Rubio's Racist Tweet

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

Florida Senator Marco Rubio is facing a major hurdle to retain his seat on the government gravy train.  Rubio, who is up for re-election in 2022, is being challenged by Congresswoman Val Demings, a black woman who spent nearly thirty years serving with the Orlando Police Department and was that department's first female chief.  Demings' husband, Jerry, is also a former Orlando Police Chief and the first black individual to hold that position - and he is a former Sheriff of Orange County, Florida, and the county's current mayor.

When Republicans run against black candidates, they often try to paint the opposition as being "soft on crime," as a way of stoking racist fears, but "soft on crime" will be a tough hand to play against Val Demings.  However, that doesn't mean that Rubio won't be out trying to stoke some racial fear and animosity.

Yesterday was Father's Day and Rubio used the occasion to remind people that some of us are better than others of us, and then to explain why that is.  Early in the morning he tweeted this:

"Every major social problem in America can be linked to fatherlessness.   Wherever involved fathers are rare, crisis is certain to follow.   And billions in government spending is no substitute for fatherhood."

Rubio, of course, was playing on the old conservative trope which suggests most black children in America grow up in fatherless homes because the dads are in prison, and that much of black youth, particularly males, gravitate toward criminality because they lack good father role models.  Then those young black men themselves head to prison and the cycle continues.

Senator Rubio, who is holier than most of us and can quote Bible verses to prove it, isn't taking into account that fact that the black prison population (and it is considerable) is incarcerated primarily due to the effects of America's long and torturous racist past.  Prolonged, generational poverty due to lack of opportunity and access to capital has resulted in people being arrested and imprisoned over crimes related to basic survival, racist housing practices have isolated communities of color from mainstream America and kept their children away from the better schools, and the so-called "war on drugs" was actually an increased policing effort that tended to target non-violent offenders and was often enforced along racial lines.  (Whites were shuffled into treatment, and blacks were shuffled into prison.)

More often than not young black fathers were removed from their families and warehoused in prisons as a result of prolonged systemic racism and social attitudes toward race.  And Marco Rubio was right there on the morning of Father's Day fanning the hot embers of racism in order to make sure that the people in Florida do not forget the racial stereotypes that his political party has spent so much time and effort developing.  (And Republicans certainly do not want racism being explored in schools where they would have little control over the narrative.)

Blacks are criminals, and because they are criminals their children are fatherless, and because their children are fatherless, they, too, will become criminals - and spending government money on them won't help.   So sayeth Marco.

It's nice to know that Val Demings has his attention!