Republican presidential candidates are getting a much-needed do-over on whether the murderous attack on a major black church in Charleston, S.C., was the result of racism.
“It was clearly racially motivated. Clearly,” Rick Santorum told the Huffington Post. A Jeb Bush spokesman had to clarify that “of course” the former Florida governor believed race was behind the shootings. After initially suggesting the gunman was just looking for Christians to kill and sticking up for the Confederate flag, Lindsey Graham acknowledged, “The only reason these people are dead is because they’re black.”
But why didn’t they get it right the first time?
To be fair, some comments being represented as Republican professions of ignorance about the killer’s motive fall more into the “how could anyone do something like this” category. Bush and Rand Paul, speaking to a Christian audience, were trying to make broader theological points about the nature of evil and what C.S. Lewis called the problem of pain.
Yet it is inconsistent for a political party whose leaders chastise President Obama for refusing to use the phrase “radical Islam” to be so mealy-mouthed about the ideology that left nine African-Americans dead.
A young white man entered an African-American Methodist Episcopal Church that had been at the center of the black struggle for freedom and civil rights. He proclaimed his hatred of black people and what they were doing to his country before gunning down members of the black Bible study group.
Even when the news first broke Wednesday, the circumstances strongly suggested it was a racist incident (not an accident). By the time Bush — who is one of the more skillful GOP presidential hopefuls when it comes to minority outreach — said, “I don’t know what was on the mind or the heart of the man who committed these atrocious crimes,” we already knew more details about what was said in the run-up to the shootings and the killer’s possession of racist paraphernalia.
If there was ever a clear-cut example of racism, this was it.
Republicans often find themselves pushing back against liberal claims that various conservative positions are motivated by some kind of subtle racial animus. This includes budget cuts to social programs that have a disparate impact on minorities, opposition to affirmative action programs that include explicit racial preferences or quotas, and the curbing of illegal immigration. Republican voter ID laws are said to suppress minority turnout and gut the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
New York Rep. Charlie Rangel, riffing off one of the dumbest things ever said by a Republican strategist, went so far as say “Let’s cut taxes” is now a racial slur. If you can’t cut the capital gains tax without being accused of racism, good luck arguing it is benign to fly the Confederate flag anywhere near South Carolina’s state capitol.
Liberals, most conservatives would say, see racism everywhere. This is something Bush should remember, given the controversy over his father, then the vice president of the United States, affectionately referring to Jeb’s children as the “little brown ones.”
But it’s hard to make that argument effectively if leading Republican politicians don’t want to see racism anywhere at all. Liberals assume this is because Republicans want white racist votes — though it’s pretty obvious Bush wasn’t trying to win over such voters when he showcased diversity in his campaign announcement.
That said, Republicans have sometimes been timid about saying what they really believe about racial issues when they think it will place them on the wrong side of the primary electorate. John McCain said as much about his Confederate flag stance in South Carolina after he lost the nomination in 2000.
Whatever the reason for the ham-fisted Charleston reactions, it doesn’t help Republicans improve their dismal standing among minority voters and it also turns off many white voters when party leaders give even the appearance of equivocation in the face of a fairly straightforward case of racism.
At Tea Party rallies, a popular placard reads, “No matter what this sign says, they’ll call it racist.” But just because some sensitive ears hear a dog whistle in every conservative argument doesn’t mean nothing is racist. Color-blindness need not require blindness to reality.
Republicans looking to make inroads with the black community should at minimum be able to call the Dylann Roofs of the world what they are the first time, without any do-overs.
