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Deliberate Oversight
Ignoring Black Republicans
By Daniel Muniz
Suppose a black candidate who was running for national office was
slammed by racial slurs and epithets. Imagine the kind of national
uproar that would reverberate in the media. Imagine the kind of
moral outrage that would fill up news shows and newspapers across
the country.
And then imagine if that black candidate was a Republican.
Oh well. There goes the uproar and the moral outrage.
The press doesn’t seem to care very much about what happens to black
Republicans. And it is irrelevant if it is Democrats who are using
the racial slurs and demagoguery because the media does not cover
such events regardless of how outrageous they are.
Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele, a conservative African-American
Republican, ran a serious campaign for the senate seat being
vacated by retiring Democratic U.S. Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes. Many
Maryland Democrats wasted no time in using inflammatory and
incendiary racial attacks against Steele such as pelting him with
Oreo cookies during a campaign appearance and publicly calling him
an “Uncle Tom”.
Even local elected officials in Maryland have no qualms about the campaign
getting dirty. Sen. Lisa A. Gladden, a black Baltimore Democrat
said:
"Party trumps race,
especially on the national level… It's democracy, perhaps at its
worst, but it is democracy."
I wonder if she would continue to feel so sanguine if a white
Republican politician had used similar tactics on her? And how would
the media react?
Without fear of any consequences from the press, Democrats can
really do whatever they want in this kind of environment while
Republicans have to be careful with everything that they say and do.
However, to give credit to where credit is due, Kweisi Mfume, a
former House Representative and Democratic primary candidate for the same
senate seat publicly condemned this obvious double standard.
Steele has had to endure such racial rhetoric before. In 2001 when
Steele headed the state Republican Party, Senate President
Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. called him an "Uncle Tom" and later
apologized for the remark.
The “reverse-racism” in Maryland is ugly and despicable but what
bothers me the most is that nobody in the media cares about it. This
shameful behavior has only received scant national attention from
the press and its coverage quickly disappeared. If things were the
other way around, the media would have saturated the country with
non-stop exposure as it has done in the past with Trent Lott, Bill
Bennett, and others.
Interestingly, the press also ignores truly incredible triumphs by
black Republicans.
In 2002, Texans elected Michael L. Williams, Dale Wainwright, and
Wallace Jefferson. Nobody outside of Texas has probably ever heard
of those names and the coverage within Texas was scant at best.
Wainwright, a state district judge, was elected to the Texas Supreme
Court. And so was Wallace Jefferson (who also made Texas history in
September 14, 2004 as the first African American Chief Justice of
the Texas Supreme Court). Williams, chairman of the Texas Railroad
Commission (TRC), was re-elected as a TRC commissioner
Overnight, black Republicans in Texas represented ten percent of the
state's major elected offices.
But still, nobody cared.
Those were monumental achievements accomplished by black Republicans
but they got absolutely no national coverage and almost no local
attention. If it was the other way around, like if they were black
Democrats in a Southern state, the news wires would have been beside
themselves by incessantly publishing stories about them.
Black Republicans have accomplished a lot in the Republican Party.
It is unfortunate that the press doesn’t recognize such feats
or provide the same kind of coverage that they give to their
Democratic counterparts. But in a way, perhaps that is an
accomplishment in of itself. Instead of a focus being centered on
race, for black Republicans it is about character, talent, and
qualifications. And that is how it should have always been.
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