School Daze

The White People's Party--The College Republicans of Boston University are offering a "whites only" scholarship and argue that they are focusing attention on the inequities of affirmative action.

Yeah, right. And Trent Lott was satirizing Strom Thurmond as well.

Race neo-cons like William Bennett have been pushing "color-blindness" as a moral position on race for years. But the color-blind ideology is mostly just a politically-correct fallback position for white bigotry. Once segregation was over, the same people who engaged in various kinds of abuses against African-Americans began to adapt the language of color-blindness as a new code for expressing their racial hostility. Complaining about affirmative action began to replace complaining about black "ingratitude," black "trouble-makers," and blacks "staring" at white women.

The Republican Party is troubled by the development and has already disaffiliated one group of College Republicans for adapting the "whites only scholarship idea." However, the Republicans have taken advantage of racist, anti-immigrant, and homophobic bigotry for so long that they can't shake the reality that they've become the "white people's party."