"If anybody is racist, it's the Democratic Party!"  This week at a meeting of the Clear Water, Texas chapter of the Tea Party, a conservative activist attempted to stake out the Republican Party as the home of the real hope for African Americans.  Exhorting the crowd to pull out their Smart Phones and bookmark his website RagingElephants.org, Apostle Claver Kamau-Imani informed ecstatic attendees that "the vast majority of them folks of color" support the Tea Party.  "We've done the polling on a national scale," he said, not specifying who conducted the poll he cites.  "Over 80% of those folks...agree with us!"  Kamau-Imani explained why. 

According to him, black people in this country are finally starting to realize that Democrats are “the party of slavery”, and Republicans are “the party of emancipation”.  One might assume he was speaking metaphorically.  There are black voters who have left the Democratic Party, reportedly in part because they believe that liberal policies supporting federal funding for social programs encourage dependency and are not in the best interest of black Americans.  They believe that it is the Republican approach, with an emphasis on economic growth, tax incentives and deregulation that will do more to encourage expansion, create jobs, and help black small business owners and others.  Those voters are being courted by the Tea Party, and by Republican Presidential hopeful Herman Cain, who spoke later in the same program. 

The Republican Party, said Kamau-Imani, is the party that is going to "set the captives free!"  But interestingly, when he went from the metaphorical to the literal to support his claim, he steered clear of a look at the current political ideologies of each party, and relied on ill-conceived emotional references to the Democratic Party of the Old South as far back as antebellum times.

Getting to specifics, the charismatic speaker explained that “If anybody is a racist, it's the Democratic Party that's the racist!  The party of the Ku Klux Klan!  The party of Jim Crow!  The party of Bull Conner, the party of segregation!”

Nimbly jumping back to the present, somehow managing not to trip on roughly forty years of colossal evolution in the philosophies of the two parties, Kamau-Imani insisted, "They're the racists, not us!  We're their friends!  We're the emancipators! We're the liberators!  We're their friends!"  Perhaps in a half-hearted attempt to move from the historical to the immediate, Kamau-Imani added the sound-bite, "We're the ones that believe in freedom!"

Kamau-Imani is technically correct, of course, as far as he goes.  Bull Conner, the infamous Birmingham lawman known for turning water-hoses and attack dogs on Civil Rights demonstrators. was a registered Democrat, and the party was famously pro-slavery before the Civil War, and fought integration for decades.  But if you're going to make references to that period as though it defines what the Democratic Party stands for today, you should take a look at the way both parties developed, shifted, and evolved.  And if you want to recruit black voters by claiming the platform of the early Republican Party, it would be more candid to describe all of its planks.  After all, it was those wild-eyed, tax-and-spend Whigs who eventually formed the Republican Party, and those guys were pretty loose with the federal dollars when it came to propping up farms, setting up schools and building railroads across the frontier.

Throughout our country’s history, the political parties have morphed, splintered, and adjusted to reflect new realities.  We have only consistently seen the current configuration of mostly-liberal Democrats and mostly-conservative Republicans since around the time of Kennedy and Johnson, and even since then there have been tremendous changes.  We have seen both Nixon and Reagan successfully court moderate Democrats.  We’ve seen Republicans occasionally wooed by Democratic plans to prioritize welfare reform, deficit reduction, and military strength.  And we’ve seen extremist wings of both parties come to greater prominence and influence.

Many would argue, however, that measurable, society-wide, legal progress - in justice and economic opportunity - didn’t begin to occur for black Americans until the 1960's, under Democratic control of the White House and Congress.  In terms of proactive political involvement and decisive party leadership, of the two parties it has been the Democrats that have fought for things like anti-discrimination laws; equal opportunity in housing, education, and employment; improved access to the ballot; and state-sponsored programs to improve the lives of minority youth.  Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and ushered in the era of the Great Society, which, until it was dismantled year after year by Republican Presidents, dramatically reduced poverty, a problem disproportionately affecting blacks.  It took a Democratic majority in Congress at that time to see these policies through.  Countless lives were changed for the better with the implementation of affordable housing programs and school lunch programs, the expansion of public transportation, and the establishment of Medicare and Medicaid.

If Republicans think this approach to addressing the needs of black voters is the wrong way to go, they need to submit new ideas honestly and argue for them rationally.  If Herman Cain believes, as he has said, that race no longer holds anyone back in this country, and that he himself never benefited from advances made (by Democrats) in the last half-century, let him explain exactly how that transpired, and how Republican policies better ensure success.  More power to him if he can convince black voters things will work out well for them if only they will start voting Republican. 

If what Kamau-Imani means is that there are good reasons for African Americans to vote Republican now, that’s what he should say.  He is free to make that case.  Contemporary Republicans are in their rights to promote fiscal conservatism as a means of attracting black entrepreneurs, or promote their social values to conservative black religious communities. They won’t fool many with their attempt to convince voters that the late-model GOP has any claim on the progress that has been made on race in this country.  But if they want to take the lead going forward, they should state the case on its merits, not try to mislead voters with false comparisons between modern-day Democrats and Old South Dixecrats, with their lynch mobs and state-condoned segregation.

I stumbled across the clip below late yesterday, and it stayed with me all night.  I woke up and watched it again to make sure it wasn't a bad dream.  What bothers me so much about it is the forthrightness of these people's prejudices, and the unapologetic effort of this government official to encourage them.  The clip encapsulates the ugly mythologies and willful ignorance that define the conservative side of the class war.  


It's a video clip of NC Speaker of the House Thom Tillis, (R-Mecklenburg County) speaking recently to supporters, advocating for entitlement reform.  

