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Is the Republican Party Racist?

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It’s a perception that’s long been held in American politics. The Republican Party is anti-black and racist and the Democratic Party is pro-black and anti-racist. The Republicans cry foul and point to their history of fighting for civil rights, the Democrats scoff at such lunacy. Without getting into a long and arduous debate over which side is correct in it’s assumptions regarding the other, I feel that both parties have a lot of work to do and that neither are blameless in regards to the treatment of blacks in America.

That said I have long felt that the literature of a time period was a reflection of life during that time. A person wishing to know how the English elites lived in the Victorian Era would get a good idea of the reality of it by reading Jane Austen or Emily Bronte. Likewise, a person fifty years from today who wants a snapshot of our culture would do well to read Grisham, Clancy, or yes, even King and any number of romance novelists. Not an exact image by any means, but a good ‘feel’ for how it was.

Due to recent employment difficulties I’ve found myself with a lot of extra time on my hands and have been catching up on some reading that I was putting off until, well, I had a lot of extra time on my hands. As such, I’ve begun re-reading ‘The Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes’ a huge and complete tome of the fictional detective’s life written by Arthur Conan Doyle between 1891 and 1905. The reason I mention this and indeed the reason I’m writing this piece is because of a passage I stumbled across while enjoying ‘Adventure V. – The Five Orange Pips’ published originally sometime between July 1891 and December 1892 in the London magazine The Strand.

In the passage a young gentleman has come to Mr. Holmes’s Baker Street residence and began to recount past events to help the detective understand the man’s predicament. During the narrative he says this about an uncle:

"...About 1869 or 1870 he came back to Europe, and took a small estate in Sussex, near Horsham. He had made a very considerable fortune in the States, and his reason for leaving them was his aversion to the Negroes, and his dislike of the Republican policy in extending the franchise to them..." Imagine how startled I was to see, in a story written 112 years ago, a reflection of the Republican Party’s policy of ensuring the rights of blacks."

Now, don’t misunderstand me, I’m not saying the Republicans are as pure as the driven snow in regards to this issue, but in fairness, neither are the Democrats. A political body is only as good as the individuals who combine to create it and as a party, the Republicans have a long held policy of supporting constitutional rights for every citizen in this country, as this hundred-year-old passage published in an English magazine illuminates. To that end, it is unfair to throw a blanket accusation of racism across any political ideology, whether liberal or conservative, and serves only to make the accuser look foolish and ignorant.

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