CPAC's K. Carl Smith is a Tea Party GOP Black Political Humanzee

K. Carl Smith is a clown. Frederick Douglass "escaped from slave master entitlements?" Time to sharpen my knives.

Chauncey DeVega has been a good boy for way too long...

When your "expert" response to the very reasonable question as to how do you reconcile the Republican Party's embrace of the Southern Strategy, the politics of white racial resentment, and the Tea Party GOP's naked political coitus with the former Confederacy and Dixiecrats, and your suggestion that black folks should find a natural home in the Republican Party is "There’s racism on my 6-year-old grandson’s soccer team," and "no political party is perfect," the argument is already lost.

The literary Uncle Tom is a misunderstood "historical" figure.

By comparison, the day-to-day Uncle Tomism embodied by the bootblack garbage pail kid black conservatives like K. Carl Smith is all too real, plain, and clear.

For them, if it is White it is Right. One can understand how Whiteness, as a social, political, and economic force, is a type of property that many, if not most, white folks are deeply invested in.

How can the Other can make such a calculation for him or herself? Ultimately, I would suggest that it is just a crude material calculus about owning some share of the psychic wages of Whiteness.

An example. From the Talking Point Memo's profile of K. Carl Smith:

Smith’s lectures focus almost entirely on how, during the Civil War and through the Jim Crow era, Democrats were the Southern party of white supremacy while Republicans, especially Abraham Lincoln, fought for progress instead. On Friday, Smith derided modern Democrats as the historical descendants of the KKK. Remarks like those prompted shocked pushback from a progressive black radio host in attendance, Kim Brown (much to Smith’s annoyance), who after several brief interjections was shouted down by the audience while trying to ask them whether it’s important to condemn racism within their party. 

Needless to say, the obvious question this raises is the one Brown was getting at: If Republicans are the party of Lincoln, then why did black voters overwhelmingly abandon them over the last 50 years? And does it have anything to do with the reasons white southerners fled the Democratic Party in droves during the same period? In other words, if the Confederacy’s spiritual descendants are Democrats, then why are their biological descendants voting Republican. 

There’s not really a lot of mystery here for historians: Democrats, led by Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, championed civil rights legislation and integration, leaving an opening for the GOP, led by President Richard Nixon, to adopt a race-baiting strategy that drew in disaffected segregationists. This is an uncontroversial enough take on events that the chairman of the RNC himself apologized on behalf of his party for Nixon’s “Southern strategy” at a 2005 speech to the NAACP. 

Smith backs off a little bit when asked how he handles this common complaint. The real lesson is — to quote Some Like It Hot — nobody’s perfect. 

“When you break the history down of Nixon’s ‘Southern strategy,’ the point is there is no political party that’s perfect,” he said. “Back in 1870 when they ended Reconstruction, the Republicans joined forces with the Democrats and that was wrong. And, of course, Democrats have a longer history of being anti-black than the GOP. So there’s no perfect political party even today.”

The joke is on the K. Carl Smiths of the world. Their White overseers and ideological masters may allow them the privilege of cleaning the toilet in the Tea Party GOP's political house. They may even allow them a seat at the table like a pet who is trained to eat with silverware for the amusement of select guests.

In private, these same white reactionary herrenvolk Tea Party conservatives have nothing but contempt for black conservative human mascots like K. Carl Smith. Why? Because the Tea Party GOP and its White Right base understand, deeply, on an instinctive level, that no self-respecting and mentally health person of color will have anything at all to do with them.

Instead, K. Carl Smith, and the political Right-wing humanzees such as Herman Cain and Jessie Lee Patterson, belong in a human zoo of freakish political oddities.

K. Carl Smith and his ilk can collect the trinkets and jewels being thrown at them for their political Judas show...or earned from selling books to White Nationalists who buy into their twisted message at CPAC.