Quote of the Morning

Newt’s been using the Southern Strategy for a while. Remember when he parroted a crazy Forbes opinion piece accusing the president of “Kenyan anti-colonialism?” Yeah. Newt may or may not be a racist, but he’s certainly playing to that crowd.

It seems to me that a lot of Republican voters and fans need to feel heroic, hence they need to feel victimized and resentful and so they need their candidates, officeholders and media personalities to validate that resentment. Democrats spent generations trying to help people who were victimized (by the system, by society, by institutionalized discrimination, etc.) and who had legitimate reasons to resent those who had it so easy by comparison, and got a lot of electoral mileage out of it; Republicans want that too. Hence the absurdity that somehow white Christians, or more specifically straight white Christian men, are the persecuted minority being unfairly taken advantage of by everyone else, or by [insert traditional Democratic constituency here].

A lot of what I hear on Fox and on Conservative™ radio seems geared toward making their listeners feel heroic. “You are the heroes; they are the villains!” regardless of who “they” are. Ask people why they vote Republican and they’ll tell you (after they get through the empty rhetorical pablum about “small government” and what-not that the GOP does not actually care about) that some segment of the population is unfairly benefiting from Democratic policies at their expense, and the GOP will put a stop to it, take that benefit away, make “those people” deal with and suffer for their own whatever and stop making me pay for it, yada yada yada. People vote Republican to “stick it to” whoever it is they’ve been told to resent.

It just struck me, reading this post how poverty is passed on from generation to generation and how much longer my ancestors have been free to pursue economic improvement compared to the average black person’s slave ancestor. My white ancestors ranged from the wealthy British who settled on colonial land given to them by a colonies governor and ran a plantation to the shoeless and starving Irish immigrant arriving illegally on America’s shores with nothing but the clothes on his back or to the middle class German doctor who settled down and had 9 sons. None of whom were slaves. They arrived as early as 1752 (maybe earlier this the date I have for the German doctor). Taking that date we’re talking about a span of 259 years. The last immigrant to come over was the Irish ancestor in 1856. So the least amount of time would have been 155 years, or approx. 15 generations.

Yes, I said 259 years or approximately 25 generations to 155 years or 15 generations for the white descendants to reach our current socioeconomic status in America. Note they started better off because they were mostly FREE people, so they had something to build off of. Also note the white males were either naturalized or born-here citizens.

Compare that to slaves. They were first brought here as slaves with no possessions or freedom of any kind around 1607. They remained slaves until Pres. Lincoln set them free in 1863. So slavery existed in the U.S. almost exclusively (but not entirely) limited to Africans for 256 years. So they were slaves in the U.S. longer than my ancestors have been free in the U.S.

Furthermore, they weren’t legally equal until the end of the Civil Rights movement of 1968. That means between 1863 until 1968, there was a whole lot of stagnation. And that kind of beat down doesn’t go away over night.

Some might quibble that African Americans became legally equal with the 15th Amendment in 1870 but I’m not buying it and neither should you. They had to be equal in every way legal in order to label them so. So using legal equality beginning at 1968 to the present I’d say they’ve had all of 43 years….about 4 generations to improve their socioeconomic situation.

And finally that 43 years hasn’t been in a vacuum of perfect equality…far from it. Racism is very real regardless of what the law says. So it hasn’t been 43 years of bliss.

So when white voters moan and groan about having to pay taxes to support welfare queens, which is code for African Americans and which studies show do not exist, they are actually saying the following:

“My ancestors only took 259 years to make it in America, what’s wrong with the African Americans that they can’t make it in 43?”

Teh Stoopid, it hurts my brain.