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| Ku Klux Klan members supporting Barry Goldwater’s campaign for the presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention, San Francisco, California, as an African American man pushes signs back. 1964 July 12. (Library of Congress) |
An interesting historical perspective on the GOP's resistance to cities and its soured relationship with African-Americans , via Hip Hop Republican.
Since the late Sixties conservative politicians have been busy retrofitting older Republican themes to make them fit into an increasingly sophisticated racist agenda. Every traditional element of the party has been reshaped by the demands of the Southern Strategy. Whatever cannot be fashioned around white cultural appeals, like the party’s old urban agenda and its appeal to women, has simply been jettisoned.
Fiscal responsibility has morphed into endless tax cuts. Commercial priorities have been entirely reduced to a program aimed at crippling federal authority. The Republican “traditional values” agenda has been re-imagined as an alternative explanation for the economic suffering of oppressed minorities.
Under the friendly green skies of the conservative alternate universe, racism ceased to exist one afternoon in 1964 when President Johnson signed a certain (ill-advised, according to some) law. Since that afternoon all subsequent inequality between whites and minority groups can conveniently be traced to their own sexual immorality, government dependence, and impiety. As a consequence, any and every reference to continuing racism is itself racism.
Read complete article here
