Republicans and Race

Our national schizophrenia about race is never so blatant than when a columnist wonders what Republicans should do to attract African American voters to the “R” column.

For Clarence Page the answer is simple. Republicans should offer race-conscious policy to blacks.

For instance, he commends former Congressman Jack Kemp for an article in Human Events in which he recommends trolling for black votes by

extending all of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, parts of which are set to expire next year, and "by extending the voting franchise to the residents of District of Columbia

But then Page explains why blacks started voting for Democrats in the first place.

Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater's opposition to that Civil Rights Act turned black voters heavily in favor of Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and simultaneously lost Southern white voters to Johnson's party, as Johnson predicted it would. To black voters, the act of sacrificing political capital is true heroism, especially on behalf of equal rights.

Barry Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act because he thought it was racist. The reward for his principled stand was to be tarred as a racist.

As it turned out, of course, Goldwater was right. Despite the noble intentions of 1964 the Civil Rights Act was used to reinject race and quotas into American politics and poison race relations ever since.

If blacks believe in “equal rights” then by all rights they should oppose the extension of the Voting Rights Act, which had a race-conscious rationale of supervising the election laws of southern states to make sure that they didn’t discriminate against blacks. Maybe a temporary race-conscious act was necessary forty years ago to crack the whip over southern states, but in 2006?

The problem with Republicans is that they persist in looking at Americans as Americans, not as race victims. African Americans won’t start voting Republican until they stop seeing everything through the lens of race.

The uncomfortable fact is that the name for a person whose politics is mostly determined by race is: Racist.