Crow etc, but I can see a whole lot of really dumb Fox viewers taking to this view. Republicans have always been on the right side, not just during Lincoln’s day, (which never had much salience since it was so long ago) but in modern times as well, when the racists are all black and brown.
Read the whole interview. He explains why the beating of a black man while in custody can’t be called a lynching (there has to be a mob and a rope involved) and that Sherrod really is a racist because she was riling up the blacks. But then so are all Democrats, always have been always will be. It’s definitional. Thomas Jefferson had slaves. Obama hates white people. Need I say more?
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