Racist rhetoric, not brainwashing drives African Americans from GOP

Facebook has expanded the possibilities of social connections and allowed Internet users to connect with people they may never have the chance to run into in real life.

In theory, this is good because people get to exchange ideas which helps expand their knowledge. However in recent years, I have taken to being careful about the type of people I befriend on Facebook. If I see someone is a follower of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, I do not friend them. I do not want to engage in endless arguments with people whose views are diametrically opposed to mine.

And that is what makes the Patch experiment interesting. Evidently, there are many people on Patch whose views are very different from mine, and it's interesting engaging in intellectual discussion with them. Sometimes it's exhausting because many conservatives simply repeat the half truths and bald-faced lies churned out by the Right-Wing Noise machine.  

For example, there is no overall liberal media bias. The American media is owned by corporations, who generally don't push a liberal agenda. Just look how the supposed liberal media fought against the Iraq War. Oh, wait, actually they supported the Iraq War en masse. In fact, Phil Donahue was fired from the then conservative MSNBC for his strident criticism of the Iraq war. And more recently, it took the allegedly "liberal media" more than two weeks to cover the Occupy Wall Street movement, because it didn't fit into their pro-corporate agenda. Social media fans learned of the movement in real time as protestors bypassed the old media dinosaur by posting updates directly to Facebook and Twitter.

It is fairly easy to predict what people on the right will say by following their opinion leaders. Limbaugh calls First Lady Michelle Obama "Mooshelle," a reference to her weight, and now this sexist slur has appeared on right-wing web sites.

The latest tactic is calling any person who dares to point out some of this country's glaring racial inequalities a racist. This is a preemptive strike. If a left-wing critic dares to point out how the GOP has been pandering to white racial fears for the last 40 years, he is accused of playing the race card. Now, it's evident the people on the right who hurl this accusation have no idea what the term racist means. This has been reinforced by some of the comments I have seen on Patch. But just because a person talks or writes about racism, it doesn't mean he is a racist. 

According to dictorinary.com, the word racist has two definitions: "1.The belief that races have distinctive cultural characteristics determined by hereditary factors and that this endows some races with an intrinsic superiority over others.  2. abusive or aggressive behavior towards members of another race on the basis of such a belief." Now if you study these two definitions, it is clear that there are elements of the right wing who harbor racist views.

Here is some evidence:

• If you want to understand how some people truly feel about black people, or other people of color, just take a look at the comment section of web sites like FOX News Nation or Biggovernment.com. A recent story on FOX News Nation about Somalia, had commenter's referring to the nation as "Niggerdishu." These comment sections are often so offensive they have to be scrubbed from the sites, although they are still captured by web sites like News Hounds.
• Michelle Obama has been subject to a shocking amount of abuse from the right and is regularly compared to a monkey, gorilla and even Chewbacca. Colorado talk show host Jimmy Lakey recently dedicated a segment to comparing the First Lady to Chewbacca, the big hairy character from "Star Wars." He also said the First Lady looked like something from "The Planet of the Apes" movie. President Barack Obama has also been compared to a monkey on several occasions. There is a long history of comparing black people to animals, insinuating they are subhuman. I find it hard to believe how anyone does not see how this is offensive.
• Rush Limbaugh and FOX News also practice a new more opaque form of racism. Many conservatives seem to think if a person doesn't use the n-word, they are not racist. However Limbaugh and the commentators on FOX are not that blatant, but they use a series of disparaging comments to demean blacks, Latinos and now Muslims and Arabs. Limbaugh has a long history of race baiting including once saying that he almost mistook Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa for the "shoe shine boy." He also once said that the NFL looked like the "Bloods and Crips," and he also once told an African American caller to take "the bone out of his nose." There are many more comments like this, but keeping up with Limbaugh's slurs is a full-time job, I'll leave that to Media Matters.
• Eric Bolling, who seems to be striving to replace Glenn Beck as offender-in-chief on FOX News, is also quickly developing a hit list of offensive comments. A few months ago, Bolling said Obama should have been dealing with the tornado victims instead of "drinking 40s." (He was actually pictured drinking Guinness while he was in Ireland.) Now anyone familiar with urban culture realizes that 40-ounce malt liquor is associated with inner city black people. And when Obama hosted Gabon President Ali Bongo at the White House, Bolling accused him of having "hoods in the hizzy," and featured a graphic of Bongo with a gleaming gold tooth. After that last stunt, Bolling was forced to issue a hurried apology. 
• Recently Chris Wallace, who was once a decent journalist, had the gall to ask 65-year-old presidential candidate Herman Cain, if he would update "Hail to the Chief" with hip hop. If Wallace had half a brain, he would know that people from Cain's generation despise hip hop as much as the average FOX viewer. According to Nielsen, FOX's viewership is 90 percent white.

I just wonder how people on the right can continue to be surprised while the majority of black people shun the modern-day Republican party. When Cain accuses the black community of being brainwashed, it is not only insulting; it also absolves the right wing of any responsibility. If blacks and Latinos are turned off by the Republican party, it's not because they are brainwashed, it because of the rhetoric coming from people like Limbaugh and Bolling.