Republican Politician Suggests Detroit Become An Indian Reservation For Black People

RANDA MORRIS/Addicting Info

“I made a prediction a long time ago and it’s come to pass. I said what we’re gonna do is turn Detroit into an Indian reservation, where we herd all the Indians into the city, build a fence around it and then throw in the blankets and the corn.” — Oakland County (MI) Executive Director L. Brooks Patterson.

This quote came from L. Brooks Patterson, a Republican official in Oakland County, MI. Patterson has been the county’s Executive Director for 21 years. He might have said these lines back in the days when he was fighting against desegration of schools. He also said them more recently, during an interview with the New Yorker. The article came out on Martin Luther King Day, 2014.

Patterson gave the statement in response to a question about what steps Detroit might take to fix its finances.

Even as Patterson struggles against throngs of criticism and negative publicity, he doesn’t deny that these were his words. He told the Detroit Free Press that his quote was taken out of context. However, Paige Williams, who interviewed Patterson for the New Yorker, says the comment came in answer to a question regarding what steps Detroit might take to fix its financial problems.

“People know me and they know I sometimes use words to make a point,” Patterson told the Detroit Free Press earlier this week.

“When I said Detroit is going to become an Indian reservation, my point was, if you don’t get black people on their feet, the successful ones will move out and the ones that remain will be dependent. We’re getting very close to that now.”

Where does the fence come in?

So in context, he was saying that the black people in Detroit are like those other minorities, the Native Americans? But then what does herding them up have to do with getting them on feet? What benign meaning is there is ‘building a fence around them?’ Not to mention throwing in ‘blankets and corn’.

When you know where Patterson’s words are coming from, you understand that the meaning was not benign. He is the lawyer who represented the anti-segregationists in Oakland County, decades ago. He fought school busing all the way to the Supreme Court, where he eventually won the case. After that he lobbied for a ‘no busing amendment’ to the United States Constitution.

Here is a photo of Irene McCabe and attorney L. Brooks Patterson meet in Washington with Rep. Thomas Downey, D-Va., in October, 1971. McCabe and Patterson were lobbying for an anti-busing amendment to the Constitution.

Photo of a 1971 meeting with anti-bussing activists Irene McCabe, young Attorney L. Brooks Patterson (now a Republican official for Oakland County, MI), and Rep. Thomas Downey (D-VA). Photo from the Detroit News Photo Gallery Archives.

 Patterson’s entire career has been focused on building fences to keep ‘those people out.’

Patterson believes in fences. He’s been working at keeping ‘those people out’ of his own community for a very long time. I think maybe he’s gotten so old and set in his ways that he just forgot he was talking to an outsider, someone who might find his views shocking and more than a little distasteful.

The legacy of L. Brooks Patterson in Oakland County is that he protected the citizens of the once affluent area of from having to mingle with ‘other races.” In a way he built a fence at the border of Oakland County and the city of Detroit. In return for the fence, Oakland County voters elected him to the office of County Prosecutor. He has held one or another political office there, ever since.

 Apologize for what?

Community activists and civil rights leaders gathered in Detroit, on January 21. The Reverend Charles E. Williams III called for a sincere apology from Patterson. Patterson told the Detroit Free Press “I’m not apologizing because I didn’t do anything wrong.”

People who live in Detroit disagree with that. Here’s a video of the news report from WXYZ Action News.

GOP Congressman Refuses To Apologize For Calling Latinos ‘Wetbacks’

By Annie-Rose Strasser/Think Progress

Rep. Don Young (R-AK) on Thursday night stood by his use of a racial slur to describe Latinos, saying that he “meant no disrespect” when he told an Alaska radio interviewer, “We used to hire 50 to 60 wetbacks to pick tomatoes”:

“During a sit down interview with Ketchikan Public Radio this week, I used a term that was commonly used during my days growing up on a farm in Central California,” Young said in the statement. “I know that this term is not used in the same way nowadays and I meant no disrespect.”

As the Alaska Daily News notes, Young “stopped short of apologizing.”

Listen to the interview:

The term “wetbacks” is meant to refer to undocumented immigrants who crossed from Mexico into the United States via the Rio Grande river. And the president of the Hispanic Affairs Council of Alaska, Alaska Daily News that she feels his cavalier use of the term points to bigger problems. “He didn’t even pause. It’s like that’s just what he calls migrant farm workers,” she said.

When it comes to immigration issues, Young’s focus is largely on preventing illegal border crossings. He has also voted to end birthright citizenship.

Young’s comments come just days after the Republican National Committee released its “autopsy” of the 2012 election, in which it said the party must work hard to be more inclusive of people of color. Such outreach has had little success so far, and the GOP is still plagued by racial inhospitality.

UPDATE

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) is condemning Young, according to Fox News’ Chad Pergram:

UPDATE

By Friday afternoon, Young had issued a full apology:

“I apologize for the insensitive term I used during an interview in Ketchikan, Alaska. There was no malice in my heart or intent to offend; it was a poor choice of words. That word, and the negative attitudes that come with it, should be left in the 20th century, and I’m sorry that this has shifted our focus away from comprehensive immigration reform.”

