Why the GOP Plays the Slavery Card

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

The Democratic National Committee wasted no time in blasting Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour for being the second Southern governor to blow off slavery as a non-issue. Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell drew much heat from the White House on down when he whited out slavery from his Confederate History Month declaration. McDonnell made a tepid, half-hearted, after the fact apology. The DNC also demands that Barbour apologize. Barbour is unrepentant, and that’s not likely to change. Slavery is just too tantalizing and enduring as a race card for Barbour and the GOP to snatch it off the table.

When Ohio Congressman Tony Hall introduced two resolutions in 1997 and 2000 asking Congress to officially apologize for slavery, he was blasted from pillar to post. Irate whites filled the airwaves with long denunciations of the resolutions as wasteful and even racism in reverse. Virginia, ironically, in 2007 didn’t back-peddle from the issue. Both houses unanimously passed a resolution apologizing for slavery. The resolution was mild, innocuous, and ultimately toothless, but at least it acknowledged the monstrous wrong of slavery. But it went no further than that and for good reason. To continue to talk about it, and back it up with special initiatives to deal with failing education, high rates of joblessness, and incarceration among blacks, all very much legacies of slavery, would have been to risk a full scale political backlash

The passage of a health care reform that conservative and tea party activists loathe and use to whip their troops in frenzy, another Supreme Court pick, the recent stirred up Southern Republican confab dominated by tea party shill Sarah Palin, and the top heavy racial divide on Obama makes this the perfect time to play the slavery card. Apologies notwithstanding, it’s a no-cost code signal to millions of whites, South and North, that loathe Obama’s policies and Obama that Southern whites, especially white males, are still the party’s bread and butter.

This is no accident. Polls show that the GOP's relentless Obama bashing complete with borderline racial appeals to white males is having some success. Obama's approval ratings have flat-lined or dipped among lower income whites and independents. Among white males in the same bracket they've plunged into free fall.

The spark to reignite the GOP's traditional conservative, lower income white male loyalists has always been there. The final presidential vote gave ample warning of that. While Obama made a major breakthrough in winning a significant percent of votes from white independents and young white voters, contrary to popular perception, Republican presidential candidate John McCain (not Obama) won a slim majority of their vote in the final tally. Among Southern and Heartland America white male voters, Obama made almost no impact. Overall McCain, garnered nearly 60 percent of the white vote.

The GOP could not have been competitive during campaign 2008 without the bail out from white male voters. Much has been made since then that they are a dwindling percent of the electorate, and that Hispanics, Asian, black, young, and women voters will permanently tip the balance of political power to the Democrats in coming national elections. It's true that blue collar white voters have shrunk from more than half of the nation's voters to less than forty percent. The assumption based solely on this slide and the increased minority population numbers and regional demographic changes is that the GOP's white vote strategy is doomed to fail. This ignores three major factors in voting patterns. Elections are usually won by candidates with a solid and impassioned core of bloc voters. White males, particularly older white males, vote consistently and faithfully. And they vote in a far greater percentage than Hispanics and blacks.

Most importantly to the GOP brain trust, blue collar white male voters can be easily aroused to vote on the emotional wedge issues; abortion, family values, anti-gay marriage and rights, and tax cuts. GOP presidents and aspiring presidents, Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr. and W. Bush, and legions of GOP governors, senators and congresspersons banked and still bank on these voters for victory and to seize and maintain regional and national political dominance.

The GOP is, as is widely seen, an insular party of Deep South and narrow Heartland, rural and, non-college educated blue collar whites. But that's not a demographic to be totally sneered at, because the numbers are still huge.

The GOP driven by personal instincts, political leanings, history, demographics, and raw political necessity will do what it has done for decades, and more times than not successfully. And that’s use every political card at its disposal to batter an African-American president, and inflame its base with racially loaded code appeals. Slavery more than fits that bill. The DNC's accused Barbour of sending a strong message that slavery was a trifle. That was idea.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is the author of How Obama Governed.

