Republicans Ignore Selma, Continue Courting White America

The Selma marches constitute landmark events in American race relations. The marches were organized to protest the continuing voter disenfranchisement of the African-American community in Alabama. The first march, called Bloody Sunday, ended when white law enforcement officers, as well as “deputized” white, civilian men, beat and unleashed tear gas on the peaceful marchers. One of the organizers of the march, Amelia Boynton Robinson, was left unconscious and became the subject of this iconic photograph. It is impossible to understate the importance of the Selma Marches in American civil rights history, unless, of course, you’re a politically-socially-ethically tone deaf Republican in the House of Representatives.

As the fifty year anniversary of the marches came and went, the Republican leadership (with the exception of House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy) committed to proving that the grand promises of a more open and welcoming Republican Party are a just a sham. The people the Republicans want are the same people the Republicans have always wanted: intensely conservative white people. Yet, in this age of memes and viral news and symbol over substance, one is forced to ask why the Republicans would choose to opt-out of such an easy photo-op. Sure, the cynical among us would recognize the hypocrisy of attendance by the Party of No. It is, after all, the same party that did everything in its power to torpedo the protections of the Voting Rights Act. In point of fact, it seems most of the Republican Party is working overtime to ignore a bill that would restore those protections.

Then again, the cynical liberals among us are never going to vote for Republicans. One can imagine that a great swath of the African-American community would be unimpressed by a Republican leadership presence at the anniversary, but there are undoubtedly African-American voters who lean to the right of the political aisles. One might expect that they would take a Republican presence as a gesture of reconciliation. A token gesture, perhaps, but a gesture nonetheless.

The truly perplexing part is that there must be Republican leaning centrists searching for some sign that the Republican Party is more than a bunch of racists courting other racists to drive a hate-filled agenda. That same group of voters might be looking to the leadership of the Republican Party to demonstrate legitimate moral leadership, for once. The Republicans’ failure to acknowledge the importance of the Selma Marches must give right-leaning centrists pause. It demonstrates that, whatever claims fall from the Republican leaderships’ lips, the dominant attitudes in the Republican locker room haven’t shifted much from the not-so-good old days.

As America rolls inexorably toward its next Presidential election, this behavior becomes even more confounding. African-Americans make up more than 13% of the population, which equates to tens of millions of votes. Alienating that many voters is naked stupidity on the order of invading Russia during the winter or starting a land war in Asia. How should voters read this stupidity? Are the Republicans truly so incompetent that they don’t understand the cost of ignoring watershed moments in civil rights history? Even if the Republican leadership treated attendance as a mere act of transparent political theater, it would have damaged them less than not bothering to attend. They might have gotten called out for engaging in transparent political theater, but every politician does. In the end, voters would have remembered their attendance, rather than their motivations.

Perhaps, more simply, their hubris has overcome their common sense. Perhaps, they truly believe that there are enough racist white people in America to keep the Republican Party relevant. They may even be right, but that can’t last. The demographic makeup of America continues to shift and the old minority-hating, poor people-hating, anyone who isn’t a fundamentalist Christian- hating rhetoric of the Republicans will continue to lose power and cultural currency. Minority numbers continue to swell, poverty runs rampant and the number of fundamentalist Christians – while always increasing in their fervor for a gross misreading of Christ’s message – are not substantially increasing in number.

The bedrock voters that support the Republicans — older, white voters from earlier, less tolerant generations — will start dying off in droves as the Baby Boomers age into retirement. A bigger problem is that the entire Republican Party, rightly or wrongly, has become defined by the extreme right viewpoint of the Tea Party. Younger voters, those who will increasingly define American elections victories, find the anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-science, anti-everything-but-big-business screed of the extreme right wing out of touch and more than a little nauseating. Worse still, the Republican mainstream has done practically nothing to distance itself, or to undermine the activities of its supposedly more extreme brethren. That also forces one to wonder where the non-Tea Party Republican’s sympathies really rest.

A more chilling thought, however, is that Republican leadership honestly doesn’t grasp the cultural, historical and political relevance of the Selma Marches. It seems wholly improbable that hundreds of college educated adults that work in the very heart of the American political process think that the events of Bloody Sunday don’t resonate with the African-American community today. In the wake of Ferguson, and the choking death of Eric Garner, and the Trayvon Martin case, how could the Selma Marches not resonate? Yet, as improbable as Republicans’ failure to understand seems, it certainly reads that way. It’s as if they heard about the Selma anniversary, collectively shrugged their shoulders and thought: “What’s the big deal?”