On its face, reform is a worthwhile endeavor.  While I oppose Tillis' proposals for drug-testing of people on welfare, and required volunteer work for people on unemployment, he has every right to suggest policy changes and make a case for them.  He also has a right to his own philosophies about what it means to be on public assistance.  I appreciate his... clarity about the fact that he thinks there is one type of person on assistance who is "respectable" and one type who isn't.  The former, according to Tillis, would be a woman in a wheelchair with cerebral palsy.  The latter would be a woman "who has chosen to have 3 or 4 kids out-of-wedlock."   Respectability is subjective, and as voters, we do want to hear such sentiments stated, loud and clear.  In his position, Tillis has a responsibility to form opinions about government provision of welfare, officially called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF).  While I find his opinion to be simplistic and callous, at least his honesty lets me know where he stands.

And he is honest.  According to Tillis, what we have to do is find a way to divide and conquer the people who are on assistance.  We have to show respect for that woman who has cerebral palsy, and had no choice in her condition - that needs help, and that we should help - and we need to get those folks to look down at these people who choose to get into a condition that makes them dependent on the government.  And say: at some point, you're on your own.  We may end up taking care of those babies, but we're not going to take care of you.

Wait, wait.  Hold on.  I'm being unfair to Tillis; I've put his ideas into such crude and judgmental terms that I'm bordering on being disrespectful   No public servant could be that obtuse about the complexities of poverty and public assistance.  That's probably not exactly what he meant, and I shouldn't put words in his mouth.  Let me go back and listen again, and transcribe exactly what Tillis said, word for word.  Then you can compare it to what I wrote above.  

According to Tillis, "what we have to do is find a way to divide and conquer the people who are on assistance.  We have to show respect for that woman who has cerebral palsy, and had no choice in her condition - that needs help, and that we should help - and we need to get those folks to look down at these people who choose to get into a condition that makes them dependent on the government.  And say: at some point, you're on your own.  We may end up taking care of those babies, but we're not going to take care of you." 

Okay, so I was quoting him directly.  But again, as unsettling as this is to listen to, Tillis has a right to a point of view.  

What he doesn't have a right to do though, is lie, through statement or omission.  He doesn't have a right to knowingly exploit the trust of his constituents and assist them in maintaining an untrue vision. 

Tillis has been a North Carolina State Legislator for over five years.  He has claimed entitlement reform as a personal cause.  It's perplexing then when he demonstrates less than a layperson's understanding of the difference between disability, welfare or unemployment.  But much more disturbing is observing him moving artfully, deceitfully, from presenting proposals and points of view to suggesting and reinforcing falsehoods.  Tillis cannot have been a legislator this long, identifying himself as an advocate for change on this very issue, without knowing the basic facts about our state's version of TANF; NC Work First.  It would be inexcusable for him to be this ill-informed about the program, and unconscionable for him to be this proactively misleading about it, so there is no acceptable explanation for what he presents here.  

The myth of the able-bodied young woman hanging out on welfare, answering to no one, having more babies to increase her benefits was never realistic, but it became less than possible nearly two decades ago.  Massive federal welfare reform laws were signed into effect in the mid-nineties by President Bill Clinton.  The most important aspect of this reform was to solidify work requirements and establish stricter time limits.

Tillis knows this.

While the work requirements and some other aspects are defined at the federal level, a lot of responsibility for program design and administration was turned over to the states.  So it's possible that somewhere in the country, there is a state that has found a way to be more lenient in its application of federal standards.  Considering the reforms were expressly designed to rectify weaknesses in the welfare system that seemed to encourage generational poverty, it's unlikely.  And certainly in NC, since well before Speaker Tillis was elected, these programs were transformed into time-limited, employment-focused programs, providing subsistence-level monies, requiring participation in job training and budgeting counseling, with a focus on moving towards independence, and a clock on eligibility that is not restarted with the addition of new family members.  No one is bringing darling little bundles of dollar signs home from the hospital.  A newborn baby can add roughly $90 a month to benefits, which are calculated partly by family size, but that amount only offsets the additional expenses a baby brings.  In most cases, benefits will still remain under $1000 a month.

Tillis knows this.

So when one gentleman in Tillis's audience raises his hand to suggest that there should be some modicum of follow-up on the county level when people are given government money, some kind of system in which government officials could at least take a look at beneficiaries, and ask them some questions from time to time, Tillis knows but does not say that in fact, NC Work First goes much further than that.  Program oversight is very structured and strict.  It relies on much more than a once-over by staff to assess whether beneficiaries are keeping their nails clean and their shirts ironed.  The gentleman with the concern said, "The county - DSS in each county - ought to be required to bring the people in periodically and see what they're doing and question them, see if they're trying to find a job, what kind of shape they're in.  You can look at somebody and find out a lot about them."  Tillis's inscrutable response; "I don't understand it... everybody says it's because they're all looking for jobs.  Folks..." whereupon he launches into a bizarre proposition that people on unemployment have plenty of time on their hands and ought to be required to do 15 hours of community service a week.  

At the end of the clip, there is a moment of humor for the discerning viewer as Tillis squirms away from the suggestion by another audience member that all state employees, (which would include Tillis) be drug-tested.  But most of it is grim, as this state representative uses populist fabrication to encourage class distrust.  Does Thom Tillis want to solve problems in North Carolina?  Does he even misguidedly want to "create a sense of responsibility and obligation on the part of people receiving welfare" as he says at one point, or does he just want to push buttons and inflame people, who will then look at him as a hero?  

You be the judge.