O’Reilly: Black Voters Don’t Believe In ‘Self Reliance’ Or ‘American Exceptionalism’

By Annie-Rose Strasser/Think Progress

Since the night of the election, Bill O’Reilly has been looking for a scapegoat on whom he can blame Mitt Romney’s loss. He seems to have found one in African American, Latino, and female voters.

Before all the votes were even cast on November 6, O’Reilly came out with the theory that “The white establishment is now the minority,” and that women, black, and Latino voters are “non-traditional” voters who “feel that they are entitled to things and which candidate, between the two, is going to give them things?”

On his show last night, O’Reilly responded to comedian Jon Stewart’s criticism that mourning “traditional voters” is latent racism. But in his rebuttal, O’Reilly explained that the mass turnout of voters of color signaled an end to “traditional American voters.” The new voters, he argued, don’t understand “traditional American values”:

If you look at the exit polling, you’ll see that a coalition of voters put the President back into the oval office. That coalition was non-tradition, which means it veered away from things like traditional marriage, robust capitalism, and self reliance. Instead, each constituency that voted for the President —whether it be single women, Hispanic Americans, African Americans, whatever— had very specific reasons for doing so. [...]

Traditional American voters generally want a smaller government in Washington, more local control, some oversight on abortion, and believe in American exceptionalism.

Watch it:

O’Reilly isn’t new to making racially charged comments. Just days before the election, he speculated that Sec. of State Colin Powell cut Obama “a little more slack” in his endorsement of him because they are both black. He’s also claimed that Democrats have made black people “dependent” on the government.

Evangelical radio host calls blacks ‘drug-addled addicts’ for taking welfare

By David Edwards/Raw Story

The director of issues analysis of a conservative fundamentalist Christian organization on Wednesday accused the Democratic Party of trying to make African Americans into “slaves” and “drug-addled addicts” with welfare benefits.

“The Democrats as a party, I believe, they want slaves, they want Americans to be as slavishly dependent upon the central government as slaves were upon their masters in pre-Civil War days, that’s what they want,” Bryan Fischer explained on his American Family Associations radio show. “We were talking this morning about how in the world is it that African Americans still support the Democratic Party? How can you explain that, when the Democratic Party is the party of slavery, the KKK, Jim Crow laws, lynch mobs, the party that filibustered the Civil Rights Act, how can you explain this?”

Fischer concluded that the only possible explanation for Democrats being supported by blacks was that the party “promises them more goodies” to get them “addicted.”

“It’s like the government is one big giant methadone clinic and they’re just handing out these injections to people in the form of welfare benefits to get them hooked, so they got to hook up with their supplier once a month, they got to get their fix, they got to hook up with their dealer on a street corner once a month and get their fix from the federal government,” he explained. “They’re like drug-addled addicts and the Democrat Party has gotten them addicted to welfare benefits. That apparently is the only reason they continue to support this party.”

“I think what keeps the African American community in the Democratic and on the Democratic plantation is the promise of goodies, it’s the promise of welfare, it’s the promise of benefits,” Fisher added.

“So that’s just a form of idolatry, they put money ahead of principle. If they’re going to give me stuff, that’s materialism, that’s greed, that’s a violation of the Ten Commandments, they’re going to stick that in front of me I’m going to vote for them no matter what.”

According to Census Bureau data obtained by Time magazine in 2001, 61 percent of the people receiving welfare in were white, while only 33 percent identified themselves as black.

Watch the video below from the American Family Associations Focal Point, broadcast Aug. 1, 2012.

Fla. governor tries relating to black students with public housing tale

By Stephen C. Webster/Raw Story

Confronted by a group of angry Florida A&M students outside his home on Thursday night, Florida Governor Rick Scott (R) attempted to generate some empathy by telling the mostly black crowd that he grew up in public housing.

The students were protesting the governor’s call for James Ammons, president of Florida A&M, to be suspended following the hazing death of one of the school’s students.

Students from the school, which has a mostly black constituency, showed up on Scott’s lawn to let him know they weren’t happy with his decision. Scott, who’d just arrived back from a trip to Israel, reportedly came out wearing sweatpants and offered to address the crowd.

“The white guv bizarrely attempted to quell the mostly black crowd by beginning his speech with some version of: ‘Hey, I grew up in public housing,’” the Miami New Times explained. “To which students protested, ‘We’re not poor!’”

He ultimately reinforced his decision, telling students that he would not rescind the call for Ammons’ suspension.

It might not have been called out as sounding racist if Scott hadn’t tried that very same approach with a group of black lawmakers in February.

“I grew up probably in the same situation as you guys,” he said to a collection of black Democrats. “I started school in public housing. My dad had a sixth-grade education.”

The comments led to Scott being booted from the luncheon.

