Harry Reid’s Not So Racist Comments

Recent comments made by Senate Majority Harry Reid where he said,  “I don’t understand how Hispanics can be Republicans,” are NOT “racist”.  Reid is not a racist.  There are some far-right wingers from FOX news and radio show  personalities who want us to believe that Reid is a “racist” because they want to find moral ground to hide their own vitriol against Hispanics. Some Hispanic Republican loyalists that want to vindicate the GOP from hateful rhetoric would like to make this a race/brown argument, but this doesn’t mean Harry Reid is a racist. Reid is a liberal progressive that still holds prejudicial attitudes toward Hispanics in which he wrongly assumes that Hispanics cannot be Republicans because they are a needy minority that can only prosper with big government assistance.

Marco Rubio was right when he stayed away from such juvenile remarks that Mr. Reid’s comments were racist, instaed he cautiously  stated the comments were “outrageous”.  There are clear distinctions between racism and prejudice of which Mr. Reid and other liberals like Barbara Boxer are evidently guilty of.  It is true that racism harbors hate and ideas that some groups and individuals are inferior.  Holding such ideas will not interact or form any kind of associations with the presumed inferior groups. Prejudices are  a more subtle nuance in which people have presumed ideas about groups or individuals, but they still interact and form associations with those presupposed inferior groups.

Harry Reid, thus,  cannot be racist because he has already formed strong associations with Hispanics and blacks. On the other hand, he still holds old prejudicial thoughts about Hispanics and Blacks in which he assumes that they are a kind of handicapped minority that can only succeed with government assistance. Moreover, he has made comments  about Obama not having a “negro dialect”. So he does believe that black have special spoken “dialect”, even if they are constitutional professors from Harvard. This is not a new mindset but was the foundation for the progressive agenda that the Democratic Congress wants to continue to relentlessly push under the auspices of stimulus and unemployment extension checks. These prejudicial progressive liberal convictions are rooted in the radical social policies of the 60′s.

In the 1960′s, the Great Society social policies were created to redress past social wrongs such as segregation.  Many programs were considerations of justice in form of reparation and to achieve a more fair political representation, but massive government social equalizer programs did  not guarantee the success of moral and political ideals for minority groups.  This is why liberals continue to keep social policies as a form of patronage.

In her book White Guilt, conservative, Shelby Steele, from Stanford and fellow researcher for the Hoover Institute argues that liberal politicians, like Harry Reid and Barbara Boxer, in the 60s inspired redress programs that caused damage to African Americans over the long run. These policies of redress according to Steele emanated out of “white guilt“, but ultimately led to prejudice. American white liberal “guilt” helped to establish the governmental system for the breakup of the traditional African American families by removing any notion of personal accountability. Steele defined white guilt as being a “complete vacuum of moral authority wherein a stigma is cast upon an entire group of people regardless of what they do or say.”

Also, due to the very real historical wrongs of segregation and slavery, liberal whites see redressing as the only way to regain “moral authority”, so liberal white politicians used government funded programs to reclaim their moral goodness. Liberal whites want to prove their own worth so to do so they must exonerate themselves of any suspicion of being racist by making sure they are aiding a needy minority. Unfortunately and conveniently for them this has become the mantra of liberal Democrats and it is in their best interest to keep perpetuating the idea that minorities  are handicapped groups that require government assistance to rid themselves of poverty.

This mindset in and of  itself is an overt form of prejudice because it holds that some groups of people are naturally incapable of developing their own economic success, and therefore, are constantly in need of help. To maintain this agenda, they set up a two-tiered system of behavior and expectation; one for oppressed minorities, and one for everyone else. For instance, blacks are allowed to get away with a lesser standard because liberal whites don’t want to call blacks on any failings for fear of being labeled “racist“.  Thus keeping blacks in a lower state and in a state of childish dependency on liberal whites and government give the opportunity to liberals to regain a sense of justice and moral goodness. In this prejudicial codependency arrangement, “liberal whites come off as magnanimous benefactors of poor, childish black people who could not make it without white liberals giving them lots of charity”.

In conclusion, Senator Reid’s comments are not racist; however, they do suggest a great level of prejudice against Hispanics. The Democratic policies of the last 18 moths have failed miserably, and unemployment among Hispanics still about 12% nationwide. Consequently, in order to appease Hispanic voters, Reid wants to perpetuate the idea that Hispanics cannot create their own success and therefore require government assistance, and possible wooing of votes he needs during this campaign year.   Reid  cannot understand why some Hispanics are Republicans and is ignorant of the fact that Hispanics have moved away from this codependency arrangement and patronage and decided to be Republicans.  Mr. Reid assumes that the federal unemployment extension programs were to function as form of patronage for the “needy” Hispanic minority population.  He views and believes that Hispanics are in  need of constant  government assistance, and thus securing their loyalty to the Democrat  Party. And, that is  indeed a REAL prejudice thought.

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