Thread: Head of New York Civil Rights Coalition compares MSNBC rhetoric to McCarthyism

Head of New York Civil Rights Coalition compares MSNBC rhetoric to McCarthyism

8:04 PM 01/04/2014
Patrick Howley
Reporter

Michael Meyers, executive director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition, told The Daily Caller that Melissa Harris-Perry and MSNBC engage in racial McCarthyism to silence mainstream black voices.

“I’m an African-American, and I’m a liberal,” said Meyers, longtime former member of the ACLU’s Board of Directors and onetime aide to legendary NAACP executive director Roy Wilkins. ”I shook when I watched that segment where they were calling out the African-American grandchild of Mitt Romney. I was really appalled.”

MSNBC host Harris-Perry apologized Saturday for a segment in which she and her guests mocked the adopted black grandson of Mitt Romney and said that Romney having a black grandchild was indicative of the Republican Party, which finds token black people for photo ops.

“I’m shocked that [MSNBC president] Phil Griffin is condoning it. I’m a little surprised it’s coming from Melissa Harris-Perry because she ought to know better. They focus entirely on race and calling racism where it doesn’t exist, and it’s time for the liberal community to call them out,” Meyers said.

“It’s ideology. I believe that Melissa Harris-Perry and Michael Eric Dyson and Toure and these folks who are supposed to be the representatives, the so-called voice of the African-American community, are a strident errant voice. It is so ideological and so radical and I’m surprised that it’s becoming mainstreamed on MSNBC. There are responsible African-American voices but you never see them on MSNBC and you barely see them on CNN.”
“It’s fashionable” for media commentators to engage in divisive racial rhetoric, Meyers said.

“There used to be a reverend on TV in New York, ‘Reverend Ike.’ And Reverend Ike used to say, ‘you can’t lose with the stuff I use.’ I think the so-called voices of Black America are selling snake oil. They are being lauded and reinforced and put into the mainstream to make it appear that they’re the authentic black voice and they’re not. Why else would they put Al Sharpton on MSNBC? I don’t get it. I mean, I do get it,” he said with a laugh.
So why do white liberals condone these tactics? According to Meyers: “paternalism.”

“You have liberal whites who are well-meaning and well-intentioned, but it’s the same liberal whites who in the ’60′s tolerated and embraced black nationalism. It was racist then, and it’s racist now… If you have white people saying this about black people, MSNBC would not tolerate this for one minute. The chieftains [of the black community] would call it out.”

“It’s worse than divisive. It’s crying racism where the racism doesn’t exist.

They just make this stuff up. Everything becomes about race, about calling people racists when they haven’t said anything racist. It’s Orwellian Doublespeak.”

Meyers also compared Harris-Perry and other MSNBC commentators to Joseph McCarthy, noting that people who get accused of racism are smeared in the public arena.

“It’s a literal blacklist. The whole purpose is to silence you and to marginalize you. People don’t want to be called racist, particularly when they’re not racist,” he said.

Meyers said that he always responds to “racial idiocy” regardless of the “stripe or the color of the person” expressing it, but noted that he does not get much criticism for it from the back community.

“I don’t get much criticism because I think mainstream blacks welcome rationality and sanity… When I was young I was responding to the black nationalist statements of Louis Farrakhan, and I was the only civil rights person to do so… Louis Farrakhan acolytes used to harass me and call me up and threaten me, but as long as we have a voice we can respond to this stridency.”

How do mainstream black voices go about doing it? Meyers invoked lawyer Joseph Welch, whose question to McCarthy at the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings summarized a silent majority’s feelings about McCarthy’s tactics: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”
http://dailycaller.com/2014/01/04/he...o-mccarthyism/

AFTER HARRIS-PERRY APOLOGIZED FOR RACIST ROMNEY COMMENT, MSNBC RENEWS CLAIM TEA PARTY IS RACIST




by WARNER TODD HUSTON
5 Jan 2014

On the same show that host Melissa Harris-Perry was forced to apologize for her attack on Mitt Romney's adopted African-American grandson, MSNBC kept up its drumbeat of dealing the race card against its enemies by declaring that the core of tea party is racist.

During the discussion, panelist Katrina Vanden Heuvel claimed that there is a useful "populism" on left and right that is "anti-corporate" but not, she insisted, "anti-business." And Vanden Heuvel claimed that these two sides could join together but for one thing: the tea party. The tea party, Vanden Heuvel explained, would not let that coalition of left and right populists cooperate because the tea partiers are racists.

"But I do think," Vanden Heuvel said, "the right-wing populism of the tea party not only became so obsessed with an anti-government meme, but let's be honest, there is a race... racism threaded through the right-wing populism--which is not unusual to American right-wing populism--that has not allowed for coalitions that could be built on behalf of working people in this country against the most powerful interests."

It is always interesting to hear this claim made of the tea party movement. After all, tea partiers are attacked from the left and from establishment Republicans for being too loud and open about what they want, what they dislike, and what they want changed. The tea party is just too noisy, the say. And yet, not one word about race is ever uttered by any member of the tea party.

So, we are expected to believe that tea partiers will talk about every issue they feel passionate about except the racism that leftists claim is their chief motivation?

It defies logic.

But regardless, on the same day that Harris-Perry tearfully attempted to deny she was throwing the race card at Mitt Romney because of his adopted African American grandson, only moments passed before her panel again threw the race card at their enemies.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journal...arty-is-Racist