If you’re wondering how a man who stood up for a child molester can sink any lower, Mike Huckabee is trying his hardest.
Fresh off his latest scandal (if you lost count, that would be the one where he said as a teen he wished he could dress up like a girl towatch girls shower in the locker room) the former governor marched onto the set of Fox News to insist racism wouldn’t be an issue if only people would be more religious.
It was just the latest in Fox’s on-going effort to somehow, some way frame the Charleston church shooting perpetuated by an avowed white supremacist as a religious, not a racial issue. As was clear almost immediately, the strategy isn’t working. And if they are resorting to booking Huckabee, they must truly be getting desperate.
The interview opened up with a rare show of contention between a Fox host and a Republican guest. Fox’s Ed Henry noted that unlike many of his counterparts, Huckabee is still refusing to call for the Confederate flag to be taken down from South Carolina’s state Capitol. The flag had been used as a symbol of white supremacy by the Charleston shooter, as well as many racists for many generations. But don’t tell that to Huckabee. He’s pretty sure there is no racism left in South Carolina.
“And so what I said was, Ed, as a frequent visitor to South Carolina, I look at this objectively. You’ve got a female governor who is of Indian descent, you have the only elected African-American U.S. senator in the South from a state of 4.8 million people, elected largely by people who are mostly white. That’s not racism.“I don’t think the president of the United States need to be picking the symbols that fly on state capitol grounds. I didn’t punt, I didn’t squirm, I didn’t vacillate on it.”
So we know that Huckabee falls firmly into the “racism doesn’t exist” camp, an idea so preposterous that it should serve as a disqualifier for any presidential nominee. However, he manages to go further:
“I keep hearing people saying we need more conversations about race. Actually we don’t need more conversations. What we need is conversions because the reconciliations that changes people is not a racial reconciliation, it’s a spiritual reconciliation when people are reconciled to God.”
According to Huckabee, people who love God cannot possibly be racist and therefore the best way to combat racism (which he doesn’t think exists in America) is to double down on God.
“When I love God and I know that God created other people regardless of their color as much as he made me, I don’t have a problem with racism,” Huckabee said, before concluding: “It’s solved!”
Huckabee must not be aware of his nation’s troubling relationship between religion and race, or he might be wary of concluding that religion would stop racism. For much of America’s history, religion was used to justify slavery, and later segregation. The most famous hate group in the country, the Ku Klux Klan, is steeped in Christian beliefs and iconography. They had no trouble using that ideology to justify using an organized reign of terror on their black victims for generations.
As Slate columnist Jamelle Bouie vividly described recently, lynchings and KKK rallies were often little more than thinly-veiled religious rituals:
“[L]ynchings weren’t just vigilante punishments or, as the Equal Justice Initiative notes, ‘celebratory acts of racial control and domination.’ They were rituals. And specifically, they were rituals of Southern evangelicalism and its then-dogma of purity, literalism, and white supremacy. ‘Christianity was the primary lens through which most southerners conceptualized and made sense of suffering and death of any sort,’ writes historian Amy Louise Wood in Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940. ‘It would be inconceivable that they could inflict pain and torment on the bodies of black men without imagining that violence as a religious act, laden with Christian symbolism and significance.’”
Huckabee’s motives to talk about God and not racism are less about reality and more about the self-serving need for Huckabee and his peers to avoid confronting the ugly rot at the base of the right-wing ideology.
Watch Huckabee’s sad attempt at derailing the discussion on racism below, via Raw Story:
Link : http://www.addictinginfo.org/2015/06/23/mike-huckabee-stop-talking-about-racism-its-solved-by-converting-to-christianity-video/
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