Here's the problem, in a nutshell, as reported in the Politico today:
The controversy surrounding a comedy CD distributed by Republican National Committee chair candidate Chip Saltsman has not torpedoed his bid and might have inadvertently helped it...
...Alabama Republican committeeman Paul Reynolds said the fact the Saltsman sent him a CD with the song on it "didn't bother me one bit."
"Chip probably could have thought it through a bit more, but he was doing everyone a favor by giving us a gift," he said. "This is just people looking for something to make an issue of."...
You get the idea.
The natural reflex is to assume that these folks know that a parody song called "Barack the Magic Negro" is racist on its face, but they just don't care. But that is not the problem here. The problem is that they genuinely don't see it as racist on its face and don't understand why the rest of us do.
Because it's just a "joke." And it's an okay joke for them because, by and large, many of them don't have much contact with people unlike themselves. At the GOP convention, I walked a full circle around the concourse counting the black faces. I think I got to 18 -- which is more than, you know, two, but remember that was out of 20,000 or so people in the hall.
What do you do with people like that? They're so completely out of touch with the country they live in that it's not even possible to have a dialogue. It's like trying to have a dialogue with someone who keeps insisting that the sun revolves around the earth and expects you to acknowledge his "point of view" as a legitimate one.
Of course, if someone on a black radio station made a "Chip the Magic Redneck" song parody, it wouldn't seem quite so funny to them. The people who hate identity politics generally only hate it when other people are engaging in it. I pray the GOP chooses Saltsman as its new chairman, that's all I can say.
