Occasionally in this raucous political season I am saddened by comments and positions taken by some politicians.
It’s not that they are different from mine. That’s fine. It’s just that some of the language is vile, repugnant and laced with untruths.
And, left unchecked, it spreads like a virus and metastasizes in the thought reservoirs of some people who should know better and others who don’t care.
It is painful that those politicians are willing conduits to attack their own race in order to win the approval of a certain person and segment of the population. Many like me are left asking: “How could they say that?”
In a couple of recent instances, two Black Republican men have spewed messages that would be deemed patently racist if they had dripped from the mouths of White people.
What is troubling, though, is that very few people I have talked to about it even knew what I was talking about. I guess the media hasn’t done enough to expose them.
The most recent such comment came from Florida U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, who suggested that Black families were more together and had it better under the clouds of racist Jim Crow segregation.
Donalds has slowly become a cable news darling of Black Republicans in the country. He even has hopes of becoming Trump’s new Mike Pence. Donalds need only to look at the grinning self-debasement of Black South Carolina U.S. Sen. Tim Scott to know it’s not going to happen for him.
However, Donalds will also be on MAGA’s good side because of comments like “You see, during Jim Crow, the Black family was together.”
He also criticized President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society program, which included civil rights legislation that ended Jim Crow and expanded federal food stamp, welfare and housing programs.
Here are few things about Jim Crow laws:
• They made it difficult to impossible for Black citizens to vote, be elected to office and to serve on juries.
• Many Christian ministers and theologians taught that White people were the chosen people, that Black people were cursed to be servants and that God supported racial segregation.
• Those who tried to fight Jim Crow faced arrest, fines, incarceration, violence and death.
More on the death part: A report by the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit that provides legal counsel to the poor, claims there were almost 4,000 lynchings of Black people in the South during the Jim Crow era. So to Rep. Donalds’ point about close Black families, the thousands of lynchings probably resulted in many single-parent Black households. As the young folks retort: “I’m just saying.”
In recent weeks, Donalds has launched a campaign to reset his comments. Sometimes, though, it is difficult to clear away all of the damage from a multicar pile-up when the culprit ignored the stop sign of good sense.
And then there is North Carolina’s Black lieutenant governor Mark Robinson, who reportedly posted on Facebook that the 1960s civil rights movement was “crap.” He has downplayed slavery. It is so sad for a Black man to feel he must denigrate Martin Luther King Jr. and others who gave their lives so that he could even have a chance to run for public office.
Former President Donald Trump was so overtaken by Robinson, who is running for governor, that he claimed Robinson is better than King. In fact, Trump called Robinson “King on steroids.”
Short note to both Robinson and Trump: Blacks in North Carolina didn’t enjoy the complete right to vote until Johnson’s voting rights legislation. And guess who was standing near Johnson for the signing? MLK. So, technically, Robinson would still be stumbling around without a chance to run for office had it not been for King.
Not all Trumpers are racists, but I am so sad that these Black people are so willing to be microphones for the MAGA movement’s ugly underbelly.
I hope they will fight the urge to be willing stooges. They owe the truth to brave civil rights fighters who risked their lives or died so that folks like them could vote and run for political office.