[By: Dr. Boyce Watkins]
Herman Cain Plays the Race Card Against Barack Obama: It appears that Herman Cain, who is expected to be a black presidential candidate, has the race card locked and loaded for his sprint toward the White House.

Recently, Cain was asked about race during a New Hampshire campaign speech. When asked about this controversial topic, Cain had this to say:

“Now people are over this first black president thing,” he said. “But there are some people who will say, ‘I’m not going to vote for another black guy because this one didn’t work out. And my response is, ‘Well, what about those 43 white guys you put in there? How did they work out? Don’t condemn me because the first black one was bad.”

There was another interesting episode when Cain was asked on his radio show why he speaks so highly of the founding fathers, even though they owned slaves.

“They set the bar high when they said all men were created equal,” Cain said. “They could have set it where they were that day. They set it high so this nation could work up to that ideal.”

Herman Cain — A ‘Butt-Licking’ Uncle Tom

One thing that people can say about Herman Cain is that he was a successful businessman. As the CEO and part owner of Godfather’s Pizza, Cain has accumulated enough wealth and success to consider himself to be a serious candidate for the presidency. With that said, Cain also has a set of views that are reflective of the diversity of opinions within the African-American community, presenting an interesting contrast to those who want to put all black people into a nice, neat, little “liberal” box.

Let’s be clear, I don’t agree with Herman Cain. I have a difficult time appreciating any African American who panders for votes by effectively saying, “I stand with you in your disdain for the way black people behave. I assure you that I’m different from the rest of them.”

Such a divide-and-conquer political strategy has been used since we had the house negro/field negro divide during slavery (there is no faster route to the top of the political heap than by becoming a black Republican). Rather than using hatred toward President Obama as a weapon for his own political advancement, Cain might be more respectable if he simply stood on his own credentials (as his fellow conservative Colin Powell might do). Being a black conservative presidential candidate doesn’t mean you have to disrespect the first black president.

With that said, many of Cain’s views reflect a peculiar paradox within the black community: the fact that black people are actually incredibly conservative. When it comes to views on gay marriage, abortion, the separation of church and state, etc., African Americans have quite a few viewpoints that align more closely with the Republican right than with liberals who’ve come to “save us.” The problem for Republicans, however, is that they insist on advocating for programs that hurt the poor, which has a disproportionate impact on the African-American community. Their opposition to Affirmative Action and constant attacks on President Obama don’t help their cause very much either.

While the existence of men like Herman Cain represents a stomach-churning example of how the disease of racism continues to affect our society, the truth is that Cain also represents the very best of what America can possibly be. I won’t vote for Herman Cain, but I am glad that there are black politicians who allow African Americans to jump outside of predefined stereotypes given to us by the media and our political leaders. There’s no one way to be black, and both Herman Cain and President Obama reflect the diversity of the black experience in America.

House Negroes | Butt-Licking Uncle-Toms

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The Grio: Lawsuits contesting President Obama’s birthplace have been routinely dismissed. The Supreme Court has declined to take up the issue. Hawaiian state officials have repeatedly offered to make copies of Obama’s birth certificate available (now for a fee). And mainstream GOP officials, including defrocked Republican National Committee Chair Michael Steele called the issue a “distraction.”

Yet the so-called “birther movement“, far from receding into the woodwork as the loony obsession of assorted kooks, cranks, and zanies, is still very much alive and well. A recent Public Policy Polling survey found that a slight majority of likely Republican primary voters think Obama was born outside the U.S. That number that has jumped during the past two years.

Why the continuing obsession with this nutty issue?

The answer is simple: to politically smear Obama. With the 2012 presidential elections gathering steam, the issue will loom even bigger since any GOP candidate will have to either keep silent on the issue, or at least give due deference to the movement. But that’s been the case all along. While GOP officials publicly disavow the birthers, they tacitly applaud them. [ READ MORE ]

Meanwhile, the billionaire Koch Brothers, the principle sponsors of the “tea-bagging movement” — are gearing for the 2012, and plan to spend big. They will contribute and steer a total of $88 million to conservative causes during the 2012 election cycle, according to sources, funding a new voter micro-targeting initiative, grassroots organizing efforts and television advertising campaigns.

