Getting Real About “Race”

A response to Patrick Buchanan

Article by Dr. Ada Fisher
- North Carolina National Committee Woman

Yesterday while sitting in the corner barbershop, six police cars flew down the street. The chasers brought back the report that last night one young sixteen year old black man was shot on a lot next to a house I previously bought, fixed up and sold in an attempt to stabilize my neighborhood. Today a robbery happened at the Black Credit Union in my community. And so it goes, . . .increasingly worsening with the economy for there are no Enterprise Zones here like Jack Kemp championed and often it seems that I am the only Republican who is out and among my people even when they won’t vote for me.

I get so tired of people who don’t live in the black or Hispanic neighborhoods having so much lip, which they ought to keep zipped, about black Americans. It is insulting when fellow Republicans spew forth rhetoric which is as tired and pathetic as that from the black panderers such as Jesse Jackson who seemingly want to keep us perpetual victims acting as our new black overseers—those with too much education and too little memory.

I agree with one thing that Patrick J. Buchanan said in reference to Barack Obama’s call for a conversation about race in America. It should be a 2-way conversation as Buchanan notes but this time, listen to voices being suppressed by “the chosen” whether democrat or conservative Republicans.

Put your facts in an accurate perspective Mr. Buchanan and then we may speak. The first recorded blacks came to America as navigator assistants with Columbus and early explorers, followed by indentured servants [black as well as white] and then the enslaved multitudes to which you refer. Meanwhile Columbus was given credit for discovering America, as if the Native Americans weren’t already here. These two groups were significant in my ancestry and that of many African Americans. These groups had their own religious beliefs reflected in spirituals and songs about their motherland which refers to praying to a rising sun, separations and death (Negro Slave Songs in the United States, the sentinel work on these songs, by my father, a Republican, Miles Mark Fisher).

It was the Republican Party which instigated civil rights and measures to free slaves of the south; however, as with the Native American's treaties, promises made such as 40 acres and a mule, were broken by undermining democrats and much farmland lost and sometimes stolen. Nonetheless some decent folks many of whom were Republicans through the Freedman’s Bureau helped to establish many of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Undue credit is taken by others for much of the progress of African Americans with little appreciation of what we have done for ourselves. As Obama and King are given too much play, many others who helped us make great strides such as Frederick Douglas, Marcus Garvey, Booker T. Washington, Touisant L’Overture, Edward Brooks (the first Black Senator, a Republican), Malcolm X, etc. are increasingly relegated into oblivion.

Most kids in this country of all colors don’t know that post reconstruction all of the black representatives in Congress were Republicans from the south. How many know of the black Frenchman Alexander Dumas who wrote “the Three Musketeers” featured in the marvelous Oscar winning movie, “Slum Dog Millionaire?” For Condoleezza Rice’s brilliance and comfort with the Russian language, many of either ethnicity know not that Puskin, one of that nation’s most famous writers was also black.

During the era of the fifties when Civil Rights is most remembered, it was Adam Clayton Powell who fought behind the scenes to legislatively ensure integration of the schools while others marched garnering the publicity. Diggs, Dellums, Hawkins, Chisholm lone black Senator Brook (a Republican) and so many others fought for the legislation of inclusion, not the crumbs of appeasement for so many wrongs committed as those Buchanan cites. And "Ike" in integrating the Army more than allowed black Americans to give with their last measure of devotion their lives on the battlefields defending a nation which had too often denied us at home the very freedoms we fought for abroad.

Affirmative Action a program started in Equal Opportunity efforts by a black man, Republican Assistant Secretary of Labor, Arthur Fletcher of the Nixon Administration is often decried as something special for blacks. In reality, white females (who are not a minority, but a majority neglected) accumulated a large portion of the benefits accrued from welfare, food stamps, Pell grants (signed under Nixon), Medicaid (covers more white females in nursing homes than the often portrayed black welfare mothers), and poverty programs from which those with degrees of either race benefited as much as those whom the programs were designed to help.

My parents told us and many parents tell their kids to prepare themselves academically and their opportunities will come. On the block where too many of our children hang they rationalize why when I can make more in a day selling dope than those with all that education will in a month. And on the flip side, in the last two years I have recommended eight students of color who prepared themselves with more than a 3.7 grade point average, 1300 on the SAT, etc. and none was offered a full scholarship into the Consolidated University of North Carolina System. Had these students of tax paying parents been illegal immigrants, many legislators who are democrats want to give them free or in-state tuition consideration. Oh how quickly that tide is turning against equal opportunities for blacks as our numbers are overwhelmed by a rising tide of illegal immigrants.

Black on black crime is inexcusable but so is the fact that schools in predominantly minority communities are most likely to get less funding, more inexperienced teachers, go without books and fail to hold high standards for their students. You worry about what black folks do to whites and I live with what we do to each other; yet when I want to discuss help we can use a different perspective, you don’t want to talk about it if it doesn’t fit your ideas of what might work or if it doesn't directly impact your life.

I am in this for solutions and know that as a biologist by training, there is no such thing as race in birds, horses or other animal kingdom residences. This is something used in humans to divide and conquer by those picking up the spoils. Let’s have a conversation about solutions which don’t rob tax payers dry, which puts citizens first, which recognizes there is beauty in diversity, which appreciates that we must speak a common language English, and which never denies the rights of people to vote. We must be standard bearers for freedom, democracy, and the US Constitution or else this nation will perish and no one will much care what you look like.

Good Job Ada! Ada is a great spokesman for our Republican Party and I am amused by Ada's refusal to ever capitalize "democrat". Subtle but revealing.