Republican does not

mean racist
Thursday’s editorial, “GOP needs to use action, not just words, to heal racial divisions” (ODE, Jan. 9), simply perpetuates that tired shibboleth of the left that republicans are racists.
Republicans don’t have a former Ku Klux Klan Kleagle, like democratic Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, in their ranks. Only last year, Sen. Byrd, in an interview with Fox News’ Tony Snow, referred to “white niggers.” Byrd quickly apologized, but he wasn’t criticized by democrats or forced to resign his Appropriations Committee chairmanship.
During debate over the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Byrd spent 14 hours and 13 minutes in an unsuccessful filibuster. He voted against the bill along with 20 other Senate democrats. Only six republicans voted against the bill.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party panders to minorities with racial quotas, preferences and double standards. This is especially true at colleges and universities, dominated as they are by the left. Consider the University of Michigan’s affirmative-action admissions policies: According to the Center for Equal Opportunity, the odds ratio favoring admission of a black applicant with identical grades and test scores to a white applicant is 174 to one. The implicit and utterly racist message here is that black students must be held to lower academic standards than everyone else.
It is republicans, not democrats, who punish nostalgia for racism in their party. It is democrats, not republicans, who perpetuate racial stereotypes and prejudices, or to use President Bush’s memorable phrase, “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”

Sean Walston

sixth-year graduate

physics