Top ten crazy sh*t Pat Buchanan says

By Katie Halper/Raw Story

Talking to Reverand Al Sharpton this week, Pat Buchanan described Obama as "your boy." But while some became outraged at his comments, they came as no surprise to others more familiar with Buchanan's rich history of bigotry. Below are 10 of his most outrageously bigoted comments on everything from African-Americans to Jews to immigrants to women and beyond.

1. Obama has benefited from being African-American.
First, Buchanan said, "Look, if Barack Obama thinks there‘s no correlation between the fact he‘s an African-American and his career has been so spectacular, he would be as delusional as George W. Bush saying the fact, he‘s president of the United States."

Then he told political analyst, author and blogger Keli Goff, an African American woman, to "shut up." In all fairness he only asked her to shut up "for a second" and added a "please."

2. White People built America

Buchanan gave voice to the voiceless white men, explaining that affirmative action is a way to increase diversity at the expense of downtrodden white males, who he says built this country. "This has been a country built basically by white folks," he said, adding that white people were "90 percent of the entire nation in 1960, when I was growing up." (It was actually 85%.)

3. White people are to the Supreme Court as black people are to Olympic track races

As if the previous clip weren't enough, Buchanan then suggested that white people are just naturally better at being Supreme Court justices, just as "black folks" happen to be the fastest runners: "But if I look at the U.S. track team in the Olympics, and they're all black folks, I don't automatically assume it's discrimination. I will say, "I think maybe those are the fastest guys we got, that maybe they're the fastest guys in the country, maybe they're the fastest in the world."

4. Pedophiles are all gay

When Eleanor Clift asked Buchanan, "Have you renounced and rejected the Catholic priests that have disappointed you over the years?" he responded, "You mean the ones involved in this gay stuff? You're dead right." When John McLaughlin clarified, "Pat, they're not necessarily gay," Pat responded "It's little kids."

But that wasn't his first time conflating gay men and pedophiles. In reference to Mark Foley, the Congressman who sexually harassed several House pages, Pat focused on the real problem -- the fact that this man is a "flamer." Talking to Joe Scarborough, Pat said, "I mean, look, we are now hearing that this flamer, Mr. Foley, was going after kids as early as 19 -- I mean, 20 -- I mean, 1998. I mean, you knew Foley. Did you know he was this kind of flamer who was after pages?"

5. The minorities are "invading"

Buchanan warned MSNBC host Joe Scarborough that "We got an invasion of our country, and you‘re going to lose this country, Joe, if you do not stop this invasion which is altering the character of the country! It‘s turning us basically into what Teddy Roosevelt called a tangle of... of squalling minorities!"

6. Hitler was a genius and the Holocaust is exaggerated

In a column designed to promote his book Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War", Buchanan described Hitler as "an individual of great courage.... Hitler's success was not based on his extraordinary gifts alone. His genius was an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his path." Buchanan also openly doubts that Jews were gassed to death in Treblinka, writing that, "Diesel engines do not emit enough carbon monoxide to kill anybody."

7. AIDS is God's punishment for being gay

In addition to calling gay people "sodomites," Buchanan once wrote, "The poor homosexuals -- they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is extracting an awful retribution on the gays." On another occasion, he added that "AIDS is nature's retribution for violating the laws of nature."

8. Women are not discriminated against and housework is liberating

On women, Buchanan wrote: "Rail as they will about 'discrimination,' women are simply not endowed by nature with the same measures of single-minded ambition and the will to succeed in the fiercely competitive world of Western capitalism." And in his book Right from the Beginning Pat added that "The real liberators of American women were not the feminist noise-makers, they were the automobile, the supermarket, the shopping center, the dishwasher, the washer-dryer, the freezer."

9. Segregation kept politics from being too polarizing

In Right from the Beginning, Buchanan wrote "There were no politics to polarize us then, to magnify every slight. The 'negroes' of Washington had their public schools, restaurants, bars, movie houses, playgrounds and churches; and we had ours." But, as Nixon's White House adviser, Buchanan told his boss not to visit Coretta Scott King because it would "outrage many, many people who believe Dr. King was a fraud and a demagogue and perhaps worse.... Others consider him the Devil incarnate. Dr. King is one of the most divisive men in contemporary history."

10. Immigrants are killing "us"

On This Week With David Brinkley in 1991, Buchanan said "If we had to take a million immigrants in, say Zulus, next year, or Englishmen, and put them up in Virginia, what group would be easier to assimilate and would cause less problems for the people of Virginia?"

More recently in his book Day of Reckoning: How Hubris, Ideology, and Greed Are Tearing America ApartPat warned "America [Is] Committing Suicide" while "Asian, African, And Latin American Children Come To Inherit The Estate." And this past month, in response to the killings spree in Norway, Pat wrote "As for a climactic conflict between a once-Christian West and an Islamic world that is growing in numbers and advancing inexorably into Europe for the third time in 14 centuries, on this one, Breivik may be right."