Georgia Republican Very Disappointed President Obama Has Not Ended Racism

Of all the embarrassing American totems we may have exported to Australia (Budweiser, country music, Keanu Reeves), could any of them be more embarrassing than an old white Republican from Georgia talking about the state of race relations in our country? And yet somehow we allowed this to happen just the other day. America! Not only have we failed black people in so many ways, we’ve even failed at sending out emissaries to talk about the plight of black people.

Here is video of Randy Evans, a Georgia member of the Republican National Committee, taking the shooting of Michael Brown as a jumping-off point to sadly, regretfully racesplain to a panel of Aussies on Sky News why the election of our nation’s first African-American president has been ashandafor black folks.

[T]to have an African-American president, you would have the opportunity for every young African-American to think to themselves, “One day I too can grow up to be President.” Well, that enormous opportunity kind of got squandered, because literally what happened once President Obama took office, African-Americans became nothing more than a political tool – a way to drive up votes among African-American communities and I would say that over the course of his six years we probably have taken more steps backward than we have forward.

Your Wonkette struggles to understand why most black folks vote for Obama and the Democrats and not the white conservatives of the Republican Party. Truly it is a giant   mystery. Though we suspect the condescension expressed by Republicans, of which this is but one example, probably doesn’t help.

[T]he net effect, is the actual, open discussion of race has gone underground and it means that when these eruptions occur, they are far more violent, they’re far more intense and they end up getting nationalized in a way that we’ve never seen before.

Whoa, hey, sounds like somebody has never picked up a history of the 1960s. Or even 1992. It is as if the history of race relations in our country started on Jan. 20, 2009. Weird.

Well because the net effect is rather than solve the core problems that result in a higher incidence of African-American youth being unemployed, being imprisoned, otherwise having not the opportunities – which is that they don’t have the education, they don’t have the support structures, they don’t have the family structures.

Rather than address any of those core issues, which in fact lead to the problem. What you have instead is, a kind of self-imposed unit here that is an available unit that every time an election rolls around, we push the button, we make sure… we know 92 percent of African-Americans are going to vote with the president.

To be fair, Evans is far from the only white idiot to blame Obama for not ending racism, or for daring to appeal to a particular voting bloc to vote for him in an election, which is a practice Obama invented just to appeal to The Blacks.

Of course every time President Obama has tried to come up with something that might benefit African-Americans along with poor white folks – education reform,   prison reform,   health insurance reform – Evans’s own party has fought him tooth and nail by accusing him of giving away goodies to the takers or running the Justice Department like his own personal band of Black Panthers.

But the one truly enormous sin President Dolemite seems to have committed is not reassuring cranky old southern conservatives like Randy Evans that his election means all the day-to-day incidences of structural racism experienced by people of color in America ended the minute he took his hand off of Lincoln’s bible, and our entire society is miraculously colorblind now so all is forgiven, and black people have no reason to be upset by the shooting deaths of unarmed young men like Mike Brown and Trayvon Martin. Just one more high crime and misdemeanor that should have been thrown at Obama during Impeach Obama Week.

[ Atlanta Journal-Constitution / Sky News ]