Daily Kos: Black Conservatives Serve Their 'White Masters' and Support 'Chains and Bondage' of Voter ID

September 11th, 2012 7:01 AM

"Black conservatives are one of the rotten legs supporting the racist stool that is the Tea Party GOP," pronounced Daily Kos blogger Chauncey DeVega. Like many leftists, he can see their lack of outrage over a requirement of a photo ID to vote as exactly akin to supporting the "chains and bondage" of slavery.

"It is part of a bargain which they have made," the Kosmonaut lectured. "For many, it is a lucrative hustle that pays the bills and brings the marginally talented an outsized amount of attention and exposure. This makes their choice to stand mute, or in some cases to serve as the human props and political blackface mask in support of efforts to demobilize African American voters, no less contemptible." He cited a New York Times op-ed by Yale historian David Blight saying conservatives should just be honest and pay off blacks not to vote:

To those potentially millions of young, elderly, brown and black registered voters who, despite no evidence of voter fraud, they now insist must obtain government ID, why not merely offer money? Pay them not to vote. Give each a check for $711 in honor of Frederick Douglass. Buy their “freedom,” and the election. Call it the “Frederick Douglass Voter Voucher.”

DeVega concluded:

Black conservatives who stand silent on these matters, or commit the civic sin of supporting the disenfranchisement of black and brown folks (as well as the poor), demonstrate that they too are slaves to the psychic wages of Whiteness--and the material gains that come with the choice to be a political Judas, Kiplingesque middle man, or colonial administrator who can interpret the drums of the natives.

Black conservatives such as these are not the descendants of Frederick Douglass, a great man who beat down an evil white overseer and slave breaker named Covey, escaped to freedom, and became a legend for all time.

Rather, the black conservatives of the C.L. Bryant stripe, those Clarence Thomases, Herman Cains, Allen Wests, and other related ilk, were more likely to play the role of the mythic Black Confederate, fighting and dying in the service of their white masters to keep other African-Americans in chains and bondage.

The headline is “They Claim Frederick Douglass as a Hero But Today's (Black) Republicans Would Keep Him From Voting.”