“. . . no I’m not European, bein’ all I can . . .”
-Snoop Dogg
White men DID NOT build the United States. No matter what Pat Buchanan, Lindsey Graham, Jeff Sessions, or Jon Kyl would like to believe. Yes, they were instrumental in its creation and conception, but there have been a myriad of people from Abigail Adams to Crispus Attucks to Helen Keller to Martin Luther King, Jr. to Cesar Chavez to Dolores Huerta to Gloria Steinem to the Iron Angels to the Massachusetts 54th Infantry to the Windtalkers who have put life and limb on the line for the fulfillment of the promise and potential signaled by the “100% white men”-created Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States. It is amazing to note, though, that both of these documents used, according to white man Thomas Jefferson, the founding documents of the Iroquois Confederacy as templates.
The confirmation hearings of Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court of the United States, though, gave these Southern Dixiecrats (oops! now they’re Republicans from the party of Lincoln) a huge microphone from which to spout even more invective toward racial minorities and women who have been the foundations of this nation since before its inception. From Graham’s “do you have a temperament problem” to Session’s open mouth, the Republican members of the confirmation committee walked what they saw as an acceptable line, attacking Sotomayor’s pride in her heritage, work for the Puerto Rican legal defense fund, and everything except her judicial record. That’s Pat, though, took it even further across the line. Both online and on television, this white man actually argued that she wasn’t qualified because she was Latina, that because she acknowledged not only her race but the role that affirmative action played in her education, somehow that makes her inferior. His spouting invective wasn’t simply restrained to the written word . . . he had the temerity, the sheer arrogance, to take his knapsack of white privilege and racial superiority on television for the broadcast world to see.
I do agree with Malcom X, for I would rather have racists stating that they are racist rather than hiding under a veneer of reasonable opposition. The arguments made by Pat Buchanan (and to a more timid extent, the members of the confirmation committee) are lasts grasps at a position of power in the hierarchy of social dominance in the United States. The stranglehold that white men have had on power (106 of the 110 justices on the SCOTUS have been white men; 43 of 44 POTUS have been white men; 413 of 535 members of Congress today are white men) flies in the face of the “rational insecurity” from which Mitch McConnell and others question Sotomayor’s work and philosophy, attack her family and community, and preach their colorblind message which means they are blind to every color but their own. And it has given some of them a false sense of security, a belief in their own superiority which is not only undeserved and a f*&^ing joke, but is offensive in the extreme to say the least.
Unrestrained by elected office, Pat Buchanan has become David Duke in a suit instead of a robe. He is in the running, like Audra Shay, on a platform which seeks to secure the white working class vote by telling them how special they are and how much the darkies are taking away from them, to be king of the klansmen. And he wants the party of Lincoln to follow him. Maybe he’ll pick Sarah Palin as a runningmate, too. Fortunately, thinking Republicans are seeing these racial attacks for what they are, more bullshit from little men seeking to attain or maintain power in a changing world.
