Not unlike the evil Lord Voldemort in those "Harry Potter" tales, whether it’s Barack Obama, Joe Biden or any person or media ally of the the American Left, the Democratic Party’s long and vivid history of systemic racism is the political version of "He Who Must Not Be Named."
The other day President Biden released a video for the class of 2021, in which he called systemic racism one of "the great crises of our time."
Former President Obama told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that the United States had not "fully reconciled with our history." He added that it was "hard for the majority" of white Americans "to recognize you can be proud of this country and its traditions and its history and our forefathers and yet, it is also true that this terrible stuff happened. The vestiges of that linger and continue," Obama said, adding that his political opponents "not only block that story but try to exploit it for their own political gain."
As with those Obama remarks, without the slightest sense of self-awareness, Biden said the following the other day in a speech memorializing the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921:
“For much too long the history of what took place here was told in silence, cloaked in darkness. But just because history is silent, it doesn’t mean that it did not take place. And while darkness can hide much, it erases nothing, it erases nothing. Some injustices are so heinous, so horrific, so grievous they can’t be buried no matter how hard people try. And so it is here, and so it is here only, only with truth can come healing, and justice, and repair, only with truth, facing it.
. . . That’s why we’re here, to shine a light, to make sure America knows the story in full.”
The problem with all this, of course, is that when Democrats talk like this about race and systemic racism they studiously — very studiously — are entirely silent about the history of their own party and the political culture that history has bequeathed them.
Why?
What Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and their allies in the media deliberately ignore is that it is their own Democratic Party that has a long and vivid history of the most abject and decidedly systemic racism imaginable.
All of which created the systemically racist political culture of the party that Obama, Biden and their fellow Democrats thrive in to this day. A short list?
- The Democratic Party was founded by slave owners. In his book "Negro President - Jefferson and the Slave Power," Pulitzer Prize winning historian Garry Wills writes that party founder Thomas Jefferson and his fellow Democratic Party politicians had a political "indebtedness to the slavemasters." Wills notes that while "everyone recognizes that Jefferson depended on slaves for his economic existence, fewer reflect that he depended on them for his political existence. Yet the latter was the all-important guardian of the former."
- The party’s first six political platforms from 1840-1860 supported slavery.
- Seven Democratic presidents owned slaves.
- Democrats in Congress opposed the 13th Amendment that abolished slavery, the 14th amendment that gave Blacks due process and the 15th Amendment that gave them the right to vote.
—Democrats in Congress opposed the Civil Rights Acts of 1866, 1870 and 1875. The first gave Blacks the right to own private property, the second gave the president the power to use the military to fight the Ku Klux Klan attacks on Black voting rights, the third banned discrimination in public accommodations.
—Historian Eric Foner of Columbia University says the Ku Klux Klan was "a military force serving the interests of the Democratic Party." University of North Carolina historian Allen Trelease described the Klan as the "terrorist arm of the Democratic Party."
—Democratic President Woodrow Wilson segregated the federal government upon taking office in 2013.
—The Federal Reserve, created by Wilson, and Social Security, created by Franklin Roosevelt, were passed in Congress with support from Senate and House Democrats in a deal to not pass legislation outlawing lynching.
One could go on.
The point is that the very core of the party, blithely ignored, is that it was created and run from its very beginning until this moment by Democratic politicians — and in today’s world their media allies — who are consumed by a culture of racial supremacy. Everything — everything and everyone — is judged by race. Put another way, today’s "identity politics" are the son of segregation and grandson of slavery.
When former President Obama tells CNN’s Cooper
“ . . . . that there are certain right-wing media venues, for example, that monetize and capitalize on stoking the fear and resentment of a white population that is witnessing a changing America and seeing demographic changes, and do everything they can to give people a sense that their way of life is threatened and that people are trying to take advantage of them” — it's in fact Obama himself who is, as they say, playing the race card.
In fact, it is Obama, Biden and their fellow Democrats who are routinely "stoking the fear and resentment" of Americans. And that fear is used in precisely the same fashion those original racial supremacy policies of slavery and segregation were used by Democrats — to get votes and win elections.
The bottom line here is that one of America’s two major political parties is effectively the Party of Race. Race and racism are in the party’s DNA. Their entire political culture is awash in it - and has been since the party allied with slave owners at its birth.
Which is exactly why prominent Democrats make a point of never discussing — much less apologizing for — their party’s very own long and horrific history of systemic racism.
Because, among other reasons, they still need and use race to win elections.
Jeffrey Lord is a Pennsylvania-based contributing editor of The American Spectator. He writes at his own web site, TheJeffreyLord.com and is the author of Swamp Wars; Donald Trump and the New American Populism vs. the Old Order. Read Jeffrey Lord Reports — More Here.
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