-By Warner Todd Huston
Herman Cain has had about enough of The New York Times and its racist columnists. The latest is the hate that The Times and guest columnist Adolph Reed, Jr. offered for South Carolina’s newest Senator, Tim Scott.
In an editorial Cain posted to CainTV.com, the one-time GOP candidate for President was incensed that Reed and The Times were so presumptuous as to imagine that no black conservative is smart enough to understand conservatism or even believe in what they claim to believe.
Reed, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, called all blacks in the GOP “tokens” and dismissed the “milestone” status that is Tim Scott’s advancement to the U.S. Senate saying it is no advancement for African Americans.
This is, of course, the ultimate insult. Reed is indulging the ages old epithet of saying that any black that doesn’t toe his extremist, liberal line of thinking is an Uncle Tom. It is the sort of dismissive attitude that assumes that black conservatives just aren’t smart enough to understand what conservatism really is. It is a way to dismiss the very intelligence of black conservatives not to mention their humanity.
As Cain noted, “Professor Reed makes it clear that he considers black Republicans to be little more than Stepin Fetchits, soulless black people who are willing to serve the white master at the expense of their true brethren”
Professor Reed is also a black man, Cain reports, so this sort of attack on other blacks for what they believe is doubly disgusting. This is the “self-hatred” that brought Herman Cain’s ire.
Since Professor Reed is also a black man, I wish him well in dealing with his obvious self-loathing. But he might learn a lot if he spent a little time moving in the circles I move in. He would meet lots of highly accomplished black men and women who have pursued their dreams in the capitalist system and have done exceedingly well. They vote Republican because they understand that free-market policies open up this same kind of opportunity for others.
It’s bad enough that Reed feels the way he does, but worse that “the paper of record” would ever publish such hate.
Any newspaper that would publish a piece denigrating blacks as needing the benevolence of big government in order to serve their interests is obviously racist and deserves widespread censure for making such an insensitive and racially biased editorial decision.
“It’s a shame the New York Times is such a racist newspaper,” Cain concludes.
Even worse than the decision of The New York Times to publish this sort of racist sentiment is that this professor Reed is teaching this twaddle to his students and the taxpayers of Pennsylvania are paying him to do so.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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