GOP’S stark embrace of racism
During the reign of Jim Crow, Southern politicians made their racism clear with declarations that were loud and obnoxious. My parents, Alabama residents, knew exactly how white elected officials viewed the possibility of granting them full citizenship.
Strom Thurmond insisted that “there’s not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to ... admit the nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, into our churches.” Eugene Talmadge proclaimed that a Black man’s place was “at the back door with his hat in his hand.” George Wallace bellowed, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”
By the time I came of age, though, it seemed that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s faith in the moral arc of the universe was well placed. The civil rights movement gained momentum, and racists began to retreat. I knew that racism had not been eradicated, but the powerful notion of equal rights had gained the public square. Bigots were forced to at least pretend to believe in the ideal of equality for all.
That did not last. We are now in the era of a full-on backlash — a powerful reaction against the strides that Black and brown Americans have made toward realizing King’s dream. A frank and ugly racism is now celebrated in the ranks of the Republican Party, as Rep. Lauren Boebert, Rcolo., has recently demonstrated.
Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-mass., introduced a resolution recently to strip Boebert of her committee assignments for her bigotry and lies about a Muslim congresswoman, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-minn.), but Pressley will find this a difficult task. Prominent GOP House members have already defended Boebert, and even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seems reluctant to take on another battle with bigots.
Boebert is not alone in abandoning the dog whistle for the bullhorn. The GOP is in thrall to former President Donald Trump, whose presidential campaigns borrowed from the rhetoric that Wallace had used decades earlier. Republicans who wish to excite their base copy Trump and the racists who inspired him.
Boebert has done that by repeatedly suggesting that Omar is a terrorist — to applause and laughter from her conservative audiences. In a September appearance, Boebert called Omar “evil” and “a member of the jihad squad.”
In a November speech, Boebert lied, claiming that a Capitol police officer had run toward her as she was getting on an
elevator with a staffer. “What’s happening? I look to my left and there (Omar) is, and I said, ‘Well, she doesn’t have a backpack, we should be fine,’” Boebert sneered.
Omar says there was never any such incident.
This is Islamophobia at its ugliest, but it also reflects an older prejudice. Omar is a brown-skinned immigrant from Africa, a native of Somalia. For Boebert and her Trumpist claque, Omar’s a two-fer: Muslim and Black.
The right-wing intelligentsia insists on pointing out that the pantheon of postreconstruction white supremacists, including Thurmond, Talmadge and Wallace, comprised Democrats. That’s true, but it’s also beside the point. After President Lyndon Johnson signed legislation supporting civil rights, the Republican Party began pandering to aggrieved whites, and they fled to the GOP. Johnson predicted as much when he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964; he turned to his press secretary and lamented that Democrats had “lost the South for a generation.”
Johnson, it turns out, was an optimist. The white South is long lost to Democrats. Worse than that is this: The current Republican Party rejects the Constitution itself because it enforces equality for all.
As the nation has come closer to that promise, the GOP has opted, instead, for a white-centric autocracy. The Grand Old Party has become a repository for unapologetic racists, Trumpist reactionaries, vile xenophobes. And its leaders will do whatever it takes to remain in power.
It’s difficult these days to believe that King was right about the moral arc of the universe bending toward justice.