"The Republican Party Is A Racist Organization"

Chauncey DeVega of the blog We Are Respectable Negroes, recapitulates the historical and rhetorical context in which Paul Ryan's recent racist comments about "lazy" people of the "inner city" find their place, the history and rhetoric through which "the GOP became the white supremacy party," in the words of the article's title, and "the country’s premier white identity organization." To this history I would just add that Paul Ryan, like Rand Paul, are both associated with the assertively market libertopian Randroid wing of Movement Conservatism and that, far from mitigating the white racism of their stance, it is crucial to recognize the forceful connection of market ideologues with white racism as a matter of substance. (For more on the racism of American-style libertarianism, read this.) The defense of racist hierarchies is the specific context in which free market arguments have been deployed most forcefully in American history. And though "market libertarians" and conservative "civil libertarians" often like to decry the bigotry and benightedness of the social and religious conservatives with whom they are otherwise electorally allied on the American right, to allow them this feel-good intellectual dis-association given the racist results they serially abet practically speaking is to make a profound mistake. It amounts to yet another variation of the facilitation of white-racism as an institutional reality by pretending the only racism that is real is the individualized racism of conscious and conspicuous racial animus.