Make Racism Wrong Again!

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

(Note: The title of this post was taken from a bumper sticker that I happened to see last week.)

The Democratic Party has a history of having extreme racists within its ranks, but if Orval Faubus  and George Corley Wallace were alive and running for office today, it is almost a certainty that they would be doing so as Republicans, because the. GOP is the party where racial intolerance seems to have gone to incubate and flower.

Here are some recent examples:

Last Wednesday afternoon Rep. Clay Higgins, a Republican member of Congress who resigned his position with a Louisiana police department several years ago rather than face a disciplinary hearing over his reported assault of an unarmed Black man, posted the following racist tweet on his official government X (Twitter) account:

"Lol.  These Haitians are wild.  Eating pets, vudu, nastiest country in the Western Hemisphere, clubs, slapstick gangsters . . . but damned if they don't feel all sophisticated now, filing charges against our President and VP.

All these thugs better get their mind right and their ass out of our country before January 20th."

Higgins left his vile tweet up until a major furor began to develop on the floor of Congress regarding it, and then he quietly pulled the tweet.  Rep. Steve Horsford, D, NV, the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, introduced a privileged resolution in the House to censure the Louisiana congressman for his angry, racist tirade.

Higgins posted his tweet in response  to a report that the leader of an Ohio non-profit representing the Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio, had invoked a citizen's right to file charges against Donald Trump and JD Vance over threats and disruptions that Springfield has had to endure since the two politicians began spreading false rumors about the local Haitian population eating pets.

In addition to intentionally spreading lies about the legal immigrant population of Springfield, Ohio, as a political maneuver, something Vance refers to as telling "creative stories" to draw press attention to real problems, Trump has also gone off on a tangent repeating unverified stories that Venezuelan gangs have taken over some apartment complexes in Aurora, Colorado, a story also being ginned-up by some right-wing news sources.   Local officials have denied the stories, and when residents of the apartment complexes have been interviewed, they say their problems are with the slumlord apartment owners and not gangs.  But Trump keeps promoting the gangs story because that fits his narrative that America has gone to hell under Biden, and it also folds in nicely with Trump's historic racism.

Trump's historic racism?

In 1989 after five Black and Latino male youth (ages fourteen to sixteen) were wrongly convicted of the brutal rape of a white female jogger in New York's Central Park, Donald Trump took out full-page newspaper ads calling for the execution of  "the Central Park Five."   The boys had been coerced (beaten) by the police into confessing, but then pled innocent in court.  There was no DNA or physical evidence linking them to the crime, and in 2002 another man confessed and the five men were exonerated and released from prison.  

But Donald Trump had gained some positive vibes from vilifying them and began to appreciate the power of racist attacks.  In the summer of 2017 when the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, turned violent and deadly, Trump, who was President at the time, famously  tried to paper over the turmoil by saying there were "good people on both sides."   Today he is still at it with his bungled attempts to demean Kamala Harris for either being or not being Black, his own personal history as a landlord, and his never-ending attacks on immigrants from "shithole" countries and those from south of the US border.

Interestingly, both Trump and Vance are married to immigrants and have children by them.   Two of Trump's three wives have been immigrants.

This week a 61-year-old man in Michigan was arrested for assaulting a mail carrier and lunging at her with a knife.  The man was upset because the carrier placed a political mailer for Kamala Harris in his mailbox, and he did not want that "Black bitch" in his box.  He also called the mail carrier a "Black bitch." The mail carrier used pepper spray to stop the attack.

A Black man was executed in Missouri this week for a murder he supposedly committed in 1998, although now it looks as though the evidence against his was circumstantial at best and was was mishandled by the prosecution - and he did not receive a fair trial.   The current prosecutor called for the man's sentence to be converted to life in prison while the case could be investigated further, and the victim's family was also calling for his life to be spared.  Missouri's Republican governor, a former rural county sheriff, declined to intercede on the man's behalf.

But Haitians, other Blacks, and Venezuelans aren't the only political punching bags of the American right.  Native Americans also serve as ready targets - as they have for the past several centuries.  Tim Sheehy, a former Navy Seal who is running for the Senate in Montana as a Republican (with Trump's endorsement), got in some political hot water a few days ago when recordings surfaced of him making seemingly disparaging remarks about members of the Crow tribe living in Montana, with Sheehy saying, among other things, that some members of the tribe are drunk at eight in the morning.

Scoring political points by pillorying others primarily on the basis of their race is a cheap and sleazy way to campaign, a ploy that appeals to the very lowest rungs of society in America.  It is an indecent way to run for office, but as long as the Republican Party is under the control of Donald Trump and his minions, it looks as though it will be GOP standard operating fare.  Trump has led his party into the sewer, and as of this point few seem to recognize that they are afloat in filth and hate.  

But they are, and Donald Trump brought them there by allowing the MAGA subculture to give voice to its deepest, most foul, racist beliefs - and then cheering them on.

It is clearly time to :  MAKE RACISM WRONG AGAIN!