California Conservative

I’ve found a new favorite columnist from Pennsylvania, surpassing even the great Jack Kelly. Her name is Salena Zito and she’s written a couple columns recently that are as good as it gets. Here’s the heart of her latest column:

Racism is not a forest; racial slurs pelted at black Republican candidates are not trees falling silently. People hear them, people see them and they are coming from a Democrat near you. Yes, the Rainbow Coalition party has a dirty little secret: racist practices against blacks who dare to speak differently. Democrats know how to fight and attack opponents whose skin color means they should not play for the other team.

How else can you explain Lt. Gov. Michael Steele of Maryland being pelted with Oreo cookies at Morgan State University in Baltimore? The unfunny joke, Oreos are black on the outside, white on the inside, shouldn’t make any reasonable person laugh.

Finally, a national columnist who’ll trumpet the notion that Jesse Jackson and Co. are quite accomplished racists themselves. Actually, their actions are based more on fear than anything else. What they fear is that African-Americans will increasingly notice that the old ‘Civil Rights Leadership’ of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Julian Bond and the NAACP don’t speak to their desires and aspirations. These old guard guys are afraid that they’re losing the battle because race relations have generally improved over the past 40 years and more African-Americans are hoping to build a secure future for themselves and their families.

Let’s face reality: there weren’t many African-Americans in 1964 who dreamt of having the wealth that the black middle class currently enjoys. Some major battles were won, though more still need to be won. But there’s been far more victories than defeats along the way. And Jesse and Julian and Joe and Al don’t represent younger African-Americans because the young folk weren’t involved in the marches, the civil disobedience and the “I Have a Dream” speech.

And as Jesse and Julian and Joe and Al see people leaving the ‘monolith’, they’re afraid that their power base will shrink at an ever-increasing rate. And they’re right that that’s what will happen.
Still, after all that rejection, that doesn’t give people the right to mock people just because they think differently and aspire to higher goals. Quite the contrary, it should be a cause to re-examine their own goals and see if they aren’t selling themselves short by not reaching higher.

Otto Banks, a black Republican and recent Harrisburg City Council candidate, endured his share of similar racial attacks. Mailings by the Democratic State Committee portrayed him as a sellout, his signs were defaced with the word “whitey” and he was constantly called “Uncle Bush Tom.” Said Banks, now an outreach director for the Republican State Committee: “An African-American Republican running for office can expect to be pictured incessantly with President Bush, linked with the NRA and gun proliferation…labeled a sellout and compared to Strom Thurman.” Yet that has not scared him away from the GOP.

This is nothing more than attacking the messenger because they can’t attack his message of achievement, setting good goals and inspiration. That’s what happens when your agenda vanishes.

People are finally noticing the nasty racism being praticed by the so-called Civil Rights Leadership and they’re getting sick of their ‘leadership’. I welcome the day when we can just remember them as the group that started with noble intentions and then faded to irrelevance then to nonexistance.

Cross-post at LetFreedomRing

This entry was posted on Monday, February 13th, 2006 at 9:35 am and is filed under Author: Gary Gross, Elections, RNC, Race. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.