Allen West has been responding to a school bus surveillance
video showing three 15-year-old African American teenagers beating up a13-year-old white teenager, with comments like the one at left.
Is it possible for Allen West to stop being such a wiling
mouthpiece of right wing contempt for black Americans?
I reject his race based blaming. Criminal violence occurs
within the white community and with great frequency, but the entire white
community is not branded as a "failing community" because of it. It's a selective viewpoint and merely feeds
the common stereotyping of blacks as culturally degenerate. Black conservatives who go to conservative
media outlets that cater to white conservative audiences and explicitly link violence to some notion of black cultural degeneracy are doing little more than feeding the prevalent undercurrent of contempt for black voters
present in the far right of the GOP and too easily tolerated within the rest of
the party.
This kind of careless and sensational language is happily
consumed by the right wing rank & file of the party as a wonderful
validation of stereotypical views of black voters and black Americans more
generally, even as most of them have little more than shallow engagement with
black communities or black Americans.
Are you going to label whites as a failing community for the prevalent
sexually permissive culture that TV and media are awash in? I don't hear that
coming from West or other black conservatives, but somehow blacks are a failing
community?
Why in the world
does Allen West or any black conservative need to politicize this crime in this
way? For the sake of defending 2nd amendment rights, you must throw black
Americans under the bus and label our cultural life as degenerate? Defending the 2nd amendment doesn't require
denigrating your own community to score rhetorical political points. And when
you do it public forums that overwhelmingly cater to a white conservative
audience, I call check on that behavior.
That kind of commentary isn't intended to help address the challenges
that exist in black America, its merely intended to curry favor with a right
wing conservative community which is disinterested in black voters as a
political consistency and welcomes rhetoric which cosigns that view, ESPECIALLY
when it comes with the cover and cachet of having come from the mouth of a
black person first. Allen West is looking to make another run for political office and rhetorically serving up his own community to win favor with very conservative white voters appears to be the price he's willing to pay. I guess he's trying to make up for this.
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