Cord Jefferson has an interesting title and short article at gawker on “House Republicans Meet at a Former Slave Plantation to Practice Talking to Black People.” The House Republicans are meeting for a winter retreat in the old colonial and slavery oriented town of Williamsburg, Virginia. To talk about guns, the debt, and government spending. He notes that irony indeed of meeting in a room named for a place of racial oppression — for a session about reaching to minorities and women, and more:
And what better place to talk about making inroads with oppressed groups than in a room named after a famous Williamsburg plantation, located in the tony Kingsmill Resort, which itself is on the site of another plantation? The GOP has heard your complaints, blacks and Latinos and women, and they’re going to try to suss it out while sitting atop dead slave bones.
Yet more evidence that the Republican Party is now substantially, and often unreflectively, the “white party” of the United States?
It seems republicans really love slave plantations for many things…including for getting married on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsAaLNMtb1A , http://www.oakalleyplantation.com/welcome.html , http://www.womangettingmarried.com/blog/2012/09/09/location-charleston/ , and http://www.alcyoneplantation.com/ for a couple of examples….
And given Democrats aren’t doing anything to challenge this type of glorification of the south or the antebellum era, go on to participate in it at times with others–even if it’s in the white house, etc., or even as in my liberal democratic home state of Washington, glorifying it though in more of a revolutionary historical frame…), they too reinforce this larger problem of systemic and all other types of racism with relation to racial oppression and slavery. The difference between the two is that participation in this type of racism is more visible in one party than it is in the other…and the diversity of the democratic party at large almost seems to “excuse it” for, at least the white democrats, to some degree when they do meet or hold events at such places, etc…. Both parties are not interested in correcting racial and/or class issues at any real level…and most certainly colorblind racism is prevalent in both.