FBI Wages War on Black Folks: Southern Strategy Rises Again [View All]

[McCamy Taylor]

We were warned. Pat Buchanan told us that it was coming months ago when he was on Countdown. He was being interviewed by Keith Olberman and he said that if Republican's were smart they would mobilze their base by making them scared of Democrats, especially Black Democrats, like Charlie Rangel who would head a Congressional Committee if the Dems took over the House. This is, of course, Nixon's old Southern Strategy which Buchanan helped perfect for Nixon back in the early 1970's and which Papa Bush used to such advantage in his own presidential campaign in 1988 with the imfamous Willie Horton ad and his War Against Black People aka the War on Drugs (ironically, a war which may have been fueled by cocaine supplied by "freedom fighters" from central America who were dealing drugs on the side but whom the administration protected because of their anti-communist politics). Bill Clinton brokered a peace between the United States and its African-american citizens, and in the first few years of the W. administration that peace seemed likely to hold. Bush Jr. was more interested in scapegoating muslims. African-americans were embraced under the umbrella of Christian Americans who might possibly be sold school vouchers and family values.

However, Katrina and sagging poll numbers changed all that. Now, the GOP needs something to revitalize the base--and to make people stop hating the Bush administration for their mishandling of the ongoing economic disaster of the Gulf Coast reconstruction. So, the War on Black Folks, aka the Southern Strategy has been resurrected.

I first posted this when Buchanan first made his pronouncement sometime back in May. At the time, I was mostly going on a hunch and a little bit of evidence---the McKinney case which had been thrust into the national media spotlight for no particularly good reason except that someone wanted it there, the Barry Bonds case which did not even seem worthy of being national news, the Duke Lacross rape case, the so called election hearings in Ohio in 2005 in which Bill Frist's attorney presented evidence that the NAACP had given away crack in exhange for votes (evidence which was later refuted but only after the Ohio legislature passed draconian legislation), the new Voter ID-Poll Tax in Georgia that unfairly burdens minority voters.

Since then, I have seen the evidence accumulate that there has been an ongoing conspiracy to target African-americans in this country. Why, when everyone has known about Jack Abramoff for years (the president even fired a prosecutor who was going to indict him), did the FBI choose to spend its resources setting up a sting operarion to go after Jefferson Davis and then to stage a media attention grabbing raid on his Congressional Office? Why has every African-american politician in the Dallas City government been under investigation for a year and why was this story on the front page of the Dallas news paper recently if they havent been charged with anything? Why were the feds so interested in going after Barry Bonds out of all the other juicing athletes that they wanted to pressure another ball player to help them gather evidence on him and him alone? Why is Janet Jackson's breast so much more sinful than any white woman's breast? We have seen more than a few of those on national television, too, but the one the right wing keeps harping back on is the Black one.

Finally tonight, the inevitable story, the one that I knew was coming. We just learned that the FBI had a spy in a black muslin group in Florida that never actually committed any terrorist acts but "talked" about them. For all we know, the FBI agent did all the talking and the others nodded. All they are telling us is that Black Folks were gonna blow us up. Shades of the 1970's.

There are clearly two tiers of justice. White criminals are nabbed reluctantly when their crimes become so glaring that they can not be ignored. African-americans are targetted, stalked, set up, entrapped, studied and finally paraded in front of the public as guilty before they are ever tried in a court of law. And every time it is Al Gonzales's Department of Justice doing the dirty business.

This is war. War against common sense and decency and American values. It is a war to make White people in suburbs vote Republican out of fear for an enemy that does not exist. It is a very nasty attempt to revive racism in a country where anti-Black racism is trying to die a natural death. It reveals the ugliest side of the right wing and of the southern Republican Party which has hijacked the national Republican Party. And I hope that Karl Rove and Pat Buchanan find themselves sorely surprised this fall when their New Southern Strategy does not work.