The racial narratives are up for grabs
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As a headline-making racial conflict was unfolding last week between the Democratic Party's two leading presidential candidates, syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. had a piece in the Post-Gazette supposedly explaining the black community's current overwhelming allegiance to the Democratic Party.
"Why is it never mentioned that [Martin Luther King] was a Republican?" a reader had asked him. And, given that Republicans were the party of abolition and that Democrats were arch segregationists, "why do African Americans support the Democrat [sic] Party?"
The column's timing is curious, appearing just as the contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton is laying bare the cognitive dissonance of the left wing's decades-old racial posturing.
The Democrats' simmering race problem had hit a low boil just days before, when Mrs. Clinton compared herself and Mr. Obama to Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King. "Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act," Mrs. Clinton explained. "It took a president to get it done."
Pundits argue over just what Mrs. Clinton meant: A skilled manager accomplishes what a visionary can only dream? Or a white person must finish what a black can only start?
It's reasonable to believe that Mrs. Clinton meant the former, given her pitch as the more experienced candidate. But cynics propose she meant the latter and that, given the Clintons' reputation within their own party for sleazy, whatever-it-takes campaigning, she's begun angling for the old white Southern racist vote.
Whatever her motives, what can't go uncorrected in Mrs. Clinton's claim or in Mr. Pitts' column is the factual inaccuracies of their party's racial narrative.
Lyndon Johnson's position as the "Civil Rights president" is a mixed truth at best. As Senate Majority Leader in the 1950s, Johnson's mission was to block the civil rights bill that Republican President Dwight Eisenhower kept urging.
But in 1957, with his own presidential aspirations rising and his finger on the a-changin' times, Mr. Johnson shepherded weak civil rights legislation to passage, explaining, "These Negroes, they're getting pretty uppity ... We've got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference ... [or] we'll lose ... It'll be Reconstruction all over again."
Seven years later, President Johnson was signing the same civil rights legislation he had previously, odiously opposed. Noble change of heart or rank political opportunism?
Mr. Pitts' accusations are even more odious. He wrote last week: "Given the choice between the soft bigotry of low expectations and the hard bigotry of a cross burning on the lawn and silence in response, is it any wonder black voters choose the first?"
Newsflash: Those cross-burners down South weren't Republicans, Mr. Pitts, and a lot of modern Republicans are sick to death of that slander.
In fact, Republican congressmen voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in far greater proportion than did Democrats. The facts simply do not support Mr. Pitts' claim that the GOP lost its "stranglehold on the black vote" because of Lyndon Johnson's leadership and "the GOP's stubborn silence on civil rights."
But you can make a strong case that the GOP lost black voters for four other important reasons: political opportunism on the left, on the right, from the black community's elite and, yes, a complicit national media.
First, the GOP parted company with the Dems over Johnson's Great Society programs, protesting them publicly as a dangerous expansion of the welfare state and the federal government's power. More quietly, they questioned whether the "Dixiecrats" weren't just trying to expiate their very recent racial sins and buy a large bloc of votes in the process.
Second, the 1970s' radical court decisions on issues such as busing drove both closet racists and true small-government conservatives into the GOP ranks -- a wedge that some Republican operatives were, to their everlasting discredit, willing to exploit.
Third, many black leaders have been content to perpetuate the left's policies, long after the policies' destructiveness has been demonstrated, since the arrangement gives them power over many votes.
And fourth, the historically inaccurate racial narrative persists because a baby-boomer-dominated media never questions its veracity. The first wave of boomers became adults during the turbulent '60s, and the heroes of their times were the new-and-improved Lyndon Johnson, the by-then politically neutral Martin Luther King and the Kennedys.
For boomer journalists to question what they saw at their coming of age, they'd have to question their very identity. And why would they, when this entrenched narrative reinforces their own "righteous crusader" self-image?
But this election may force a re-evaluation of the old, one-sided narrative. With Mr. Obama winning the South Carolina primary, will Mrs. Clinton stoop to the tactics of racial division that Democrats have long said were the GOP's mainstay?
Are voters ready for an independent, self-created black man rather than the beneficent white liberal who grants him his identity?
First Published January 28, 2008 12:00 am
