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The all Black Texas Western University team made history, winning the NCAA basketball championship over Kentucky in 1966.

Tim Scott, the Ghost of Plantations Past

POSTED: April 30, 2021, 8:00 am

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The Republican Party enlisted Negro extraordinaire South Carolina Senator Tim Scott to deliver the GOP response to President Joe Biden’s address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday evening. Never one to disappoint, Scott was his usual shuffling self, willing and able to apologize for the worst excesses of American oppression of Black people. He really cemented his credentials with his White Republican colleagues when he gleefully declared “America is not a racist country.” While President Biden and Vice President Harris expressed similar sentiments, it is the context in which Senator Scott made the remark that is so distasteful. This is the same man who gleefully endorsed an American president who regularly gave comfort to White supremacist and took delight in the oppression of Black people and people of color. Senator Scott represents a political party that has fully deployed hate as a political weapon and embraces a racist ideology that is rooted in the extermination of Black people. The senator also spoke just days after a White police officer was convicted of the brutal murder of a Black man, George Floyd, whose only offense was being Black. Scott made this declaration despite the fact that he has complained about his own treatment due to the color of his skin.

Some would call Tim Scott an Uncle Tom or worse. The South Carolina senator is that and more. He is a walking talking contradiction, a buffoon willing to undermine his own community for the sake of gaining the approval of his White colleagues who likely see him as just another nigger. Scott is the worse type of Black person; so self-loathing that he is willing to degrade himself to endear himself to a party that is overrun with White supremacists who despise Black skin. He would have been the slave on the plantation who would have gleefully exposed a runaway plot and watched emotionless as captured slaves were whipped and tortured. Tim Scott is a wretched human being who should be despised by Black people in this country.

That criticism might sound harsh but it’s warranted. We are in the midst of an all-out war on Black people in this country. Police murder Black people with ease, White supremacists threaten to overthrow the government, racist governors push laws to suppress the Black vote, the Fox News Channel peddles lies about the November election, and a former Racist-in-Chief stirs the pot from his Florida lair and conjures up the worse version of Whiteness imaginable. And in the middle of this insanity, Tim Scott comes out from underneath a rock and slithers in the muck. Where is a mongoose when you need one?

I deplore Black people like Tim Scott. No, it’s not because he is a Republican though the party of Trump is deserving of disdain by Black people. It’s because Scott is a simpleton parading around as if he has integrity. He is a fraud with no discernible ideological framework except a willingness to sell his soul to appease his White overseers. He is the ghost of plantations past. Scott would have enjoyed slavery. He would have gladly picked cotton and found no wrong in his master’s depravity. Tim Scott would have been the ‘happy’ slave that his Republican colleagues in Texas want children to believe existed.

“He is a fraud with no discernible ideological framework except a willingness to sell his soul to appease his White overseers. He is the ghost of plantations past. Scott would have enjoyed slavery. He would have gladly picked cotton and found no wrong in his master’s depravity. Tim Scott would have been the ‘happy’ slave that his Republican colleagues in Texas want children to believe existed.”

Expect more of this buck dancing from Tim Scott. It’s all he has to offer. He has already indicated his opposition to Democrats’ proposal to end qualified immunity for police and is offering up a counterproposal that will do nothing to protect Black lives. That’s his role in the Republican Party. He is the cardboard cutout, the right-wing race shield who will be pulled out by Republicans to defend the wretchedness of the party. For that Tim Scott deserves our wrath and should find no peace wherever he travels. He and his family need to be reminded that the culture rejects him. He is an embarrassment, an utter disgrace.

If the Republican Party thinks the likes of a Tim Scott is their ticket to the Black community, they have taken the wrong onramp. Like his fellow leeches Ben Carson, Candace Owens, Diamond and Silk, Kim Klacik, and the late pizza jester Herman Cain, there is no depth to which the senator from South Carolina will not sink for the sake of a pat on the head. Scott’s speech Wednesday night will go down in history as one of the most shameful displays of minstrelsy in history.


Walter Fields is the Executive Editor of NorthStarNews.com.

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