Usually I avidly follow CPAC, if only for the swag they usually sell. This one has always been my favorite.
I've been preoccupied with other things and haven't seen the worst of this year until now. (At least I hope this is the worst of it) I don't know how many of these lovely young men are out there, but let's just say I hope it isn't very many:
The exchange occurred after an audience member from North Carolina, 30-year-old Scott Terry, asked whether Republicans could endorse races remaining separate but equal.After the presenter, K. Carl Smith of Frederick Douglass Republicans, answered by referencing a letter by Frederick Douglass forgiving his former master, the audience member said “For what? For feeding him and housing him?”
After the exchange, Terry muttered under his breath, “why can’t we just have segregation?” noting the Constitution’s protections for freedom of association. Watch it:
ThinkProgress spoke with Terry, who sported a Rick Santorum sticker and attended CPAC with a friend who wore a Confederate Flag-emblazoned t-shirt, about his views after the panel. Terry maintained that white people have been “systematically disenfranchised” by federal legislation.
When asked by ThinkProgress if he’d accept a society where African-Americans were permanently subservient to whites, he said “I’d be fine with that.” He also claimed that African-Americans “should be allowed to vote in Africa,” and that “all the Tea Parties” were concerned with the same racial problems that he was.
At one point, a woman challenged him on the Republican Party’s roots, to which Terry responded, “I didn’t know the legacy of the Republican Party included women correcting men in public.”
The funny thing is that this was a CPAC session on outreach to black voters. I would have thought this guy might have just been being some kind of smartass, but the video portrays him as just being an ass.
I think this would have struck me as less noteworthy if I hadn't heard a young workman at my neighbor's house use the "n" word the other day as if it was the most normal thing in the world. I was so shocked by it that I was paralyzed for a couple of seconds and didn't respond right away. My neighbor (a very confident Hispanic woman) didn't miss a beat -- she just said, "hey none of that on my property. You don't like it I'll find someone else." The kid rolled his eyes but he shut up.
Considering how much I heard the word when I was growing up back in the day, the fact that I was shocked shows it's an improvement. But it's still creepy that any white person, especially a young one, would drop this language into a conversation in public.
