Whites in GOP find comfort in Cain
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A crude racial calculus has been a part of our national discourse for centuries. Conservative pundit Ann Coulter is America's finest practitioner of it.
"Our blacks are so much better than their blacks," she told Fox News' Sean Hannity in a display of pure racial taxonomy we haven't seen since the 19th century.
"To become a black Republican, you don't just roll into it," Ms. Coulter said. "You're not going with the flow. You have fought against probably your family members, probably your neighbors, you have thought everything out and that's why we have very impressive blacks in our party."
Asked on "The Joy Behar Show" to defend her comments, Ms. Coulter differentiated between liberal black Democrats ("their blacks") and conservative black Republicans ("our blacks").
"I'm saying Google Maxine Waters, Cynthia McKinney, John Conyers, and then Google Allen West, Michael Steele or Herman Cain," she said, resisting the urge to approximate their skull circumference with her bony fingers like an old-fashioned phrenologist. "Ours are more impressive. There's no question about it."
When Ms. Coulter refers to "our blacks," she isn't talking about the so-called "Talented Tenth," the cadre of black intellectuals that W.E.B. Du Bois hoped would rise up to lead the majority of American blacks to the Promised Land via the power of a classical education. No, Ms. Coulter is praising those blacks in her party who have an amazing capacity to make white folks feel good about themselves despite hundreds of years of bad blood and history.
In the mind of many white conservatives like Ms. Coulter, there will always be a hierarchy of Negroes. At the top are "our blacks," who reject the notion that America suffers from any lingering effects of white supremacy and systemic racial injustice.
"Their blacks" are the 99 percent of us who refused to stick with the Republican Party after it was taken over by Dixiecrats and Southern defectors from the Democratic Party during the height of the civil rights struggle.
Like most blacks, I find myself standing in the field gazing in wonder at the party going on in the Big House on the hill. We hear all of the singing, dancing and "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" coming from the mansion, but it doesn't impress us enough to join in.
Still, we're amazed by the ability of the blacks on the inside to make so many white conservatives feel comfortable with them. "If you're still poor and unemployed barely one generation out of Jim Crow, then it is your fault," some of these ZaDDD negroes say with a straight face.
First Published November 4, 2011 12:00 am
