COMMENTARY | Perhaps there is a bet among the members of the GOP. Perhaps there is a game of “Truth or Dare” gone awry, or maybe it’s the strangest, loudest game of political “Chicken” to date. There is little else that can explain it.
A few days ago, Rick Santorum — not a person known for the most level or diplomatic speech at his best — allegedly said, according to CBS News, that he doesn’t want to “[M] make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.” I say “allegedly,” because, despite the sentence being captured on video, he claims that that is not what he said; rather he “stumbled” over his words. Decide for yourself.
Within the self-same news cycle that had Santorum tripping over himself to prove that he tripped over his words, we have good old Newt Gingrich doubling down on the racist stupidity. According to the Associated Press, he expressed his desire to speak to the NAACP to explain “why the African-American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps.”
So, Newt, let me tell you why you might be waiting for quite some time for that invitation, so that you can inform the leadership and membership of the NAACP that they should be focusing on paychecks over food stamps.
The people of color I know are not dithering over whether to get public aid or take a job at minimum wage with no benefits, with which they would still qualify for public aid. The people of color I know are concerned about realistic tax breaks for child care, about saving for their children’s college educations, and about the solidity of their 401(k)s. They are worried about the economy and the increasingly odd suggestions from the GOP to “fix” the problems, because the people of color I know have MBAs and law degrees and understand illogical financial fluffery when they hear it spewed.
So hear this, Republicans, and hear it clearly: you do not have trouble with “the African-American vote” because of some mythical monolithic block that wants to preserve access to the great well of food stamps in the glorious amount of $668 per month for a family of four. You have trouble with voters of color — of all colors — due to your condescending assumptions about what matters to various groups of Americans based solely on the amount of melanin in their skin.
This new world isn’t so new anymore, GOP. Even the guy you hope to run against this year, the man who is the current President of the United States, is a person of color, and before he was president, he was a senator, and before he was a senator, he was a state senator, and before that, he was an Ivy League-educated lawyer.
And he is not the only one. He is not an anomaly. He is the face of an entire class of people that seem to be invisible to the Republican naked eye, a class of educated, well-employed, upper-middle class Americans who happen to have dark skin. And who happen to vote.