Yes, but that was pre-glasses Rick Perry.
Rick Perry, force of good in the
fight against racism.
“America is a more tolerant and welcoming place than it’s ever been before,” he said. “So why is it today that so many black families feel left behind, even after federal programs like food stamps and housing subsidies?” Arguing that the country’s social safety net and War on Poverty has failed, Perry criticized President Obama for expanding Medicaid and allowing more workers to get overtime pay — policies that will cover millions of families of color.
He called on his party to reach out more to voters of color with alternative policies, saying, “When [Republicans] gave up on winning African American support we lost our moral legitimacy as the party of Lincoln.” His alternative policies include scrapping environmental regulations, lowering corporate taxes, and funnel more federal dollars to private and charter schools.
See, the way ThinkProgress wrote that up was a little rude. Just because Rick Perry has been an advocate of voter ID laws and once demanded the National Guard go guard the Texas border because he was pretty sure the brown menace would be overtaking his state any day now doesn't mean—what's that? Rick Perry's history as a champion of racial justice goes even farther back
than he lets on?
In the early years of his political career, Rick Perry began hosting fellow lawmakers, friends and supporters at his family’s secluded West Texas hunting camp, a place known by the name painted in block letters across a large, flat rock standing upright at its gated entrance.
“N[——]head,” it read.
And despite Perry's insistence that he demanded his parents paint over the name, his guests vow it was still there long after Perry claimed he'd boldly had solved the problem?
Of those interviewed, the seven who said they saw the rock said the block-lettered name was clearly visible at different points in the 1980s and 1990s. One, a former worker on the ranch, believes he saw it as recently as 2008.
Well, sure. If you're going to nix all the presidential candidates who have hosted political events on bits of property that have been explicitly named with racial slurs that their owners have painted on rocks, though, maybe
you're the one who's not being "tolerant and welcoming."
You know, I just don't think I'm asking for much here, but I keep assuming that eventually we're bound to have a presidential election that includes not even one candidate with racially "insensitive" episodes in their past so horrible that we have to redact some of the words out of them. You know, someday. Eventually. After the robots take over.