Courtland Milloy is a Metro Section Washington Post columnist. The other day someone on this blog intimated that I would have no idea how a black person would feel and that I was insulting. Let’s look at it through someone’s eyes who meets all the qualifications. I have no opinion. Milloy has been with the Washington Post since 1983. I found the opinion piece to be rather humbling. I would like to highlight someone else’s opinion. We don’t have to agree with Milloy, but we need to view this incident through someone’s eyes other than our own. These are not MY sentiments but I feel it is imperative that we acknowledge how someone else might feel.
Washington Post 3/24/10
Courtland Milloy: Congressmen show grace, restraint in the face of disrespect
I know how the “tea party” people feel, the anger, venom and bile that many of them showed during the recent House vote on health-care reform. I know because I want to spit on them, take one of their “Obama Plan White Slavery” signsand knock every racist and homophobic tooth out of their Cro-Magnon heads.
I am sick of these people — and those who make excuses for them and their victim-whiner mentality.
They aren’t racists, the apologists say. They just don’t like deficits and government takeover of health care. So what does using vile epithets for black or gay congressmen have to do with that? The tea party people didn’t refer to white Democrats using racial epithets. No one yelled “white trash” or “redneck cracker” at any of those congressmen. And none of their own ever stands up and declares that such practices are morally wrong.
Reps. John L. Lewis (D-Ga.), Emanuel Cleaver II (D-Missouri), James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.), Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and others deserve a hats off for their restraint and composure.
Cleaver told me: “I said to this one person, ‘You spat on me.’ I thought he was going to say, ‘Hey, I was yelling. Sorry.’ But he continuing yelling and, for a few seconds, I pointed at him and said, ‘You spat on me.’ ”
How about pointing and declaring: “Spit in my face, fist in yours”? But that’s just me.
Cleaver, 66, is a Methodist minister who organized the Kansas City chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (a civil rights organization founded by Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy).
Cleaver grew up in a house in Texas that had been used as a slave cabin only one generation before, became a congressman serving on the House committee on Homeland Security — and gets spit in the face from some tea party racist.
And he refuses to press charges, no less.
“I would prefer to believe that the man who allowed his saliva to hit my face was irrational for a moment,” Cleaver said.
Have mercy. The preacher walks the walk.
“What I saw on their faces, on the signs, what I was hearing, made me think, ‘This is not about health care,’ ” said Clyburn, 70, who is House majority whip. The son of a minister from Sumter, S.C., he also serves as leader of the House Democrats’ Faith Working Group.
“It reminds me of that period in our history right after Reconstruction,” Clyburn said, “when South Carolina had a black governor and the political gains were lost because of vigilantism, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan.”
Of course, black people are not supposed to have such memories. Forgive — and forget; that’s what we are supposed to do. See, we live in post-racial America now, with a black president and all. So, if anybody is racist, it’s black people.
The esteemed Stuart Taylor all but said as much in a 2008 column he wrote for the National Journal.
After discounting the racism at campaign rallies for the Republican presidential ticket, Taylor concluded, “The ugliest race-tinged comment by any prominent leader during this campaign came not from a Republican but from Rep. John Lewis, the Georgia Democrat. . . . Lewis accused McCain and Palin on October 11 of ‘sowing the seeds of hatred and division,’ likening them to George Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor who created an ‘atmosphere of hate [in which] four little girls were killed.’ Lewis should be ashamed of himself.”
So, here we are, nearly two years later, and Lewis is walking a two-block gauntlet of white hate from the Capitol to the Cannon House Office Building. A racial epithet spews from a crowd being restrained by Capitol Police.
“It reminded me of photographs I saw of the jeering crowds when Central High was being integrated by the Little Rock 9 in 1957,” said Lewis, 70, a civil rights veteran and one of the nation’s most distinguished advocates for justice and racial quality.
“It also reminded me of the angry demeanor of white people when a group of us were being arrested in February 1960 in Nashville, during a civil rights demonstration. As we were being led to a police van, people lined the streets just like they were at the Capitol, and they were yelling ‘The niggers are coming!’ and ‘Go back to Africa!’ ”
There he goes again, remembering.
Makes me mad as hell.
Btw, Starry, you didn’t answer the question in 39.
In what way did the TEA Partiers do damage to THEIR cause? They only protested as is their right.
I mean, you brought it up. Just asking.
Oh, and how about my firearm scenario? How is that different from health care insurance?
Article 1 of the United States Constitution authorizes Congress to pass laws that affect the United States, its territories and its people. It authorizes Congress to levy taxes from social security to milk pasteurization. The Constitution doesn’t authorize milk pasteurization either, is that unconstitutional too?
The Tea Partiers lost their fight in Congress and now they’re angry and look stupid. That’s how they damaged their cause.
A firearm is very different from health care insurance.
And if I were a Supreme Court Justice and you were arguing your case in front of me, I would ask one simple question:
What article/section/clause of the United States Constitution does the Health Care legislation violate?
Answer that.
Starry, my firearms are definitely health care insurance. And they are not different. They are products made by another party. Just like insurance policies.
Under your logic, the powers to enact laws allow Congress to do anything. Do you really want an all powerful Congress. I don’t even want an all powerful conservative Congress. I want a Congress with the limited powers authorized under the Constitution.
The point is that the Constitution is very specific about what the federal government is allowed to do. If you are talking about this clause:
“To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers”
Remember those “other Powers” are enumerated. And none of those enumerated powers allows the Congress to force citizens to purchase products of any sort from third parties or the government. It is not necessary to show what authorization that violates as there is nothing in the Constitution that allows it in the first place.
The only thing that might keep it in play is because the SCOTUS continues to support bad law concerning “promote General Welfare” clause or the “interstate commerce” clause. But on its face, I see nothing in there that allows the mandates.
Just because you like to be dictated to by the Fed’l gov’t, does not mean that its constitutional.