By Edwin Cooney
Racism has always been and probably always will be a part of our national culture as race is a major aspect of each of our beings! Fortunately or unfortunately, we can't be human without a race. Some of us are even multiracial. Hence, if you ask this observer, even the absence of racism is racist due to the reality of who each and every one of us really and truly is.
There are, as I see it, three elements of racial relations. First, there is the personal, second, the social, and then there's the political element.
The personal aspect of racial relations isn't strictly individual because it can and often is affected by the personal attitudes of our birth families towards men, women and children of other races and ethnicities. However, personal attitudes can readily be modified by what Mr. Lincoln called ""the better angels of our nature.”
I remember back in 2009 when the leadership of the GOP asserted that its top priority was the defeat for re-election of President Barack Obama. My instinctual reaction to the GOP priority was "damn those racist Republicans!" Then, I remembered that back as early as 1954 Adlai Stevenson, the 1952 opponent of President Eisenhower, declared that as Ike was the likely GOP candidate in 1956, the Democrats needed to be ready to defeat Ike for re-election regardless of his success.
In late 1961, President Kennedy was informed during a press conference that the Republican National Committee had just passed a resolution declaring that the Kennedy administration was pretty much of a failure. "I'm sure it was passed unanimously," the president promptly responded. And during the 1980s, Democratic leaders, despite President Reagan's vehement protests, labeled the president and his supporters as being fundamentally racist. With these instances in mind, along with a number of other ongoing political factors such as whoever holds the White House, I’m now reluctant to categorize the 2009's GOP priority as being strictly racist.
One of the most vital elements in electoral politics is the strategy of appealing to and broadening the party's political base especially in areas of the country where it is strongest. The GOP, much to its discredit I think, decided back in the days of Nixon, Goldwater, and even old Ike, along with GOP national chairman Bill Miller (who would be Barry Goldwater's vice presidential running mate in 1964) to appeal to the Old South for its solid electoral majorities. To that end, the Democratic Party has become as unpopular as the "carpet baggers" and the "scalawags" in the defeated Confederacy of the late 1860s and 1870s up to 1877 when Presidents Grant and Hayes traded principle for practicality so that the GOP could hold the national executive office from 1877 with but two exceptions until 1933. [Note: in 1884 and 1892, Democrat (Stephen) Grover Cleveland was president and, between 1913 and 1921, the South's very own (Thomas) Woodrow Wilson was president.]
As I see it, whenever an issue that affects the future of Blacks, Whites, or any other racial category is a major aspect of a piece of legislation or executive authority, that issue is a racist issue and, regardless of your position on such an issue, the position is racist because it directly has to do with the future well being of people due strictly to their racial makeup.
What puzzles me is the GOP's insistence on permanently offending future racial and ethnic voters who within a decade or two will constitute a majority of the population of the United States! White Anglo-Saxon Protestants will, within our lifetimes and old as we may be, constitute a minority of the American people. This will alter our attitudes toward immigration, health care, and most certainly voting rights.
Who people are and the culture that sustains their sense of personhood has been and perhaps always will be a factor in an otherwise free society. Because all national domestic issues affect men and women of all races, every issue is ultimately an issue of race. Thus, to the degree that I'm a racist, I consider myself an “equity racist” when it comes to America's reactions and values regarding the fates of racial groups!
Hence, the ultimate question inevitably is: who's a racist and who isn't? According to Americans' traditional political standards, those seeking to regulate race relations to the disadvantage of Blacks and other racial minorities, are defined as being racist. Those who support racial equality, or if you prefer, equity, I label as equity racists as stated above. Another way of answering this question would be to proclaim that issues, not people, are racist!
Let us hope that when Blacks and other current minorities become the majority, they will treat our children and grandchildren better than they've been historically treated from the days of Colonial Jamestown to the present days of GOP political reactionism!
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
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