danajohnhill.org | Hard Times Come Again No More

I wanted to weigh in on the comments conservative commentator Bill O’Reilly made on his radio program recently following a dinner he shared with Al Sharpton at Sylvia’s Soul Food, an apparently popular Manhattan restaurant. Quoth O’Reilly:

“I couldn’t get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia’s restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City. I mean, it was exactly the same, even though it’s run by blacks, primarily black patronship [sic].”

In a subsequent interview on another program he added:

“There wasn’t one person in Sylvia’s who was screaming, ‘M-Fer, I want more iced tea.’ You know, I mean, everybody was — it was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb in the sense of people were sitting there, and they were ordering and having fun. And there wasn’t any kind of craziness at all.”

I am not the first to point this out, but I’ll be the latest to say that the problem with his statement isn’t that it was overtly racist, à la, “I hate black people”. I am sure O’Reilly meant no harm, and, in fact, probably was genuinely happy with his experience at that Harlem eatery. The problem isn’t what he said, but what he felt. He expected it to be something horrible because it was a restaurant owned and frequented by blacks. That he had a decent time is all well and good; but what is clear is that Bill O’Reilly’s analysis of American society is based on the assumption that black people are bad. This no doubt informs his political beliefs. And when you consider how he is a prominent conservative writer and speaker, it is not an illogical conclusion to draw that many other conservatives’ notions of this country are biased by the ridiculous fallacy that black people are fundamentally different from white people.

That brings me to a recent Paul Krugman column in the New York Times in which he points out what I hold to be a truth, namely that the large numbers of southern whites that vote Republican–62% in 2006–illustrates that race is still the dominant factor in conservative politics – more than national security, more than economic policy, more than other “values” issues.  If it were security or economic policy that mattered, Republicans have clearly demonstrated they are not the best choice.  That leaves race.

In fact, I believe that the major Republican “value” being espoused–albeit in veiled language–is bigotry, be it against Mexicans or Muslims or blacks. The two dominant constituencies Republicans rely on for support are the super-rich (who enjoy the GOP’s slavish devotion in return for lavish financial contributions) and the bigoted. The latter, of course, do not realize that the politically powerful don’t really share their ideology, but exploit it for electoral gains. But, since the massive defection of southern whites to the GOP following the 1964 and ‘65 civil rights legislation signed into law by President Johnson, the Republican party has needed to use “the Southern Strategy” to hold onto power.

And if you need further proof that Republicans have written off the minority vote altogether, note the recent debate of Republican presidential candidates in which the four front-runners did not appear. It is acknowledgment that they have so misunderstood the issues important to black voters–which are the same issues important to all Americans: health care, civil liberties, education, etc.–that they must cling ever tighter to their last bastion of support, bigoted whites, whose ill-informed opinions of blacks mirror those of Bill O’Reilly.

Filed under: Current Events, Politics, Rantings on September 29th, 2007