Posted by
Jon on Friday, April 25, 2008 7:01:07 PM
In the light of Alicia Keys’ recent statement and persistent rumors, it looks to me that Rev. Wright looks less like a kook and more like a symptom. If blacks believe these things (and my gut says that urban blacks do), we could use this to own the black vote. We need to recognize that, between policies like the minimum wage’s explicitly racist beginnings, the eugenics of the Progressive Movement’s origins, and the KKK’s persecution of Republicans that went shoulder-to-shoulder with their persecution of blacks, I don’t see how their fears of government conspiracies are irrational. After all, the only difference between “the government made it easier to hire whites over blacks” and “the government created AIDS” is that the government could never have kept inventing AIDS a secret; they didn’t even try to cover up the origins of the minimum wage.
Many people believing a thing doesn’t make it True, but it does make it Important. We’ve been better on civil rights than Democrats for 150 years; we were chased out of the South by the KKK, a larger percentage of our party voted for the Civil Rights Act in the ‘60s and a larger percentage of our party voted for the Voting Rights Act in the ‘60s. Rev. Wright is the best opportunity the GOP has had to talk to blacks in decades. Rev. Wright isn’t the problem, he shows us the problem, and Barack Obama isn’t the solution. If blacks fear the government (and who could blame them), we need to tell them that Big Government is a White Government, and a White Government big enough to hurt them.