Behind the "Big Tent" mask the Republicans are desperate to be noticed wearing, are groups who honestly think they don't see race, because they need that psychological cover as a license to thwart history.
You see, if they don't honestly acknowledge what's happened to blacks, then A) they don't have to do anything substantial about it, and B) they can magnanimously imagine themselves as part of a different and more wholesome, and profitable, future.
But, by directing their attention and ire so vehemently on blacks - and especially on this President and his policies - it's painfully obvious to everyone watching, the Republican Party is, culturally, still firmly stuck in America's rearview mirror. And with their image fading fast:
Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, they're blacks of a different era - one the rest of us, now, only want a peek at on film, and not in our daily lives.
And yet, it's here. Dr. Ben Carson - and the adulation he receives from conservatives - could be replaced by Booker T. Washington without even squinting our eyes. American culture's that real. Right down to the Southern backdrop of strange fruit.
That's because we're a country, with a character, and the sooner we start acting like it, the better. There is no escaping our history. The most we can hope is to learn from it.
How the Republican Party thinks a traumatized and terrorized people - who've never had what they needed - were somehow going to collectively beat the odds, is a question I may not be equipped to answer because, frankly, I don't understand it. But then, I'm not willfully obtuse, as well.
Unlike the Republican Party (and the other blacks momentarily still in it) I can not look my people in the face and not acknowledge their struggle as a moral one, or frame their plight as undeserving. When it comes to their concerns - vs. the major concerns of even "mainstream" America - theirs wins, hands down, every time. Partially because, as we've seen, freedom and justice for blacks has always had a profound influence on loosening the parameters limiting other's lives as well.
Those slave ships left a lot in their wake. TMR has been calling for reparations and it's time that's on the table. But even more than that, it's the Republican Party that should be calling for a Truth & Reconciliation commission, not only in order to (cynically) assess if, why, and how money to blacks would be warranted and/or distributed, but also so we can get the story in the open and, finally, walk together as a nation.
The Republican Party freed the slaves.
The Republican Party should see to it, as their civic duty, that ignorance on this particular subject will no longer be an excuse for anything.
