My fellow Americans, who are “your people”? I ask because U.S. attorney general Eric Holder, who is black, used the phrase “my people” in congressional testimony this week. It was an unmistakably color-coded and exclusionary reference intended to deflect criticism of the Obama Justice Department’s selective enforcement policies. It backfired.
In pandering to skin-deep identity politics and exacerbating race-consciousness, Holder has given the rest of us a golden opportunity to stand up, identify “our people,” and show the liberal poseurs what post-racialism really looks like.
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Herman Cain is my people. He’s my brother-in-arms. I’ve never met him. But we are family. We are kin because we are unhyphenated Americans who are comfortable in the black, brown, and yellow skin we are in. We are growing in numbers — on college campuses, in elected office, on the Internet, on public airwaves, everywhere. And that drives liberals mouth-frothing crazy.
Cain is the successful Georgia businessman who has wowed audiences across the country with his passion for free markets, free minds, and the American Dream. The former president of Godfather’s Pizza and forceful Tea Party speaker happens to be black. So he must pay the price that all minority conservatives in public life must pay. As I noted last week, a cowardly liberal writer recently derided Cain as a “monkey in the window,” a “garbage pail kid,” and a “minstrel” who performs for his “masters.”
Race traitors. Whores. Sellouts. House Niggas. Self-haters. I’ve heard it for nearly 20 years in public life. Every outspoken minority conservative has. Sticks and stones may break our bones, but these spiteful epithets can’t enslave us.
Val Prieto is my people. A fierce, freedom-loving American blogger of Cuban descent, he rejects race-card games and refuses to be lumped in with Hispanic ethnic-grievance mongers. In response to pro-illegal-immigration marchers who infamously desecrated the American flag, Prieto wrote:
I have never and will never, despite having many issues with the government of the United States throughout the years, burn a flag of the United States of America. I am Cuban by birth, American by the grace of God. And a darned proud, dignified, thankful and respectful American. . . . I refuse to be lumped together as a class or a race simply because we speak a similar language. . . . I ain’t Mexican, I ain’t Latino and I ain’t Hispanic. I am an American of Cuban descent. And damned proud of it.
Katrina Pierson is my people. She’s a feisty young Texas mom and Dallas Tea Party activist who supports limited-government principles and rejects left-wing identity politics. She confronted the NAACP last year with a rousing manifesto of political independence and rebutted the left-wing group’s attacks on the Tea Party as racist:
The reality is that we colored people no longer require the assistance from other Negros for advancement. These groups run to the rescue of distressed brown people only when the media deems it newsworthy. Meanwhile, there are inner city black children who continue to grow up fatherless while sharing a neighborhood with stray bullets, drugs and a plethora of liquor stores on every corner. . . . I don’t believe that the true meaning of this nation’s creed was to move black people from one form of slavery to another.
The NAACP, she observed, is made up of “Democrats who bow to a Democrat master today as they once did over 200 years ago. Once this is realized by the forgotten society, race in this country will be as irrelevant as those who thrive off of it.” Amen, sister.
Allen West, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and freshman congressman from Florida who happens to be black, is my people. Unafraid to skewer progressive sacred cows, he speaks boldly against global jihad and its Fifth Column enablers who scream “Islam-o-phobe!” West has also nailed the Congressional Black Caucus as “a monolithic voice that promotes these liberal social-welfare policies and programs that are failing in the black community, that are preaching victimization and dependency; that’s not the way that we should go.”
According to U.S. News and World Report’s Kenneth Walsh, President Obama told guests at a private White House dinner that he believed the Tea Party movement had a “subterranean agenda” of racism against him. But Lt. Col. West summed up the movement’s transcendent, post-racial agenda forthrightly:
The tea party is a constitutional, conservative grassroots movement — and that’s it. The tea party stands for three things: They want to see effective, efficient, constitutional government; they stand for national security; and they stand for free-market, free-enterprise solutions. That’s it.
It’s government of, by and for the people — all the people. Not just the ones still shackled by reflexive Democratic-party loyalty. We are beholden not to our skin pigment or ethnic tribes, but to American ideals, tradition, history, and faith in the individual.
