I was commenting on another thread, and I took the time to research how bad the Republican Party’s record on electing African Americans really was. It’s far worse than I thought. In the last 110 years (in other words Post Reconstruction), there have been 4 elected black Republicans in Congress (5 if you count the non voting member of the US Virgin Islands). There are now 93 African American Republicans elected to office at all levels of government, from School Board Vice President to Mayor or State Senator. On the plus side, that’s up from 57 (I think) last time I checked. On the other hand, there are still so few African Americans representing the GOP’s elected preference that Red State would be able to treat every one of them to a steak dinner with their own bottle of Caymus (a restaurant will charge 2-3 times that by the way) for the amount of money they are asking.
Fun With Numbers
This post is in: Kiss My Black Ass, Republican Stupidity
Andrew
Clearly, African-Americans are just waiting for someone like Michael to tell them who to vote for.
myiq2xu
You can bet the rent money that at the GOP convention this summer every one of them will be up on the stage.
jh
And then the camera will pan to the audience and the illusion will be shattered.
r€nato
how pathetic for those who submit to that enormously cynical act of tokenism.
r€nato
I recall that a couple-three years back, during one of the GOP’s fits of trying to reach out to black folks, the RNC put out a calendar which documented the various accomplishments of the GOP on behalf of black people.
Most of it was things Lincoln had done. Really, do they even have any concept how lame they look with these stunts?
Incertus (Brian)
Don’t you believe it. You think the cameras will go anywhere they want? Please–they linger on the other handfuls of people of color out there on the floor for precisely the same reason.
Jake
The doctrine of “Fuck the proles, I got mine,” knows no boundaries.
You want pathetic, take a drive through the hills of southern Indiana in October and count the number of pro-Republican signs in yards.
Jake
The thing I don’t get about the “Look, Lincoln’s one of us!” (aside from the lameness) is a lot of GOPers (especially in the South) revile Lincoln and they’re not very secretive about it so the real message is: “Hey, vote for us because a guy we hate was in our party!”
But I’ve got on better. During the last election cycle a local GOP group ran a ad that claimed Dr. King was a Republican.
The response was … about what you’d expect.
Mr Furious
So, Tom, that “Black Republican” magazine you link to…do they just print one of those out and pass it around?
Bubblegum Tate
Oh, there’d be lots more elected Black Republicans–thousands of them!–if only those damn liberal fascists hadn’t somehow subverted the process.
sidereal
Don’t forget Hispanics! I count 9.
You really don’t even need to say anything. The numbers pretty much speak for themselves.
Jay
At the 2004 Republican convention, 17 percent of the delegates were minorities.
That will be a crowded stage.
Dulcie
Niiiiiiiiiiiiiice!
4tehlulz
Why would they pan out to empty seats?
Zifnab
They had one of those guys sitting near Michelle “Horray for Interment Camps” Malkin during some GOoPer pro-war-for-people-who-aren’t-in-the-military event. It’s always so much fun to hear about how Lyndon Johnson was a closet mega-racist, how Robert Byrd is KKK, and how John Conyers is a cynical puppet of the DC system. I got an even bigger kick out of Lt. Gov. Michael Steele’s run for Governor of Mass, when he passed out the “Steele Democrat” flyers.
The sad shit is I’m sure the poor sods down in Arkansas or Alabama who are getting bottom-of-the-barrel educations might actually get sold this horse crap. But at the end of the day, historical rape like that is on par with holocaust denial. It’s just nice to know that the same bigots and race-baiters who give us these bold faced lies run off and botch Katrina or pull a Jena 6 and properly ruin the illusion.
PotD
superdestroyer
Since the Republicans have no hope of appealing to blacks (or Hispanics or Asians) and those groups are growing relative to whites, it is only a matter of times (and a relatively short period of time) before the Repulican Party becomes irrelevant.
However, one of the question everyone should ask is what happens in a one party state where blacks, instead of being an important bloc in the ruling party, becomes just one of many blocs in the one party. My guess is that the importance of blacks to the poltical system will decline as the Democratic Party becomes the only relevant political party in the U.S. Even the former Republican social conservatives will become more important once they cross over and start voting in the Democratic Party after the collapse of the Republican Party.
