Other Columns by Horace Cooper
Horace Cooper Bio

Printer-Friendly Version

Why Can't We All Get Along?
By Horace Cooper
October 6, 2003

In the wake over the Rush Limbaugh flap on ESPN, it's clearer that the double standards employed by the political correctness police are doing more to harm race relations than any effort since Lester Maddox. This latest example of indignation over Rush Limbaugh's unremarkable criticism about the media makes it clearer to many fair-minded people that in America we can't have a serious discussion about issues involving race. Just last month, Chicago Cubs Coach Dusty Baker claimed that "blacks and Latins take the heat better than most whites, and whites take the cold better than most blacks and Latins. That's it, pure and simple. Nothing deeper than that." While the ignorance in this statement is shocking, neither resignation or apology were necessary. You see, Dusty Baker is black.

For much of the 20th Century, the legacy of slavery and segregation were major reasons for our difficulty. But these two are less and less the basis for an inability to openly discuss issues involving race and ethnicity. Instead, liberals and so called "minority advocates" have effectively created a racial speech apartheid zone in which they are able to speak publicly and freely about the topic and others (especially conservatives) are not unless they limit themselves to a narrow area: apologizing and supporting progressive policies that purportedly will redress racial grievances.

For themselves neo-Afrikaners are able to use and misuse words like equality, opportunity, justice, and fairness to pursue ends antithetical with each. Sadly, in the process of enforcing these speech codes, the advocates for racial speech apartheid hinder our nation from tackling many of the difficult issues facing our nation that involve race.

On America being a meritocracy and a haven for markets, they allege the concepts are simply pretexts to prevent minority opportunity. Questions about voter ballot integrity, fundamental to a democracy, are casually dismissed as attempted minority voter suppression. Neutral assessment tools to determine admissions for higher education are derided as Jim Crow-like barriers to prevent minority education. Constitutional interpretation that reflects and reinforces the political and legislative determinations of the populace as enacted are attacked as antiquated, unfair and biased attempts to impose the bigotry of the past onto the lives of racial minorities today.

What critics fairly deride as the use of the "race card" by the racial speech separatists is used to ostracize, discipline and attain political outcomes that couldn't be achieved in an open and fair political debate. Whether the issue is DC Statehood, increasing the minimum wage, supporting the liberal version of a prescription drug benefit, etc the issues are often framed in a way to make one position pro- and another anti- minority. This approach ignores the reality that there are substantive policy considerations requiring costs and benefits to be weighed and balanced. But the race calculus won't allow it. To oppose the policies of the "speech neo-afrikaners" is to be bigoted. To support them is not. Such simplistic thinking would make the "Know-nothings" of the 19th century proud.

When Reps. Eddie Bernice Johnson and Harold Ford Jr. indignantly demand Rush's resignation while remaining eerily silent during Cubby Baker's racial pronouncements, the pattern is clear. Remember when black DC residents were told they can't attend the private or public schools of their choice because fmr. President Clinton vetoed the school choice demonstration program in Washington, D.C.? Even now, Senate Democrats engage in a filibuster over the DC Appropriations bill to prevent passage of President Bush's school choice program. When black men on average receive the lowest benefit from the federal Social Security program because they don't "live long enough" to get back what they've put in, who can complain on their behalf?

People of goodwill on both sides of many public policy issues have been prevented from having an open and unstilted discussion. As a result, some policies relevant to blacks are delayed or are not even examined for fear of sanction. On the other hand, the silence by liberals and racial activists who have a free hand to take these issues up is deafening. Since some debates might prove inconvenient to their progressive agenda, they must remain unexamined even if they could have a beneficial effect on blacks and America.

Now the neo-Afrikaners would have us believe that Rush Limbaugh's comments about liberal media preferences herald the end of black progress as we know it. Yet accepting this view ultimately distorts Rush Limbaugh's record for posterity. Perhaps, more importantly, it discredits a broad spectrum of American thought held by those who espouse views other than those endorsed by the neo-Afrikaners.

President Bush was right to say that "every day our nation was segregated was a day that America was unfaithful to our founding principles." It was a long and hard fought battle to right that wrong and although the task is largely complete, the efforts on the part of decent Americans continue. Although the speech separatists won't acknowledge it, in America today equality before the law is overwhelmingly the consensus view. But claiming that racists and bigots blocking access to the election booth is the major problem facing blacks ill serve blacks or America. Rodney King's plaintive plea in the aftermath of the riots of LA is even more needed in the 21st century than ever.

----------

Horace Cooper, a Senior Fellow with the Centre for New Black Leadership, regularly writes a column for UPI and GOPUSA. He was praised as a key Republican strategist in Elizabeth Drew's New York Times bestseller "Showdown: The Struggle Between the Gingrich Congress and the Clinton White House" and extolled as a "poster conservative" by Michele Mitchell in "A New Kind of Party Animal."