Right ON. The mainstream media pretend minority conservatives don't exist, while bloggers denigrate them without shame. The liberal elite are horrified at the thought of people of color identifying with those who regard themselves as Americans first. They don't want the "virus" to spread! Better to keep these people on the welfare plantation, rewarding single parenthood, chaining them to failing schools, perpetuating government dependency. We can only hope more people wake up and realize that liberalism is not the cure, but the disease.
Michelle is one of my peeps...
Christie/West 2012... I think the Gov knows how to tackle the domestic issue's, and clearly the Lt.Col can handle foreign policy among other things....
Scottish by birth, Proud American by the grace of GOD.
When people hyphenate themselves into "Something-Americans" they are inserting themselves into other classes that are separate and different from the rest of us plain "Americans." In effect, they are discriminating against themselves.
The "Tyranny of Appearance" rides roughshod over Democrats. They bow and scrape to this lie as if it were their god..., all their days.
Whereas the rest of us have awakened to throw off these shackles of misperceptions, the Liberal Left hang their heads, seeing nothing else around them, not even recognizing the ugliness and futility of their chosen prejudiced path, and their dirty feet. Truly they are the blind leading the blind!
I am an American (unhyphenated)! And thankful to God to be so blessed. And you know what? I don't care about the color of my skin, nor anybody elses, much like I don't care about my height, as I think that's an absurd measurement except if I decide to buy a suit!
Such measurements have no merit. I don't even fill in the spaces on goverment papers which ask about what race I am! I will not follow such blindness, nor buckle to some Liberal idea of devisive demographics! So there!
The feminists are the same way. Because I am a woman I must conform to the tribal mores of their white man hating collectivist dystopia. They have become the devil that they sought to destroy.
Setting aside the crudeness of the "my people" statement, why is the US AG using a 3rd graders straw man argument?
Culberson read Bartle Bull's PERSONAL OPINION about New Black Panther incident. Holder then said it is "a great disservice...to my people" to blacks who integrated in the South. Bull DIDN'T COMPARE the two. He said it was the worse incident of voter intimidation he (Bull) had seen.
I was happy to see Olivia's comment about her rejecting the "white-man hating collectivist dystopia" of contemporary feminism. But what baffles me is why so many women--nearly all, as far as I can tell on the university campus where I work--capitulate to feminist bullying and fall in line. Maybe it's not all the women, but those who don't fully capitulate are too cowardly to speak up, leaving the most impressionable 18-year-old female students defenseless.
"I ain’t Mexican, I ain’t Latino and I ain’t Hispanic. I am an American of Cuban descent. And damned proud of it."
what is a hyphen but shorthand for 'of descent?'
When asked to identify my background, which is pretty often,I call myself Black, not african-american, because to me, the term african-american implies that someone in my family at one time made a conscious decision to come to america from africa, which did not happen. Most other racial groups can claim origin to one country or another, which gives them a shared history, but blacks only have america, which until about 60 years ago, wasnt nice all the time. Now that time has passed we can move past race and talk about what is really important. Racism has always been used as a weapon to keep poor people from banding together against those who would prey on their decisiveness and take advantage of them.
I am glad that the republican party now has some color. unfortunately, listening to the speech against certain other types of people who are not welcome to join makes me think that this color has not yet gone to the head. When the picketing to keep certain groups out of neighborhoods becomes unacceptable, than i will know that we are all truly americans. until then, it just seems like we are banding together against another group, which is basically how immigration has played out, over and over again, in american history.
"I hate those people. I like them now, as long as they are with me in hating this new group. Oh, those guys are cool too, but did you see who is trying to move in now? lets all get them!"
Frank Lee- I know exactly what you mean. I once was one of those 18 year olds. At 30 I finally learned how to shed my victim status, by the grace of God. Forgiveness is so powerful and life changing.
Brava, Ms. Malkin. May I say that I too am "your people." I'm a white male and my ancestors were some of the first English colonists in Virginia. However, I am an American.
The thing that distinguishes America from the rest of the planet is the lack of hyphenization. One can look at the T.V. images from around the world, and observe the madding crowds, and notice that all of the people in the streets look exactly the same. By contrast, one needs only look at an American rifle company to notice that they are all different - hispanic, white, black, oriental, etc. They are all Americans.
