Sgt. Rutledge, Racism and election 2012

Sgt. Matthew Luke Skid­more: Now lis­ten to me Braks and hear me well. You told me your­self that you did that awful thing I wouldn’t believe it, but Braks, why did you run away?

Sgt. Brax­ton Rut­ledge: Because I walked into some­thing none of us can fight…White woman business!

Sgt. Rut­ledge 1960

The Waco Kid: Hey Boys, look what I got here

Sher­iff Bart: Hey where are the White Women at?

Blaz­ing Sad­dles 1974

Today on Gran­ite Grok there is a story on the occu­pod smoke bomb that was thrown at the White house. This quote caught my eye:

You know, I think this might be racism? Attack­ing the home of a black man and his fam­ily. Where’s Bill Mahr, Janeane Garo­falo, hell the entire stenog­ra­pher media, (and the NH Dead Peo­ple Party) to dis­avow this uncivil act of racial prejudice?

Wait. My bad. They can’t feign out­rage because they are prob­a­bly all too busy hold­ing a moment of silence like the one in honor of the guy who may have shot at the White house.

I found this an inter­est­ing because the NYT and Jessie Jack­son are going on about racist repub­li­cans again.

Note that polit­i­cally oppos­ing this pres­i­dent is racism, but throw­ing smoke bombs or shoot­ing at a White House occu­pied by a black pres­i­dent, no worries.

Of course when it comes to racial dou­ble stan­dards all of this is small pota­toes next to the events of Octo­ber past.

You might remem­ber a time when a black fel­low by the name of Her­man Cain was not only lead­ing the field, but was dri­ving the debate in a direc­tion of a sim­pli­fied trans­par­ent tax plan.

That could not be. If the GOP fron­trun­ner is a black man who grew up in the seg­re­gated south the entire nar­ra­tive is threatened.

Peo­ple won­der why Her­man Cain dropped out of the pres­i­den­tial race. Why didn’t he stand and fight? I won­dered it myself. It wasn’t until I watched Sgt. Rut­ledge and remem­bered the gen­er­a­tion that Mr. Cain was born into that I really understood.

1^st Sgt. Brax­ton Rut­ledge: Any­one come, you ain’t gonna be in here with me.

Mary Beecher: What are you talk­ing about?

1^st Sgt. Brax­ton Rut­ledge: I’m talk­ing about you. A white woman. White women only spell trou­ble for any of us.

Mary Beecher: That’s non­sense. We’re just two peo­ple try­ing to stay alive.

1^st Sgt. Brax­ton Rut­ledge: Lady, you don’t know how hard I’m try­ing to stay alive.

Hope­fully to a per­son born in the 80’s such talk might sound like non­sense, to a per­son born when I was (1963) it might bring thoughts of Blaz­ing Saddles:

But to a per­son born before that time, a black man born in 1945. It’s some­thing com­pletely dif­fer­ent. Look at this scene from Sgt. Rut­ledge, pay par­tic­u­larly atten­tion from 2:36 – 3:47.

There is no sin­gle racist stereo­type more pro­nounced than the black man threat­en­ing a white woman. It was the clas­sic racial image invoked by those who wanted to main­tain white supremacy. It’s been a club used against the black race for longer than I can remem­ber. It cost Emmett Till (Cain was 10 at the time) and many oth­ers like him their lives. In cin­ema you saw it in Birth of a Nation and you saw the con­se­quences in To Kill a Mock­ing­bird. It is clas­sic racism on a grand scale.

Yet not once while the Politico ran dozens of sto­ries on the flim­si­est of evi­dence, not once while Glo­ria Allred was fish­ing for accusers, not once when the entire lib­eral news media pro­claimed him guilty and the late night comics made jokes did any­one look at what was hap­pen­ing and say:

Doesn’t any­body see a bit of Jim Crow here?

Of course they didn’t! Her­man Cain is a con­ser­v­a­tive, he is a repub­li­can and when you accept lib­er­al­ism as your reli­gion and you make your liv­ing off of that meme not only do you stay silent in the face of that meme, you embrace it.

And that more than any­thing else is why Her­man Cain, in my opin­ion, did not stand and fight, he saw the enlight­ened and tol­er­ant media, to their dis­grace, return to the worst days of his youth and saw a fight he believed instinc­tively, he could not win.

If they left is not ashamed of them­selves they ought to be.

Update: I think Smitty mis­un­der­stands me. I don’t sug­gest that Her­man Cain should play the race card, I’m sug­gest­ing a race card was played on Her­man Cain, an old fash­ioned race card one lib­er­ally used against blacks.