Some Blacks Still Mentally Shackled To The Plantation

The final elec­tions of the 2018 sea­son will be held today November 27^th, in the south­ern state of Mississippi. The elec­tions are a runoff between Republican-appoint­ed Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, a white woman appoint­ed to fill the Senate seat vacat­ed by the retir­ing Republican Senator Thad Cochran African-American Mike Espy, for­mer Congressman, and Clinton agri­cul­ture secretary.

Neither can­di­date received more than 50% of the votes in the November 6^th elec­tions; by state law, this means that there has to be a runoff elec­tion to decide a win­ner. Today is that day.
Hyde-Smith’s par­ents report­ed­ly sent her to a whites-only school after school seg­re­ga­tion was out­lawed. This can hard­ly be laid at Cindy Hyde-Smith’s feet, but she con­tin­ued the trend by send­ing her own daugh­ter to one such school to avoid send­ing her to a school in which she would mix with black students.

The cam­paign is draw­ing a lot of atten­tion because of com­ments Cindy Hyde-Smith made on the cam­paign trail.
Normally a Republican can­di­date in ruby red Mississippi would swat away a demo­c­ra­t­ic oppo­nent, not so much this time.
Donald Trump’s two cam­paign events for Hyde-Smith on November 26^th seem to indi­cate a sense of ner­vous­ness on Republicans.
The Doug Jones win in neigh­bor­ing Alabama may be upper­most in the minds of Hyde-Smith’s sup­port­ers as well.

At issue are com­ments made by Hyde-Smith, Referring to a local ranch­er, in which she joked that, “if he invit­ed me to a pub­lic hang­ing, I’d be on the front row.” 
At anoth­er event, the sen­a­tor sug­gest­ed to a group of young vot­ers that vot­er sup­pres­sion would be “a great idea.”
“There’s a lot of lib­er­al folks in those oth­er schools who maybe we don’t want to vote,” she said. “Maybe we want to make it just a lit­tle more dif­fi­cult. And I think that’s a great idea.”
Cindy Hyde-Smith has not real­ly made a full-throat­ed apol­o­gy for her state­ments. She is seem­ing­ly invest­ed in run­ning out the elec­tion clock rather than apol­o­gize for her insen­si­tive and racist com­ments.
Attaching her­self ful­ly to Donald Trump’s coat-tails, Cindy Hyde-Smith seems to think that is all she needs to win in Mississippi.
She may very well be right in think­ing that.

Mississippi not only has the dubi­ous dis­tinc­tion of being one of the most racist states in the union, but it also had the high­est num­ber of lynch­ings of African-Americans dur­ing the Jim Crow era.
That Hyde-Smith thinks that sit­ting front and cen­ter at a pub­lic lynch­ing tells a great deal about her human­i­ty. 
If elect­ed to the Senate, it will speak even more clear­ly about those who vot­ed for her.
That Mississippi kind of brain rot has cer­tain­ly kept that state one of the most impov­er­ished and depen­dent on fed­er­al aid.
This brings me to the point of this article.

Not sur­pris­ing is the response of some Republicans in the state when asked about Cindy Hyde-Smith’s com­ments.
No.……I’m not talk­ing about whites; they are what they are; I’m refer­ring to some blacks in the state, who still sup­port the Republican par­ty.
“I just choose to look at it as a pos­si­ble mis­take and chalk it up to that,” said John Mosley Jr., an African-American Republican who ran for may­or of Moss Point, Mississippi, in 2017. “And I haven’t giv­en it much thought after­ward.”
“I’m a Republican. I sup­port Cindy Hyde-Smith,” said Charles Evers. “She didn’t say any­thing about black folks; she didn’t say any­thing about white folks. She just said, ‘If there’s a hang­ing, I’ll be in the front row’ or some­thing like that. She didn’t mean any­thing like that. She was say­ing some­thing. I don’t give a damn what oth­er peo­ple think.”