Charles and David Koch are worth a reported $21.5 billion each, thanks to their stakes in Koch Industries, their privately owned oil, chemical and consumer products company. [ READ MORE ]

All in all, Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” — a cynical racial scheme that plays “White Fears” to the hilt, is alive and well in 2011. It has served Republicans well over the years.

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References:
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•  Tea Party Racists and the Lynching of President Obama

•  The Last Gasp of Aging White Power: But Time Is Not on Your Side

•  The ‘White American Brain’ Finally Goes Haywire in Spectacular Fashion

•  The Coming Obama Reich: 10 Things That Terrify Right-Wingers

•  What The Tea Partiers Really Want: A Whites ONLY Country …’Dang It!’

•  The Right’s Search For a Black Racist.

•  Fear of An Intelligent Black Man — White Intimidation By Black Male Intelligence Still Exists To This Day

•  Republicans and the Art of Racism: Obama is Dealing With an Aggressive Covert and Fascist Operation in Congress, in The Media and On The Streets

•  Rise of The ‘Angry White Male’: Desperate & Insecure Whites See Years of Unfettered Privilege Slipping Away

•  The Tea-Bag “Terrorist” Suckers Are The New “White Power Movement“

•  Disguising Hate as Heritage: The Neo-Confederate Tradition Of Refighting The Civil War

•  An Anatomy of Projected Racism

•  Images of Right-Wing Republican Terrorism in America

•  Living Under Obama: White Male ‘Conservative’ Victimhood and The New Realities of ‘Black Privilege’

•  The Pathology of White Privilege: What If The Tea Party ‘Tea-Baggers’ Were Black?

•  The ‘Destroy Obama’ Game Plan: A Single-Minded and Vicious Enemy Stalks The Democratic President

•  On Negrophobia: Psychoneurotic Obstacles to Black Autonomy (or Why I just love Michael Jackson)

•  The Politics of Mosques and Qurans Show America Tto Be in The Worst Spasm of Paranoia and Bigotry Since The Cold War.

•  Fanning Fears of Muslims Has Never Made Better — Or More Cynical — Political Sense. — Until the advent of the Obama presidency, Republicans had no reason to scapegoat Muslimsor demonize Islam — and indeed, they could not have inflamed those prejudices without damaging their own leaders, especially George W. Bush. The political and cultural messaging that Republicans and conservatives accepted quietly from Bush is today considered tantamount to treason when promoted by Obama.

•  The Great ‘Tea-Party’ Fear: Pollution of The White ‘Stock’ — The Strange Sexual Obsessions Driving the Tea Party Movement: The great white fear of interracial “pollution” has found its most acute expression with Obama as president. He is the offspring of not simply an interracial relationship, but an international coupling as well. He is the child of 21st century globalization, the symbolic representation of a hope for a world without borders, without race prejudice, without white privilege. — [ READ MORE ]

•  America Just Can’t Deal With Reality Any More.

•  The Real ‘Un-Americans’ and Dinesh D’Souza’s ‘Summa Idiotica’.

•  White Civil-War: The Intra-Racial Struggle Over America’s National Identity and Belonging.

•  NAACP Report Ties Tea Party to Militia and Racist Republican Groups; Tea-Bagger Group Calls Obama ‘Angel of Death’.

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   [ By: Chauncey DeVega ]
Black History Month is Herman Cain Playing the Race Minstrel for CPAC — In the immortal words of Megatron in Transformers: The Movie, Herman Cain’s speech at CPAC really is bad comedy. As you know, I find black garbage pail kids (black conservatives) fascinating — not because of what they believe, but rather because of how they entertain and perform for their White Conservative masters.

When race minstrelsy was America’s most popular form of mass entertainment, black actors would often have to pretend to be white men, who then in turn would put on the cork to play the role of the “black” coon, Sambo, or Jumping Jim Crow. Adding insult to injury, in a truly perverse and twisted example of the power of American white supremacy black vaudevillians would often pretend to be white in order to denigrate black people for the pleasures of the white gaze.

Herman Cain at CPAC

Minstrel Show

Herman Cain–an ironic name if ever, and one more suited to a tragic figure in a Harlem Renaissance era novella–is not “blackening twice” as some race minstrels chose to do.

