Salon: “Democrats are the real racists!”

Friday, Jul 10, 2015 12:55 PM EST

“Democrats are the real racists!” Inside the GOP’s pathetic & insulting response to charges of bigotry

If you're a Republican, how exactly do you explain away Donald Trump's hideous comments about Mexicans?

If there is a more fatuous right wing trope than “Martin Luther King was a Republican” it has to be the utterly nonsensical line that Democrats are the true racists because they were the southern party during Jim Crow. Inevitably, in any discussion of race, some smart-aleck troll smugly interjects the irrelevant fact that the departed Democratic Senator Robert Byrd was a member of the KKK and some very clever boy or girl shares the astonishingly obvious fact that Republican Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. Case closed, Democrats are the racists and the Republicans are the African Americans’ true allies.

I’m not going to go over the same tired ground that hundreds of others have covered to refute this foolishness. Even the trolls know that many millions of people who used to vote for Democrats switched parties after the various civil rights acts were passed in the ’60s under a Democratic majority. While they deny there was ever such a thing as the “Southern Strategy,” and pretend that racist appeals for votes never happened, that’s also a documented fact and they know that too.

But just because conservatives are clearly playing games, it doesn’t lessen the insult to African Americans when they make these inane claims. After all, if Democrats are the “real racists,” then 95 percent are African Americans must be very dumb indeed.

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Whether they like it or not, it is a historical fact that many people who were once members of the Democratic Party switched their affiliation to the GOP when the Democrats voted for civil rights legislation and Democratic presidents signed it. This is not a debatable point. That so many Republicans choose to pretend this isn’t so is either a sign that they are arguing in bad faith or they are living in denial. Either way, it won’t solve their problem: they just have no idea what to do about all the resentful white voters they’ve been opportunistically coaxing into their coalition for the last few decades. They can try to prevent people from voting and they can pretend that “illegal immigrants” are stealing elections. But it won’t change the fundamental reality that they are on the wrong side of history and have been for a very long time.

Link: http://www.salon.com/2015/07/10/democrats_are_the_real_racists_inside_the_gops_pathetic_insulting_response_to_charges_of_bigotry/

Note: The full title of this article would not fit - so I had to shorten it.