The legacy of MLK is again being tarnished by bigotry from the left.
Joy-Ann Reid, managing editor of NBCUniversal-owned theGrio.com, took the set on MSNBC's "NOW with Alex Wanger" on King's birthday. Wrapped in her cloak of partisanship, Reid decried Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney for--get this--giving money to a woman in need.
The reason the act "galled" Reid: the woman was black.
Ruth Williams had been volunteering at one of Romney's South Carolina campaign offices, and upon meeting him at a rally in Sumter and telling Romney of her financial hardship, the candidate gave her around $50 from his own pocket.
Rather than salute the act as one of Christian kindness, Reid said it played into "every sort of patronizing stereotype of black people" and, in a column later that day, likened it to Romney "flicking a quarter at Ms. Williams" and reinforcing a conservative stereotype of blacks as "dependent, childlike and constantly in search of handouts."
Reid and her like-minded friends--progressive talking heads whose only explanation to Obama's unpopularity is the seething and unadulterated Civil War-era racism inherent in the right (and the South)--are an affront to the dream.
These constant, baseless and vitriolic accusations are corrosive to the process of improving race relations in America, only serving to dissuade whites from speaking openly on the subject in the first place for fear of the left-brandished and ever-present stigma of "racist."
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