The Week is a news magazine that highlights issues of the world
in a concise and compelling fashion. It is
brought to us through the efforts of Felix
Dennis (pictured on the right) and William
Falk (on the left).
The individual in the middle is Charles Blow, a columnist
for The New York Times.
One of the standard features of The Week is its “Best Column” format. It devotes a page to “Best columns: The U.S.”
and a page to “Best columns: Europe.” It
highlights two or three articles with the implicit guarantee that these are the
important issues of the past week.
In its current issue (June 7, 2013), The Week features an article by Charles M. Blow of The New York Times. The title of the excerpt is “The GOP’s
‘slavery’ insult.”
This is what The Week
published:
Why do Republicans keep on “comparing blacks who support the Democratic candidates to slaves?” asked Charles M. Blow. In the GOP’s “Democratic plantation” trope, blacks vote for Democrats only because Democrats take money from white people and give it to black people in the form of goodies like welfare and food stamps. It’s “the highest level of insult,” implying that unlike other voters, African-Americans are too stupid and lazy to make informed decisions about politics. To serve as safe mouthpieces for this slur, Republicans keep looking for black conservatives with a bomb-throwing rhetorical bent. The most recent example is E.W. Jackson, an extremist nut whom the GOP nominated to run for lieutenant governor of Virginia. Jackson has attacked gays as “very sick,” said liberalism has been “far more lethal to black lives” than the Ku Klux Klan, and dredged up the Democratic plantation analogy, saying, “We’re going to the slave market voluntarily today.” When Republicans nominate black candidates of this type, who is their intended audience? It’s certainly not the 95 percent of black voters they think of as shiftless slaves.
Mr. Blow teaches Americans that Republicans think of black
voters as “shiftless slaves.” The Week tells us this is what America
needs to know.
Allen West
could not be reached for comment.
UPDATE 7/4/2014:
Felix Dennis died on June 22, 2014 from throat cancer. He was 67.
UPDATE 7/4/2014:
Felix Dennis died on June 22, 2014 from throat cancer. He was 67.
Photo of William Falk by Chester Higgins, Jr. of The New York Times. Photo of Felix Dennis from his Web site. Photo of Charles Blow by Damon Winter of The New York Times.
