Spiel mit der Rassenkarte
Von Dietmar Ostermann
22.07.2010
Als Barack Obama ins Weiße Haus einzog, war in den USA viel von der postrassistischen Gesellschaft die Rede. Mit der Wahl des ersten schwarzen Präsidenten, auch mit den Stimmen vieler Weißer, sollte das Land die Rassengegensätze überwinden. Anderthalb Jahre später ist von dieser Fiktion wenig geblieben. So unbestreitbar der Wandel ist, so wenig sind die USA mit Obama schon in einer quasi farbenblinden Normalität angekommen. Wer daran Zweifel hatte, kann dieser Tage beobachten, wie brutal die “Rassenkarte” gespielt, wie zynisch alte Wunden aus politischem Kalkül aufgerissen werden – und wie schwer sich auch die Regierung eines schwarzen Präsidenten mit dem Thema tut.
Gegenstand und Opfer der jüngsten Kontroverse ist Shirley Sherrod, bis Anfang der Woche Regionaldirektorin des Agrarministeriums in Georgia. Eigentlich könnte ihr Lebensweg ein Lehrstück für den Wandel sein: Sherrod wuchs als Tochter eines schwarzen Farmers im Süden auf, inmitten der unruhigen Bürgerrechtsära. Ihr Vater wurde 1965 von Weißen ermordet, die Täter wurden nie verurteilt. Die Tochter verschrieb sich dem Kampf gegen Diskriminierung, setzte sich für schwarze Bauern ein, die systematisch benachteiligt wurden.
Als 1986 zum ersten Mal ein weißer Farmer um Hilfe bat, dessen Land gepfändet werden sollte, zögerte Sherrod. Sie habe nicht alles getan, dem Mann zu helfen, räumte sie im März beim Bankett der Bürgerrechtsorganisation NAACP ein. Aber: “Durch die Arbeit mit ihm habe ich gesehen, dass es in Wahrheit um diejenigen geht, die nichts haben. Sie können schwarz, weiß oder hispanisch sein. Ich habe verstanden, dass ich armen Menschen helfen musste.”
Es war eine nachdenkliche Rede über innere Kämpfe und die Überwindung von Vorurteilen. Davon aber tauchte am Montag im Internet zunächst nur ein zweieinhalb Minuten langer Ausschnitt auf, der den Inhalt ins Gegenteil kehrte: Eben jene Passage, in der Sherrod bekennt, dem weißen Farmer nur bedingt geholfen zu haben.
Dann ging alles schnell: Prominente Scharfmacher stürzten sich im rechten Kampf-Sender Fox News auf die Story, warfen der NAACP und der Obama-Regierung “umgekehrten Rassismus” vor, forderten Sherrods Entlassung. Um politischen Schaden vom Präsidenten abzuwenden, drängte die Spitze des Landwirtschaftsministeriums die Frau zum Rücktritt. Selbst die NAACP distanzierte sich von Sherrod.
Inzwischen ist das Video in voller Länge aufgetaucht, weiß man, dass die Regierung einer Provokation des einschlägig bekannten Bloggers Andrew Breitbart aufsaß. Der Mann hält Obama für den Agenten einer kommunistischen Verschwörung und steht der Tea Party nahe, der Sammelbewegung konservativer Empörung. Die NAACP, Agrarminister Tom Vilsack, das Weiße Haus, selbst Fox-News-Einpeitscher – alle haben sich bei Sherrod entschuldigt.
Erledigt ist der Fall damit nicht, erst recht nicht für den Präsidenten. Viele Afroamerikaner sind empört, wie naiv die Regierung der Verleumdungskampagne aufsaß – und wie feige sie Sherrod fallenließ. Der schwarze Kolumnist Eugene Robinson aber spricht auch vom gezielten Versuch, diffuse Ängste zu schüren, “dass, wenn Afroamerikaner und andere Minderheiten einflussreiche Machtpositionen einnehmen, sie irgendeine Art von Rache an Weißen nehmen”. Von der postrassistischen Gesellschaft redet niemand mehr.
False reporting here…Fox didn’t air a word about this incident until after Obama’s administration fired Sherrod. They jumped the gun on the brief exerpt of the video. If you had done any research, the release of the video was not about Sherror, it was about the NAACP’s APPROVAL of those statements. The NAACP had the full footage and did nothing to intervene.
The racism in the U.S. was engineered over a century of the Democrat party founding, funding and directing the actions of the KKK and resisting civilrights legislation right up until the 1960’s. That Civil Rights legislation was written by Republicans who tried to pass it during Eisenhower’s administration, but the Democrats, including JFK voted it down.