HyperIon
Shelby Steele on Bill Moyers’ Journal last week said something along the lines of: “when someone asks me if i know any black republicans, i reply that i know ALL of them.”
minority stockholders?
could you provide a link substantiating that statement?
rachel
The phrase: “What have you done for us lately?” comes to mind.
Jake
When that story started to break I knew exactly where it was happening. The problem for those dicks was 1) They’d tried it before. 2) People who live within 100 miles of DC tend to be a bit more politically alert because a lot of our news is political news.
Meanwhile, on the south side of DC, in Virginia people in predominantly Democratic neighborhoods (incidentally ones with high ethnic populations) were getting anonymous phone calls saying the cops were at the polls waiting to arrest people with outstanding warrants.
And every year the GOP scratches its head and wonders why it is so hard to get non-H/W/ voters.
Gosh. I wonder why.
Jay
LINK
bob
I just wonder how anyone with a synapse that still functions cannot see that the Republicans are the party of freebooters who use idiot christians and idiot libertarians to vote for them by flat out lying to them. These are white racist colonialist imperialists, kind of just like what the Russians used to say about us during the cold war. At that time it was mainly the Dulles brothers causing the trouble. Now it’s the whole damn republican party.
Jay
What have the Dems done lately?
cleek
IIRC, the guy running a close 2nd in the Dem primaries is black. on the other hand, the Reps do have Alan Keyes. so i guess it’s even.
Jay
I heard Andrew Cuomo say the other day that he was good at Shucking and Jiving.
IIRC
IIRC That when the Supreme Court issued its Brown v. Board of Education ruling against segregation, 100 Democrats (19 U. S. Senators and 81 Congressmen) issued a public denunciation of that ruling, declaring that desegregation was “certain to destroy the system of public education”
Enlightened Layperson
All denouncing affirmative action, of course. Although actually these “black conservatives” the Republicans are always putting forward make the case against affirmative action better than they could ever imagine.
Jake
How do you define lately?
Yeah, yeah and the Republican party 2008 is identical to Lincoln’s Republican party.
This will come as a huge shock but the dynamics and focus of both parties have shifted a little bit since then. Remember Strom Thurmond?
Feeb.
Cyrus
I wouldn’t be so sure. Hasn’t a major party only disintegrated once in the history of the country? (Though admittedly, it was over this same issue, so…) There’s no guarantee that things will change as quickly as you seem to think, and even if they do, the Republicans will probably move toward greater diversity to keep up.
Pb
What do you think the Republicans of today would think of the values enshrined in the Republican Party Platform of 1856…
Barry
Anybody who invokes Dixicrats when discussing the *current* GOP and Democratic Party has revealed themselves to be either a fool or a liar.
ChristieS
And when Johnson bullied the Civil Rights Act past these assholes anyway, they up and jumped ship to the welcoming arms of the Republicans. IIRC.
ChristieS
Exactly, as well as when Republicans invoke Abe Lincoln. The parties today bear absolutely NO resemblance to the parties of the same name in 1862.
The massive shift in political ideologies that occured between the end of Reconstruction and the end of WW1 saw the complete realignment of the parties to the opposite ends of the political spectrum. They kept the same party names but literally swapped positions on the spectrum.
Jay
It’s pretty funny reading you folks just making shit up.
Please see the current President pro tempore of the US Senate and ask him if he has seen any white niggers recently. Senator KKK is still a Democrat and he voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Also please name of the Dems that voted against the 1964 Civil Right act that moved to the GOP. Thurmond is the only Senator that switched parties after voting against the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
The truth is that most of the Dixiecrats did not become Republicans. They created the Dixiecrats and then, when the civil rights movement succeeded, they returned to the Democratic fold.
A larger percentage of Republicans voted for the 1964 civil rights act then Democrats. This can be said for ALL of civil rights laws.
Also note that Kennedy voted against the 1957 Civil Rights Act.
sidereal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964
From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don’t need any more than that… but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.
But keep banging that drum and I’m sure you’ll eventually convince everyone that the modern Democrats are the real racists. Clap harder!
sidereal
Whoops. boffed the blockquote there. The second to last paragraph was a quote from Kevin Phillips, Nixon’s strategist, in the New York Times in 1970 laying out the Southern Strategy.