President Obama Confronts Holocaust Evil, Now Confront the Slavery Evil

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

President Obama spoke forcefully, passionately and correctly at the Buchenwald death camp on the evil of the Holocaust. He implored nations to confront those who would deny its horror. Obama should do the same about the evil of slavery. There are two arguments against him doing that though. Then Presidential candidate Obama raised one on the couple of occasions when he was asked about reparations. He tersely said that the best way to address racial disparities is to provide more resources and programs for education, employment and health care. Blacks would be the greatest beneficiaries.
The other argument is that slavery ended nearly a century and a half ago. The obliteration of legal segregation, oceans of civil rights laws, voting rights, affirmative action programs, Oprah, Colin Powell, Eric Holder, Tiger Woods, and of course, Obama, and a big, prosperous black middle class, have erased the stain of slavery. Neither argument will wash.
Two years ago Virginia apologized for slavery. The apology was not just a matter of doing the morally right thing. The U.S. government, not just a handful of evil Southern planters encoded slavery in the Constitution, and protected and nourished it for a century. Traders, insurance companies, bankers, shippers, and landowners, made billions off of it. Their ill-gotten profits fueled America's industrial and agricultural might. For decades after slavery's end, white trade unions excluded blacks and confined them to the dirtiest, poorest paying jobs.
Though many white and non-white immigrants came to America after the Civil War, they were not subjected to the decades of relentless racial terror and legal segregation as were blacks. Through the decades of slavery and Jim Crow segregation, African-Americans were transformed into the poster group for racial deviancy. The image of blacks as lazy, crime and violence prone, irresponsible, and sexual predators has stoked white fears and hostility and served as the standard rationale for more than 4,000 documented lynchings, as well as the countless racial assaults, and acts of hate crime violence.

Many blacks earn more and live better than ever today, and have gotten boosts from welfare, social and education programs, civil rights legislation, and affirmative action programs. But that does not mean that America has shaken the hideous legacy of slavery. The Urban League in its annual State of Black America reports finds that young blacks are far likelier than whites to be imprisoned, serve longer terms, and are more likely to receive the death penalty even when their crimes are similar.
Blacks continue to have the highest rates of poverty, infant mortality, violence victimization rates, and health care disparities than any other group in America. They are still more likely to live in segregated neighborhoods, be refused business and home loans, their children attend failed public schools than any other group, and are more likely to be racially profiled on America's urban streets.
There is nothing new about state and federal governments issuing apologies and even payments for past wrongs committed against African-Americans. The U.S. government admitted it was legally liable in 1997 to pay the black survivors and family members of the two-decade long syphilis experiment begun in the 1930's by the U.S. Public Health Service that turned black patients into human guinea pigs. The survivors got $10 million from the government and an apology from President Clinton They were the victims of a blatant medical atrocity conducted with the full knowledge and approval of the U.S. government.

The state legislature in Florida in 1994 agreed to make payments to the survivors and relatives of those who lost their lives and property when a white mob destroyed the all-black town of Rosewood in 1923. This was a specific act of mob carnage that was tacitly condoned by some public officials and law enforcement officers. Florida was liable for the violence and was duty bound to apologize and pay. The Oklahoma state legislature has agreed at least in principle that reparations and apology should be made to the survivors of the dozens of blacks killed, and the hundreds more that had their homes and businesses destroyed by white mobs with the complicity of law enforcement in the Tulsa massacre of 1921. A bill by Michigan Congressman John Conyers has has kicked around Congress since 1989 would establish a commission to study the impact of slavery and the feasibility of paying reparations to blacks.
The brutal truth is that the mainstay of America's continuing racial divide is its harsh and continuing mistreatment of poor blacks. This can be directly traced to the persistent and pernicious legacy of slavery. Nearly a century and a half later, that legacy is still very much alive and well.

President Obama condemned the monstrosity of the Holocaust six decades after it ended. In doing that he recognized that there’s no time frame or statue of limitations on evil. It can still affect generations that were born years after the horror officially ended. There’s nothing wrong with recognizing the same about slavery.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His weekly radio show, “The Hutchinson Report” can be heard on weekly in Los Angeles Fridays on KTYM Radio 1460 AM and live streamed nationally on ktym.com