Well, she did speak out and like millions of black Americans who have to deal with the daily rigors of being black in these United States, she wasn't surprised at all.
Patricia Carroll, the CNN camerawoman who was assaulted with peanuts and called an animal by two attendees at the Republican National Convention, told Journal-isms on Thursday that "I hate that it happened, but I'm not surprised at all."
Carroll, who agreed to be named for the first time, said she does not want her situation to be used for political advantage. "This situation could happen to me at the Democratic convention or standing on the street corner. Racism is a global issue," she said by telephone from Tampa.
But Carroll, 34, said that as an Alabama native, she was not surprised. "This is Florida, and I'm from the Deep South," she said. "You come to places like this, you can count the black people on your hand. They see us doing things they don't think I should do."
Carroll noted of the Republican convention, "There are not that many black women there."
She's right. There aren't many black women out there, at the convention or in the GOP's voter ranks. You can literally count the number of black people present at the RNC on one hand, not counting anyone who happened to be part of "the help" out back.
Well, Artur Davis couldn't be the only one to hype up the crowd, so it fell to Condoleezza Rice to get the crowd's blood up:
“Ours has never been a narrative of grievance and entitlement. We have not believed that I am doing poorly because you are doing well. We have not been jealous of one another and never been envious of each other’s success,” she said to more cheers. “Ours has been a belief in opportunity.”
Talk about knocking out two birds with one stone - score a hit against Americans complaining about the nation's wealth inequality while giving the so-called racial grievance-mongers a glancing blow. Rather efficient, she is.
“A little girl grows up in Jim Crow Birmingham, the segregated city of the south where her parents can’t take her to a movie theater or a restaurant, but they have her absolutely convinced that even if she can’t have a hamburger at the Woolworth’s lunch counter she can be President of the United States, if she wanted to be, and she becomes the Secretary of State,” Rice said to more deafening, extended cheers of approval. “Yes, America has a way of making the impossible seem inevitable in retrospect. But of course it has never been inevitable — it took leadership, and it took courage and it took belief in our values.”
Juxtapose the above with the current company she keeps - the same people who're actively denying minorities and the elderly the right to vote. The same people who wouldn't have minded if she ended up being one of the four young girls blown up in a church basement in Jim Crow Birmingham.
At this point, someone points out that the people behind Jim Crow were Democrats and that, in a nutshell, the GOP is still "the party of Lincoln" and blacks are stupid for abandoning them for LBJ's Great Society and Civil Rights Act Flavor-Aid. Here's some required reading material that should finally explain, once and for all, how black Americans saw the great big bait-and-switch coming and how they managed to gingerly step across the aisle without missing a beat. I should thank @Jon_Rollings for bringing this up, but his Twitter account wound up receiving a burn notice a few days back. I can't imagine why.*
Meanwhile, the Field Negro is not pleased with Mia Love:
Ms. Love, of course, isn't from Utah. Her parents are Haitian, and she migrated to Utah from Connecticut.
Ms. Love represents the typical immigrant who came to America looking for a better life with her family. Her American experience is not like the American experience of the Negro born in America. She came here looking for a better life, and like most immigrants she found it. You could argue that anything would be better than the Third World existence that most immigrants left behind.
Ms. Love, in her mind, isn't burdened by America's sad history when it comes the blacks who were brought here under quite different conditions. So sadly she doesn't even view herself as one of those American blacks. When her white friends in Utah tell her that she is "different than those other blacks", she actually believes it.
I can speak to this, because I too came to America from a different country. I was brought here by my family as well. The difference is that my parents didn't come to stay. They came for an education and went back home to the country that they loved. I was taught to understand that I am no different than the Negro in America, the only difference is that my ancestors came off the boats just a little bit sooner. Ms. Love is the type of Negro who looks down on the American born Negro, because she has failed to understand their history and where she fits into it.
Yes, the black immigrants who have nary an inkling of nor a desire to understand the experience of black Americans tend to look their noses down on us. And that's a shame, because it leaves them wide open to be played like fiddles in the Tennessee foothills. White Americans love these guys because they represent what they'd rather black Americans should be and therefore, there's no longer any need or effort to understand black Americans on their own terms. Also, having Mia and a score of other black men and women around allows the GOP to maintain its culturally diverse bonafides while the whitest of white bread continues to administer the party and the Oval Office, whenever the GOP can put itself in a position to command it once more.
It says a lot about the GOP's chances of winning black hearts and minds when there are more black folks on stage than in attendance.
*Anyone who still believes in Twitter Gulag should get a refresher course on how Twitter actually works. Slamming the API with multiple posts just seconds apart is a surefire way of going to Twitter Jail. It's why the most devoted and prolific Tweeters have Jail accounts.
