What Does the Presence of Two Black Republican Representatives in Congress Tell Us?

The following article is from Townhall Online Journal. In it Star Parker tries to make the point that the Tea Party is not racist and that the Republican Party is not the Republican Party that many, especially the media and the left thought it was. She tries to make both of these points off of the elections results of last Tuesday. Nice try and I think she is right, but ...

• Two new black republicans is not a sea-change.
• All of the new Reps. and Senators still need to be held accountable for good decisions, white or black, democrat or republican.
• The twelve Republican blacks who lost their races to represent their districts need to not give up.
• Winning in gerrymandered districts against worthy adversaries is a good sign but the Republican party will need to continue to make gains to dispel both the reality and the myths of the past.
• And Star, I hope you run again. You would make a great representative of any district.
• The Tea Party needs to continue to mature if it hopes to gain real momentum.

Star Parker

Race and the 2010 elections

Will the NAACP be celebrating the arrival of two new black faces to the U.S. House of Representatives?

Don’t hold your breath. They certainly will not. These two new black congressmen are Republicans.

There’s a powerful message here that should and must be digested.

We have arrived in post-racial America but establishment blacks – lodged in the political left – refuse to accept it and are doing all they can to get black citizens to refuse to accept it.

The sobering reality is that the black political establishment doesn’t want Dr. King’s dream. They don’t want an America where people are judged by the content of their character. They want an America that is Democrat and left wing and this is what they promote today under the banner of civil rights.

The campaign by the NAACP and leading black journalists – all liberals – to paint the Tea Party movement, the push back against government growth and intrusiveness over the last two years, as motivated by racism is shameful.

Shortly before the elections, the NAACP produced a tome called “Tea Party Nationalism,” alleging racist connections to the Tea Party movement.

The day before the elections, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson wrote a column suggesting that the Tea Party movement was a well funded racist pushback against President Obama which started the day of his inauguration.

Tim Scott and Allen West, our new black Republican congressmen, are both aggressive and unapologetic voices for everything the Tea Party movement stands for.

They were just elected in districts that are overwhelmingly white. Both also defeated white Republican opponents in their primaries.

Scott’s district is Republican. But West’s is not.

Florida’s 22nd district that just elected West voted for Barack Obama in 2008, John Kerry in 2004, and Al Gore in 2000.

I guess these white Democrats and Independents didn’t get the racism memo.

The political tsunami, washing in a wave of new Republicans to Washington, was caused by a major shift in the vote of political independents, overwhelmingly white, and who largely voted for Barack Obama in 2008.

Who turned on the light after the presidential election that caused these white voters to discover that the man they voted for, to their horror according to the NAACP and Eugene Robinson, is black?

Follow the Gallup presidential approval poll over the last year and a half and you get a graphic picture of the changing political landscape that produced the electoral results we just witnessed.

In February 2009, Barack Obama’s approval rating, 65%, exceeded his disapproval, 21%, by 44 points.

By August 2009, 6 months after passage of the stimulus bill, the bailouts of banks and General Motors, and well into President Obama’s marketing campaign for his health care initiative, that gap shrunk to seven points – 50% approve, 43% disapprove.

In January 2010, voters of Massachusetts elected a Republican, Scott Brown, in a special election to replace long term Democrat legend Ted Kennedy. Brown campaigned against the health care bill, which Ted Kennedy had called “the cause of my life.”

President Obama went to Massachusetts to campaign for Brown’s opponent Martha Coakley.

By the end of January, Obama’s approval margin was gone. 47% approve, 47% disapprove.

Obama refused to get the message and joined with Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi to use procedural gymnastics to pass a far reaching health care bill that the American people didn’t want.

End of story.

Tim Scott and Allen West won their races. But there were 14 blacks total running as Republicans in congressional races around the country, including me.

We hate racism because it denies that what is in a person’s mind and heart has nothing to do with the color of their skin.

Almost everyone in America today, Thank God, appreciates this truth.

When will the left wing black establishment wake up to it?

Star Parker

Star Parker is founder and president of CURE, the Center for Urban Renewal and Education, a 501c3 think tank which explores and promotes market based public policy to fight poverty, as well as author of the newly revised Uncle Sam's Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America's Poor and What We Can do About It.