Race Cards
by Thomas Sowell
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If you are
sick and tired of seeing politicians and others playing the race
card, or if you are just disgusted with the grossly dishonest way
racial issues in general are portrayed, then you should get a copy
of Ann Coulter's new book, Mugged.
Its subtitle is: "Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama."
Few things
are as rare as an honest book about race. This is one of the very
few, and one of the very best.
Many people
will learn for the first time from Ann Coulter's book how a drunken
hoodlum and ex-convict, who tried to attack the police, was turned
into a victim and a martyr by the media, simply by editing a videotape
and broadcasting that edited version, over and over, across the
nation.
They will learn
how a jury – which saw the whole unedited videotape and acquitted
the police officers of wrongdoing – was portrayed as racist, setting
off riots that killed innocent people who had nothing to do with
the Rodney King episode.
Meanwhile,
the people whose slick editing set off this chain of events received
a Pulitzer Prize.
Even the Republican
President of the United States, George H.W. Bush, expressed surprise
at the jury's verdict, after seeing the edited videotape, while
the jury saw the whole unedited videotape. Even Presidents should
keep their mouths shut when they don't know all the facts. Perhaps
especially Presidents.
Innumerable
other examples of racial events and issues that have been twisted
and distorted beyond recognition are untangled and revealed for
the frauds that they are in Mugged.
The whole history
of the role of the Democrats and the Republicans in black civil
rights issues is taken apart and examined, showing with documented
fact after documented fact how the truth turns out repeatedly to
be the opposite of what has been portrayed in most of the media.
It has long
been a matter of official record that a higher percentage of Republicans
than Democrats, in both Houses of Congress, voted for the landmark
civil rights legislation of the 1960s. Yet the great legend has
come down to us that Democrats created the civil rights revolution,
over the opposition of the Republicans.
Since this
all happened nearly half a century ago, even many Republicans today
seem unaware of the facts, and are defensive about their party's
role on racial issues, while Democrats boldly wrap themselves in
the mantle of blacks' only friends and defenders.
To puff up
their role as defenders of blacks, it has been necessary for Democrats
and their media supporters to hype the dangers of "racists." This
has led to some very creative ways of defining and portraying people
as "racists." Ann Coulter has a whole chapter titled "You Racist!"
with examples of how extreme and absurd this organized name-calling
can become.
No book about
race would be complete without an examination of the role of character
assassination in racial politics. One of the classic injustices
revealed by Ann Coulter's book is the case of Charles Pickering,
a white Republican in Mississippi, who prosecuted the Imperial Wizard
of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1960s.
Back in those
days, opposing the Ku Klux Klan meant putting your life, and the
lives of your family members, at risk. The FBI had to guard Pickering
and his family. Later, Pickering went on to become a federal judge
and, in 2001, President George W. Bush nominated him for promotion
to the Circuit Court of Appeals.
As
a Republican judge, Pickering was opposed by elite liberal Democrats
in Congress and in the media who, in Ann Coulter's words, "sent
their children to 99-percent white private schools" while "Pickering
sent his kids to overwhelmingly black Mississippi public schools."
Among the charges
against Pickering was that he was bad on civil rights issues. Older
black leaders in Mississippi, who had known Pickering for years,
sprang to his defense. But who cared what they said? Pickering's
nomination was defeated on a smear.
Mugged
is more than an informative book. It is a whole education about
the difference between rhetoric and reality when it comes to racial
issues. It is a much needed, and even urgently needed education,
with a national election just weeks away.
October
10, 2012
Thomas
Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford
University. His Web site is www.tsowell.com.
To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other
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