It makes me won­der whether these two are afraid of being strung up on the near­est tree. 
Please tell us how you real­ly feel, we will not tell any­one.
According to (post​bul​letin​.com), Evers is the 96-year-old broth­er of the late Medgar Evers, an NAACP leader who was assas­si­nat­ed on June 12, 1963, out­side his home in Jackson Byron De La Beckwith, a mem­ber of the White Citizens Council. Two tri­als in 1964 result­ed in hung juries. Beckwith was con­vict­ed of Evers’ mur­der on Feb. 5, 1994.

When I saw these com­ments and oth­ers, my ini­tial instinct was rage, just unadul­ter­at­ed rage at what I thought was the abject stu­pid­i­ty of the indi­vid­u­als involved.
Maybe some of that in these men and oth­ers like them, but there is always anoth­er per­spec­tive.
I have been writ­ing on this sub­ject for some time now, [the idea of black and Latino Republicanism], both of which seem to oper­ate in an Orwellian uni­verse, divorced from the real­i­ty of their indi­vid­ual existence.

I am mind­ful that for many in the deep south, the Democratic par­ty of George Wallace and Bull O’Connor still leaves a bit­ter taste in the mouths of peo­ple alive. The likes of Charles Evers, who lost his broth­er to an assas­s­in’s bul­lets.
I can only imag­ine how they would find it hard to sup­port the Democratic par­ty, which was the par­ty of seg­re­ga­tion­ists.
Juxtapose that with the ini­tial loy­al­ty African-Americans felt for the Republican par­ty because Lincoln, the Republican pres­i­dent, signed the Emancipation dec­la­ra­tion, and the obsti­na­cy becomes more under­stand­able, even though intol­er­a­ble and no less infuriating.

The miss­ing nexus for African-Americans who still cling to the Republican par­ty, is their inabil­i­ty to think out­side the way they were pro­grammed to think as [sub­hu­man sub­jects] of a sys­tem that pro­ject­ed itself as supe­ri­or to them.
Sure, Lincoln, a Republican President, was forced to free the slaves, but he did so only because it suit­ed his inter­est in main­tain­ing the Union.
Lincoln had no burn­ing desire to be rid of slav­ery, it was con­ve­nient for him, and his eman­ci­pa­tion dec­la­ra­tion was acute­ly tai­lored to fit those ends.
On the con­trary, Democratic President Lyndon Johnson presided over the sign­ing of both the [Civil and Voting Rights Acts] which changed the way blacks are treat­ed in this coun­try.
The sign­ing of both these pieces of leg­is­la­tion result­ed in whites’ mass exo­dus from the Democratic Party to the Republican par­ty.
Today the most loy­al base of the Democratic par­ty is African-Americans.

The Republican par­ty is ful­ly con­ver­sant with those facts. Subsequently, the par­ty isn’t try­ing to recruit blacks into the par­ty.
If you think about it, why would the Republican par­ty, which has become far too white and far too racist for even for­mer white Republicans, want to attract blacks?
Considering that Whites left the Democratic par­ty over that par­ty’s sup­port for blacks?
It is impor­tant nev­er to for­get that whites left the Democratic par­ty for no oth­er rea­son than that they believed anoth­er group of peo­ple had no right to the fun­da­men­tal rights and dig­ni­ty they enjoyed, as a mat­ter of course!
Nevertheless, as the small per­cent­age of blacks who still sup­port the Republican par­ty is con­cerned, the par­ty will not chase them out. 
At least not yet.…..who knows what this far-right par­ty of Stephen Miller, Cindy Hyde-Smith, and Donald Trump will do ulti­mate­ly?
The par­ty still has a demo­graph­ic prob­lem. As it strug­gles with per­cep­tions and a shrink­ing white base, it still needs a cou­ple of token black stooges to fend off some of the attacks on its racism.
Sorry Mia Love, Michael Steele, et al. 
Not many expect a Mike Espy win tonight in Mississippi, indeed, not this writer but stranger things have hap­pened.
I ful­ly expect white Mississippians will act like white Mississippians but the negroes, though.….….