- Mar 11, 2015
- 76,901
- 33,940
- 2,330
How the Republican Party Became The Party of Racism
ByMichael Harriot
According to Pew Research, 83 percent of the registered voters who identify as Republican are non-Hispanic whites.
Nearly half of the country (49 percent) believes Donald Trump is racist but 86 percent of Republicans say he is not, according to a recent Quinnipiac University poll. The same survey shows that 79 percent of Republicans approve of the way the president handles race. Other data points include:
52 percent of voters who supported Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election believed blacks are “less evolved” than whites, according to researchers at the Kellog School of Management.
In a 2018 YouGov poll, 59 percent of Republicans agreed: “If blacks would only try harder, they would be as well off as whites.”
The same YouGov poll revealed that 59 percent of self-identified Republicans believe blacks are treated fairly by the criminal justice system.
70 percent of Republicans agreed that increased diversity hurts whites.
Republican-appointed judges give black defendants longer jail sentences, according to a Harvard study released in May.
55 percent of white Republicans agreed “blacks have worse jobs, income and housing than white people” because “most just don’t have the motivation or willpower to pull themselves up out of poverty” according to the Washington Post’s review of data from the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center.
Nearly twice as many Republicans than Democrats (42 percent versus 24 percent) believe that blacks are lazier than whites, according to the same NORC poll.
There is not a single significant poll that shows Republican voters with lower negative feelings about non-white populations versus Democrats or independents.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: The Democrats are the real racists because the GOP is the party of Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. Surely you’ve read the oft-repeated anecdote about how the Republican Party ended slavery and most importantly, fought for the passage of the Civil Rights Act.
All of this is correct.
Republicans would like you to believe that Republicans supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Democrats opposed it, which is only partially true. To understand the change in both parties’ ideology, all one has to do is count the votes.
There were 94 Southern Democrats in the House of Representatives. 7 voted for the bill.
There were 10 Southern Republicans in the House of Representatives. Zero voted for the bill.
Northern house Democrats voted in favor of the bill 145-9
Northern House Republicans favored the bill 138-24
Of the 21 Southern Senators (Democrat or Republican), only 1 voted in favor of the Civil Rights Act (A Texas Democrat).
As you can see, it wasn’t the Democrats who opposed the Civil Rights Act and the Republicans who favored it. Everyone supported the Civil Rights Act except the South. It was Southern politicians from both parties who voted against the legislation.
www.theroot.com/how-the-republican-party-became-the-party-of-racism-1827779221
So it is untrue that Democrats are playing blacks or democrats think blacks are too dumb to get ID's. What these numbers show is that republicans think that blacks are stupid enough to be told how republicans freed the slaves and democrats owned them and by repeating that over and over they could get enough blacks to leave the democratic party to put/keep them in power.
Obviously, IM2 cannot comprehend percentages or any sort of mathematics whatsoever.
