Sunday, August 26, 2007

Rush Limbaugh knows why we want to stop genoicide in Dafur

Rush Limbaugh knows why white Democrats would want to help stop genocide in Dafur. As reported by Media Matters:

Summary: On his nationally syndicated radio show, Rush Limbaugh claimed that Democrats "want to get us out of Iraq, but they can't wait to get us into Darfur." He continued: "There are two reasons. What color is the skin of the people in Darfur? It's black. And who do the Democrats really need to keep voting for them? If they lose a significant percentage of this voting bloc, they're in trouble." A caller responded, "The black population," to which Limbaugh said, "Right."

A great deal could be said about such opinions, including the fact that very few Democratic (and, of course, even fewer Republican) elected officials have proposed the United States do anything about Dafur. But what I find most interesting is what this reveals about Mr. Limbaugh. Mr. Limbaugh thinks any white American who proposes helping black people in Africa must have a selfish reason for doing so. In other words he does not believe that white Americans really have altruistic motives for wanting to prevent genocide, at least genocide involving black people in Africa, and thinks any white American who claims to have such motives is a liar and a hypocrite. It is interesting that he apparently does feel that black Americans have some intrinsic interest in helping black Africans.

Think about that for a moment. Rush Limbaugh feels that black Americans have a stake in what happens to black Africans, but white Americans do not. In Limbaugh’s view white Americans have more in common with white Europeans than they do to black Americans and black Americans have more interests in common with black Africans than they do with other American citizens of different skin colors. Isn’t that a profoundly un-American point of view?

1 comment:

Dave Barrett said...

the,
I deleted your comment because it was not a response to anything in the blog post and, unless you advocate not intervening anywhere in the world (not just Africa) to stop killing, it was obscenely racist.