If you want the truth about racism in the U.S., here it is:
“An Open Letter to the Democratic Party
By Lt. Colonel Frances Rice,U.S. Army Retired: Contributor to the LHI
“We, African American citizens of the United States, declare and assert:
Whereas in the early 1600’s 20 African men and women were landed in Virginia from a Dutch ship as slaves and from that tiny seed grew the poisoned fruit of plantation slavery which shaped the course of American development,
Whereas reconciliation and healing always begin with an apology and an effort to repay those who have been wronged,
Whereas the Democratic Party has never apologized for their horrific atrocities and racist practices committed against African Americans during the past two hundred years, nor for the residual impact that those atrocities and practices and current soft bigotry of low expectations are having on us today,
Whereas the Democratic Party fought to expand slavery and, after the Civil War, established Jim Crow Laws, Black Codes and other repressive legislation that were designed to disenfranchise African Americans,
Whereas the Ku Klux Klan was the terrorist arm of the Democratic Party, and their primary goal was to intimidate and terrorize African American voters, Republicans who moved South to protect African Americans and any other whites who supported them,
Whereas, according to leading historians (both black and white), the horrific atrocities committed against African Americans during slavery and Reconstruction were financed, sponsored, and promoted by the Democratic Party and their Ku Klux Klan supporters,
Whereas from 1870 to 1930, in an effort to deny African Americans their civil rights and to keep African Americans from voting Republican, thousands of African Americans were shot, beaten, lynched, mutilated, and burned to death by Ku Klux Klan terrorists from the Democratic Party,
Whereas Democratic Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman rejected anti-lynching laws and efforts to establish a permanent Civil Rights Commission,
Whereas the Democratic party has used racist demagoguery to deceive African Americans about the history of the Republican Party that: (a) started as the anti-slavery party in 1854, (b) fought to free African Americans from slavery, (c) designed Reconstruction, a ten-year period of unprecedented political power for African Americans, (d) passed the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U. S. Constitution granting African Americans freedom, citizenship, and the right to vote, (e) passed the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875 granting African Americans protection from the Black Codes and prohibiting racial discrimination in public accommodations, (f) passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 granting African Americans protection from the Jim Crow laws, (g) established Affirmative Action programs to help African Americans proper with Republican President Richard Nixon’s 1969 Philadelphia Plan that set the first goals and timetables and his 1972 Equal Employment Opportunity Act that made Affirmative Action Programs the law of our nation, and (h) never sponsored or launched a program, passed laws, or engaged in practices that resulted in the death of millions of African Americans,
Whereas Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka (a 1954 decision by Chief Justice Earl Warren who was appointed by Republican President Dwight Eisenhower) was a landmark civil rights case that was designed to overturn the racist practices that were established by the Democratic Party,
Whereas after Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt received the vote of African Americans, he banned African American newspapers from the military shortly after taking office because he was convinced the newspapers were communists,
Whereas Democratic President John F. Kennedy voted against the 1957 Civil Rights Law, opposed the 1963 March on Washington by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and was later criticized by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for ignoring civil rights issues.
Whereas Democratic President John F. Kennedy authorized the FBI (supervised by his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy) to investigate Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on suspicion of being a communist,
Whereas Democratic Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, made a 14-hour filibuster speech in the Senate in June 1964 in an unsuccessful effort to block passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and was heralded in April 2004 by Democratic Senator Christopher Dodd as a senator who would have been a great leader during the Civil War,
Whereas when the 1964 Civil Rights Act came up for vote, Senator Al Gore, Sr. and the rest of the Southern Democrats voted against the bill,
Whereas in the House of Representatives only 61 percent of the Democrats voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act as compared to 80 percent of Republicans, and in the Senate only 69 percent of the Democrats voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, compared to 82 percent of the Republicans,
Whereas Democratic President Bill Clinton sent troops to Europe to protect the citizens of Bosnia and Kosovo while allowing an estimated 800,000 black Rwandans to be massacred in Africa, vetoed the welfare reform law twice before signing it, and refused to comply with a court order to have shipping companies develop an Affirmative Action Plan,
Whereas Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore created harmful racial division when he falsely claimed that the 2000 presidential election was “stolen” from him and that African Americans in Florida were disenfranchised, even though a second recount of Florida votes by the “Miami Herald” and a consortium of major news organizations confirmed that he lost the election, and a ruling by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission declared that African Americans were not denied the right to vote,
Whereas the Democratic Party’s soft bigotry of low expectations and social promotions have consigned African Americans to economic bondage and created a culture of dependency on government social programs,
Whereas the Democratic Party’s use of deception and fear to block welfare reform, the faith-based initiative and school choice that would help African Americans prosper is consistent with the Democratic Party’s heritage of racism that included sanctioning of slavery and kukluxery, a perversion of moral sentiment among leaders of the Democratic Party whose racist legacy bode ill until this generation of African Americans,
Now, therefore, for the above and other documented atrocities and accumulated wrongs inflicted upon African Americans, we demand a formal written apology and other appropriate remuneration from the leadership of the Democratic party.”
And the Democrat party has been feeding and exacerbating racism and exploiting it while keeping a large percentage of the Black community socially, culturally and economically isolated and subjugated. And that same, ill-informed community has been largely voting Democrat ever since the KKK told them to vote Democrat or else.
Then, in 2009, Kenneth Gladney, a Black tea party patriot was physically assaulted at a tea party rally by…can you guess? By SEIU thugs…Democrats one and all.
Please try to get your facts straight.
Best regards,
Gail S
http://www.backyardfence.wordpress.com