I know, bashing Republicans gets tiring after a while, but it's true that their party really does have a race problem that they refuse to see. Exhibit A at the 2013 Conservative Political Action Conference is a session on race and conservatism--sponsored by the Tea Party Patriots--entitled
"Trump The Race Card: Are You Sick And Tired Of Being Called A Racist When You Know You’re Not One?" K. Carl Smith, a black conservative who led the session, trotted out the old "Democrats are the party of slavery and the Klan" meme, which generally went over well with the audience. He encouraged Republicans accused of racism to refer to themselves as "Frederick Douglass Republicans"--though I would say that this is merely a rebranding and has no effect on the actual substance of the party. Smith even noted that Douglass forgave his former master--the truth of which I cannot weigh in on. This led to an interruption from the neo-Confederate duo of Scott Terry and Matthew Heimbach. (Herr Heimbach, as the article points out, founded the first
White Student Union at Towson University and
invited Jared Taylor, a known white supremacist, to give a lecture there.) Terry accused the speaker of "reaching out to voters at the expense of young white Southern males" and seemed stunned that any former slave would have to forgive their master for providing food, clothing and shelter. And then the shit hit the fan. Well, not because of Terry's blatantly racist interjection, but because a black woman in the audience asked if the Republicans should condemn racism in political ads made by fellow Republicans. Most people interviewed on the subject seemed to either have no problem with what Terry said or, if they did, glossed over it completely.
