Alan has an affinity for blaming his mistreatment on his race. Remember his past efforts catalogued in the Illinois Times piece:
Keyes is also legendary for playing the race card. He quit his State Department job in 1987, blaming it on a racial snub by Deputy Secretary of State John C. Whitehead. (Keyes accused Whitehead of looking past Keyes and speaking to subordinates while arguing over Keyes’ plan to withhold funding for any UN committees that refused to support U.S. policies. Whitehead called the charge “outrageous” and “inaccurate.”)
In 1992, when he wasn’t given a prime speaking spot at the Republican National Convention, Keyes made headlines by blaming the decision on racism and accused fellow Maryland Republicans of being racist for not supporting him. Keyes spoke twice at the convention, including once in primetime. Because the Republican National Committee withheld financial support for his losing cause, Keyes accused them of racism and complained that in the Republican Party, “colorblind means that when a colored person walks in, you suddenly go blind.”
Running for president, Keyes accused the media of “a blackout to keep the black out.” Salon.com reporter Jake Tapper recounted that after the Oct. 28, 1999, presidential debate, Keyes accused journalists of being racist because they didn’t ask him questions in the pressroom: “The people of this country have gotten over their racial sickness — I don’t know that you folks have. I think that merit means nothing to you because you can’t look past race. And I think I’m deadly sick of it. If you’re not in the mold that’s supposed to correspond to what you folks say is ‘black,’ what you claim are supposed to be the attributes of the race, then you’re shut out.”
When Tapper pointed out the media attention to African-American Republican J.C. Watts and asked him about it, Keyes responded, “The very question is a racist question!” Keyes told the media, “You do to me what you did to my ancestors! You ignore my successes, just as you ignored my ancestors’ successes. You ignore it and then you report it so people can think badly of me. And then you want to tell me you’re not a racist!”
Keyes told USA Today in 2000 that he was excluded from media coverage because of racism: “I think it’s racially motivated. And it’s racially motivated not in the sense of just being against blacks but being against black conservatives, who would threaten the base of left-wing liberalism in America.” Keyes claimed that the media was playing a “Stepin Fetchit game of racial politics.” When an interviewer praised his oratorical skills, Keyes called it racist because it denigrated his ideas.
As Kevin Merida noted in the Washington Post in 2000, “How do you explain a black man who regularly uses slavery metaphors to make his points and yet complains he has been racially typecast?”
When Keyes invokes the civil-rights movement, it is only to make a point about his favorite issue, abortion. Keyes has said, “I believe I fight the same battle, when I speak on behalf of the unborn, that Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. were fighting.”
Keyes even argues that abortion “is committing genocide against black people in this country with devastating demographic results that we have already seen in the course of the last census.”
When it comes to race, what Keyes rejects is the idea that any black person — except for Alan Keyes — suffers discrimination. Keyes told Larry King in 2000 that if he was the victim of a “driving while black” police stop, he would not blame police but would fault the “black folks out there disproportionately committing certain kinds of crime.”
If past is prologue, he’ll only argue it’s racism whenever he’s challenged more frequently from here on out. In reality, the fact that he is African-American has probably shielded him from criticism in the past. Jacob Weisberg made the point after an eruption after the 2nd Presidential Debate in 2000
You know what’s fascinating? Can I make a statement here? The New Hampshire debate that was held in the ’96 race, they did the polling afterward. I actually won the debate in the eyes of the people polled. I OFTEN win these debates, and every time I stand before you press folks, you have no questions. I find it kind of amazing. At some point, you know, one has to start to wonder. The people of this country have gotten over their racial sickness. I don’t know that you folks have. I think that merit means nothing to you because you can’t look past race. And I think I’m deadly SICK of it. Every time I get in front of audiences in this country, they respond, just as it was tonight, to the answers THAT I GIVE. But your response is nothing because you don’t represent those people. You apparently represent the same money powers that are seeking to destroy the representative nature of our government. I frankly think you all ought to be ashamed of yourselves. At some point you ought to wake up to your responsibility not to let vice take place in darkness and not to let virtue languish unnoticed. That’s your job, but you don’t do it, DO YOU? Instead you PANDER to the money. But if you were doing your job, we wouldn’t have to worry about campaign-finance reform, because there would be sufficient attention paid to every candidate in the race that the American people would know who they are and what they stand for without the expenditure of billions of dollars. But they don’t know, because you won’t do your job. That’s SAD! And it’s DESTROYING our democracy.
With that, Keyes stormed off the stage and departed the room, leaving reporters somewhat stunned. In fact, I think the racial factor works mildly in Keyes’ favor. If he were a white Republican, and thus less of a novelty, the press would portray him more directly as a fanatic. Ignoring Keyes is the kindest thing the press can do for him.
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