A call to racists: come join the Democratic party

Let's put aside the "flag flap" for a moment (or maybe forever).

I'm interested in this idea of welcoming racists into our party. I've been thinking about it all day, and I think it's a good idea.

Dean is right about one thing, working class people, white, black or whatever, have a lot in common, especially when it comes to political self-interest. But the racial divides in the south have led us to viewing "those guys" (poor or lower middle class working whites in the south, whether they have a pickup truck, or a confederate flag, or a refrigerator and sofa on their porch or not) as somehow irredeemably evil, part of some enemy army.

But they aren't. They are certainly in need of some kind of redemption. They don't seem to be getting it from their fundamentalist churches (which you would think should be the BEST place for them to learn tolerance), and they sure as hell are never going to get it from the GOP. Maybe if we could make our tent truly big and welcome them in, they could learn something from us. Maybe some of those hatreds and prejudices could be broken down.

I'd rather see these people changed than continually segregated into an increasingly poor, increasingly well-armed and increasingly frustrated subculture of America. The rethugs think they can count on the votes of this constituency, based primarily on gun rights issues, and also on pro-life issues. We'll never win over the hard-core right-to-lifers; those votes I'm willing to concede. But a lot of these people who are NOT single-issue voters simply need to understand the economic reality imposed on them by GOP policies. If they understand this, they will likely want to turn somewhere else. If they turn to US, I believe we would be wise to welcome them. Maybe in that way we can start being part of the solution to a problem that clearly frustrates and angers all of us.

how do you welcome racists?

It's more that we have to stop demonizing them. These are Americans. Granted, they are Americans that have some seriously fucked-up ideas about at least one major human issue. But if you take that out of the equation, we might find that we have a lot more in common with them than we assume.

It's a matter of starting a dialogue. We talk about how poor whites who choose the military as a last-ditch career move end up cannon fodder for the BFEE's oil invasion. We talk about how they can't afford to take their kids to the doctor and how the GOP is doing NOTHING to solve that. We talk about loss of jobs. We talk about the looting of social security. We talk about the loss of services for the poor. These things matter to them, just as they matter to all of us, even if for different reasons.

Maybe, in the course of that dialogue, WE start looking less like the enemy to THEM. Maybe, somewhere along the line, one of them starts thinking, "You know, that colored fella ain't so bad." Maybe they start to see the world a little less in black and white. Because this is at the heart of the problem. We have Dems like Sharpton making statements that boil down to, "We must hate racists." Racists make statements that boil down to, "We must hate niggers." Somewhere along the line, the necessity to hate other people and reject them outright must stop. It's got to end. We need to talk. But we can't talk about race FIRST, because there is no context at present for dialogue, there is only hatred.

I just know that standing across a great divide from these people and screaming about how bad they are isn't changing them. They aren't moving out of the USA as far as I can tell, they're here to stay. We have to live along side them. Wouldn't it make sense to try to help them change?

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I suspect some of them are even among those clamoring that "Dean is a racist." To pretend that we don't have a party that includes racists already as well as anti-gay rights members is absurd.

If I remember correctly Clinton signed the defense of Marriage Act. I think maybe we should work on getting the beam out of our own eye before working on the mote in other's eyes.

Some people are bigots - various degrees of Archie Bunker, and then there are guys like the James Byrd killers.

There are white people who are Dems who do not totally embrace black people or who are scared of them (my parents used to be that way), but they learned by exposure and gentle urging from me.