From: Gerald Long
Columbus
The critical year in modern American political history was 1968, when Southern segregationist George Wallace threw the presidential race into chaos. Wallace ran as an independent and, to counter his campaign’s appeal to voters in the South and elsewhere, the Republican candidate, Richard Nixon, adopted a now legendary "Southern Strategy." In a nutshell, Nixon’s plan was to invoke code words, or "dog whistles,” that would appeal to the racial intolerance of many voters. For example, Nixon used terms like "law and order" and "states’ rights" as less-than-subtle indications that he was sympathetic to Southern resistance to civil rights. The electoral votes of Southern states did go to Wallace, but nationally Nixon was successful in his quest for the presidency.
With Nixon’s Southern Strategy firmly embedded in the GOP’s playbook, the party broadened the tactic to appeal to the racial and social resentments of voters across the country. The party’s dilemma was to convince people with modest incomes to vote against their own financial interests. After all, the soul of the Republican Party was and is a fervor to bestow tax breaks on billionaires. This necessitated cynical efforts to generate fear in the general public, to make people afraid of anyone who was "different,” and to then convince people that the GOP was their last line of defense. Lee Atwater, an infamous strategist for both Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, even admitted that dog whistles like "affirmative action," "mandatory busing" and "welfare queens" were continually repeated to fan the flames of racial division because it was just unacceptable to use the "N-word" by the 1970s.
Today, without breaking a sweat, one can trace the course of Republican racism from 1968 to 2019. As a nation, we are cursed to have a racist named Donald Trump in the White House. Trump is a person who, in the 1970s, broke the law by refusing to rent apartments to people of color. In 1989, he took out a full-page advertisement in The New York Times to urge the use of the death penalty for four African Americans and one Hispanic (the Central Park Five). When these teens were exonerated, he did not bother to apologize. After the terrorist attacks in 2001, he falsely claimed that he witnessed mass celebrations by Arab-Americans. Trump played a central role in the absurd "birther" accusations against our first African-American president. He later launched his own presidential bid by calling Hispanics rapists and criminals. Just two years ago he even asserted that a group that included white supremacist protesters also included "some very fine people." More recently, he told four congresswomen, all people of color, to "go back" to "the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came." For the record, three of the women were born in the United States, and the other has been a citizen longer than Trump’s wife. Such insults are eerie reminders of the "go back to Africa" affronts that still haunt the memories of far too many African-Americans.
