24 Feb 2010 Washington Post/Henry Louis Gates Website Wants to Write Black Conservatives Out of Black History

As Black History Month draws to a close, the web site The Root has chosen to publish a hateful article that demeans black conservatives solely for their political views — grouping them with brutal dictators, convicted criminals and self-centered celebrities.  This has drawn a stinging rebuke from Project 21 member Bob Parks.

“It doesn’t take much for liberals to call black conservatives ‘self-hating,'” noted Parks, “but what is it called when someone decides that blacks deemed inappropriate should be wholly removed from history?  What kind of egos are we talking about here?”

The Root is operated by The Washington Post.  Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. serves as The Root’s editor-in-chief.

In a recent posting, “Black Folks We’d Like to Remove From Black History” by Jada Smith, 21 blacks are singled out for being “embarrassing.”  Smith wrote: “[W]hile we love our own, we sure do dream of erasing a few of them.”

“It’s not enough that progressives intentionally distort and rewrite black history to their political advantage, but now The Root, the Post and Professor Gates are showing additional contempt for black people by allowing open suggestions about who should be excluded from that rewritten history,” Parks pointed out.

Of the 21 blacks selected by Smith to purge from black memory, there are five American political figures, five infamous foreign dictators, two criminals and nine celebrities.  The two liberal politicos — current D.C. councilman and former mayor Marion Barry and former Baltimore mayor Sheila Dixon — earned their shame by being convicted of breaking the law.

The three black conservatives are demeaned solely for their politics.  Republican Party chairman Michael Steele is the “Bozo of politics.”  Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas allegedly lacks “standing” among blacks because “he looks to the Constitution as ‘colorblind.'”  Former presidential candidate Alan Keyes, whose activism extols the values of the Declaration of Independence and the rights of the unborn, has “never managed to make a lick of sense.”

Project 21’s Parks added: “The Root meticulously nominated five political figures among narcissistic celebrities and murderous dictators.  The two liberals broke written laws, while the others were convicted of the crime of being black and conservative.  It’s ironic that the hyper-sensitive Professor Gates presided over this fantasy of removing certain onerous blacks from our history.  Now that he’s got me riled up, I wonder if he and his bosses at the Washington Post will have me over for a beer to talk about their writer acting stupidly.”

Project 21, a leading voice of black conservatives since 1992, is sponsored by The National Center for Public Policy Research (www.nationalcenter.org).