It has been interesting, if also predictable, to watch conservatives reacting to the Herman Cain sexual harassment allegations
discover the horrors of anti-black racism. After all, they’ve spent the
past three years claiming that the real victims of racism in the United
States are white.
“Have we ever had a president who was such a partisan hack, such a race-baiter?” Rush Limbaugh
asked last year. Meanwhile, he’s been utterly dismissive of the notion
that the Tea Party has shown racism against African-Americans, saying,
“[T]he charge of racism is losing its heft…it’s been overdone and
overblown.” Writing of allegations of racism on college campuses in her
2009 book Guilty: Liberal ‘Victims’ and Their Assault on America,
Ann Coulter charged, “Rather than ‘institutional racism,’ what we’re
witnessing is ‘institutional racial hoaxism’ committed by liberals.”
Calling the GOP’s infamous Willie Horton ads “powerful,” Erick Erickson
has urged Republican strategists to create a new generation of similar
spots about the farcical New Black Panther party, writing, “The
Democrats are giving a pass to radicals who advocate killing white kids
in the name of racial justice and who try to block voters from the
polls.”
Then, this week, everything
changed. Suddenly, the right sees the “institutional racism” that
Coulter disparaged everywhere. “Look at how quickly what is known as the
mainstream media goes for the ugliest racial stereotypes they can to
attack a black conservative,” Limbaugh said on Monday. “I Declare
Politico’s Attack On Herman Cain Racist,” blared a headline on
RightWingNews.com. On Fox and Friends Tuesday morning, guest host Peter
Johnson Jr. alluded to Clarence Thomas, saying, “[M]aybe this is a
high-tech lynching that Politico engaged in.”
This is an absurd charge. Herman
Cain is currently leading the Republican polls. If he wants to be
treated as a serious candidate—something that’s not entirely clear,
given his lack of a campaign staff in Iowa and New Hampshire—he’s going
to be subjected to serious scrutiny. When a major presidential candidate
has been accused of sexual harassment,
and when his accusers have received financial settlements as a result
of their complaints, that’s news. Indeed, that’s so obvious it seems
absurd to have to write it. Just imagine, after all, how much
decorousness we could expect from Fox if such a scandal were discovered
in Obama’s past.
But it’s not really surprising that
the right, usually so dismissive of prejudice against
African-Americans, has been so quick to cry racism. The modern
conservative movement emerged in large part in opposition to the civil
rights revolution, which caused Dixiecrats to flee to the GOP en masse.
Even the Christian right began with racial grievance; as the evangelical
Columbia professor Randall Balmer showed in his 2006 book, Thy Kingdom Come,
the religious right was born out of the backlash against the IRS’s 1975
decision to revoke Bob Jones University’s tax-exempt status because of
its prohibition on interracial dating. In his 1996 book Active Faith,
Ralph Reed acknowledged that his movement was on the wrong side of the
fight for civil rights, writing, “The white evangelical church carries a
shameful legacy of racism and the historical baggage of indifference to
the most central struggle for social justice in this century, a legacy
that is only now being wiped clean by the sanctifying work of repentance
and racial reconciliation.”
As Reed’s word suggest, many on the
right badly wants to be rid of this stain on their history. It’s a sign
of progress that almost everyone in American public life considers
racism to be shameful. At the same time, most conservatives remain
opposed to policies designed to remedy the effects of past
discrimination, and the movement is largely uncomfortable with the
multicultural transformation of the United States. They want to wrap
themselves in the now-unquestioned moral legitimacy of the civil rights
movement without actually backing the movement’s goals. Hence Glenn
Beck’s rally at the Washington Mall on the anniversary of Martin Luther
King’s “I Have a Dream" speech, or the parade of white congressmen who
lined up to proclaim that they were saving black babies by trying to
defund Planned Parenthood earlier this year.
It’s not really surprising that the right, usually so dismissive of prejudice against African-Americans, has been so quick to cry racism. The modern conservative movement emerged in large part in opposition to the civil rights revolution.
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