[ Unfortunately, the attendees at CPAC are not the butt of some type of joke where the white man wearing the cork is really a black man in secret. ]

Instead, Herman Cain’s shtick is a version of race minstrelsy where he performs “authentic negritude” as wish fulfillment for White Conservative fantasies. Like the fountain at Lourdes, Cain in his designated role as black Conservative mascot, absolves the White racial reactionaries at CPAC of their sins. This is a refined performance that Black Conservatives have perfected over many decades and centuries of practice.

Let’s consider the routine. First, Cain enters the stage to Motown music. Then Cain feigns swimming after rolling up his sleeves to show them his black skin and how he is a hardworking negro (not like those other ones). Cain bellows in a preacher affected voice and channels the folksy negro down home accent of his late grandpappy. In the money shot, Cain gives the obligatory “black folks who are not Republicans are on the plantation” speech to the joyous applause of his White benefactors. And he doubles down by legitimating any opposition to President Barack Obama as virtuous and patriotic regardless of the bigoted well-springs from which it may flow.

In total, CPAC is a carnival and a roadshow for reactionary Conservatives. It is only fitting that in the great tradition of the freak show, the human zoo, the boardwalk, and the great midway world’s fairs of the 19th and 20th centuries, that there is a Borneo man, a Venus Hottentot or a tribe of cannibals from deepest darkest Africa or Papua New Guinea on display. For CPAC and the White Conservative imagination, Herman Cain and his black and brown kin are that featured attraction.

We always need a monkey in the window, for he/she reminds us of our humanity while simultaneously reinforcing a sense of our own superiority.

Sadly, there are always folks who are willing to play that role because it pays so well.

Feeding The Animals: Re-visiting The ‘Canine‘ CPAC Carnival

References:

UPDATE:
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Why I Stand By My Criticism of Herman Cain — Even As Right-Wingers Attack Me: Chauncey DeVega responds to attacks from Breitbart and other right-wingers for his criticism of conservative presidential hopeful Herman Cain.
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Rev. Al Sharpton talks about Rush Limbaugh’s latest attack on the Obama administration using a Photoshopped image of Mount Rushmore and calling it “graffiti on the walls of American history.”

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Limbaugh defends his comment that Obama admin is “graffiti“: “Graffiti is an art form,” asks “what’s wrong with gangs?”

Gingrich: Dems haven’t attacked GOP on racism “because it was so patently stupid when you had [UNCLE TOM] Michael Steele as the chairman”

NOTES: Limbaugh’s sexism backfires spectacularly — On November 15, 2010, Rush Limbaugh’s storied history of sexism on his radio show took a strange turn today. Rush, who regularly refers to feminists as “feminazis” and female news anchors are “infobabes,” tore into “stupid babe” Sasha Abramsky of Salon.com for penning an article about President Obama that Rush did not like. [ CONTINUE READING ]

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Huffington Post: Black members of the tea party movement last Wednesday rejected charges that the group’s activists are racist, saying they oppose President Barack Obama because of his policies not his skin color.

The members gathered at a Washington news conference in the wake of allegations about its rank and file, heightened by the recent split with a Tea Party Express leader who had posted a letter on his blog written from “Colored People” to Abraham Lincoln. The post suggested that black people would choose slavery over having to do real work.

The black members said the racism that has been attributed to the tea party movement came from outsiders who infiltrated the groups to discredit their work and it should be rejected.

“These people do not oppose Barack Obama because of his skin color. They oppose him because of his policies,” said Lloyd Marcus, a spokesman for the group. [ READ MORE ]

Other Tea-party News:

Tea Party Hypocrites: Nathan Deal, Rick Scott and New York’s Gubernatorial Candidate Carl Paladino — One uses taxpayer money to rail against taxes, another’s tainted by Medicaid fraud, a third secretly pocketed thousands from a government contract. These three cases do not amount to an indictment of the Tea Party movement overall as much as a reminder of its frailties. John Avlon on three candidates making a mockery of the movement’s message. [ READ MORE ]

Tea-Party Music, Association of American Physicians and Surgeons and Nevada’s Sharon Angle

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Uncle Michael Steele’s RNC Leadership Failure

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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