In 1944 the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal acutely subverted a classic paradigm in American political culture: the so-called “Negro problem.” As Myrdal pointed out in his work, An American Dilemma, there really is no “Negro problem” in America. There is a white problem. White people in America systemically prevented people of African descent from fulfilling what most Americans honestly referred to as the American dream. In 1944, with segregation in full effect and blacks disfranchised across the South, Myrdal offered a powerful case for integration that would be used in the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954.
While so much progress has been achieved over the last 50 years in solving what Myrdal correcting identified as the “white problem” with black people, there are still vestiges of this sorry past. Here in Knoxville the Ku Klux Klan showed up a year ago to “protest” against what they described as a “hate crime” when five African Americans brutally raped and murdered a young white couple. While the murder was shocking there was no indication that the perpetrators had any racial animus. It was little more than drugs and robbery that led to this crime. But the Klan still made its case.
In this political season there have been numerous comments regarding Barack Obama that have edged toward – and sometimes gone over – any acceptable boundary of racial discourse.
But the flier sent out by the Chaffey Community Republican Women’s Club in Southern California goes into the ranks of infamy. Ostensibly a riff on Obama’s comment about not looking like the other people on the dollar bills, Club President Diane Fedele made fake “Obama Bucks” food stamps with stereotypically black food like fried chicken, watermelon, ribs and Kool-Aid. I can’t honestly say that I’ve seen a more racist image on an official party document since, well, the 19th century. The flier openly hearkens to minstrelsy imagery.
Of course, back in those days it was the Democrats who proudly declared themselves to be the “White Man’s Party.” In 1868, Horatio Seymour and Frank Blair ran the most explicitly white supremacist Presidential campaign in US history, openly cheerleading Ku Klux Klan attacks against black Republicans in the South.
Since the 1930s – and since 1964 in particular – African Americans have moved en masse to the Democratic Party. Noting the declining percentage of Americans of European ancestry, Republican leaders have courted racial and ethnic minorities for years. In 2004, Karl Rove successfully encouraged 11% of African Americans to vote for George W. Bush – mostly because of a shared religious conservatism.
Images like this completely undermine such efforts to broaden the GOP’s reach. That a President of an official Women’s Republican Club would feel it even remotely appropriate to put such a flier out reveals an ugly contempt for non-whites at the rotten core of the modern Republican Party.
Barack Obama didn’t need racist antics like this flier to win nearly 100% of African American votes this fall. Black conservatives have embraced Obama for his example of self-help if not for his politics. And non-conservative blacks needed little convincing to support the first African American with a real shot at the White House.
But this flier – like the vicious anti-Mexican rhetoric during the immigration debates – has served to whiten the Republican Party at the very moment when America’s demographics have made an all-white party impossible to compete. If the Republican Party is serious about broadening its appeal, it needs to make a public example of people like Linda Fedele and expel them permanently from all Republican events. The price of ignoring this sort of outrage is political oblivion of the sort nobody will lament.