By Alec Dubro at TomPaine.com:
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2007/05/08/reagan_white_as_snow.phpRonald Reagan. The man was a saint, a positive saint. Such strength, such warmth, such conviction, such vision. Such claptrap.
Reagan was a mean, crazy old man with a withering contempt for most of the world’s people, beginning with African Americans and extending most strongly to black Africans.
Last week, as we’ve heard, the Republican presidential candidates praised the name and heritage of Ronald Reagan 40 times during the televised Show and Tell at the Reagan Presidential Library. That none of them mentioned Reagan’s legacy of white supremacy and support for apartheid is a little like invoking Jefferson Davis and not mentioning treason or slavery. Actually, a lot like it.
Ronald Reagan was a white supremacist to his very core, and left enough traces over his lengthy political career so that it’s evident for anyone who cares to look—which apparently few do.
Domestically, he opposed every legislative remedy for African Americans, betraying a meanness of spirit and an open racism. As Sidney Blumenthal wrote in The Guardian in 2003:
Reagan opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, opposed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (calling it "humiliating to the South"), and ran for governor of California in 1966 promising to wipe the Fair Housing Act off the books. "If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house," he said, "he has a right to do so." After the Republican convention in 1980, Reagan traveled to the county fair in Neshoba, Mississippi, where, in 1964, three Freedom Riders had been slain by the Ku Klux Klan. Before an all-white crowd of tens of thousands, Reagan declared: "I believe in states' rights."It’s hard to believe now, but in 1965, a higher percentage of congressional Republicans voted for the Voting Rights Act than Democrats. Reagan, then, wasn’t following party tradition; he was making a grab for the white racist vote—and it worked. Southern Democrats abandoned the party en masse for one more welcoming to white supremacy. No wonder so many loved, and still love, the man: He validated people’s whiteness....