When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed, President Lyndon B. Johnson famously remarked, “We have lost the South for a generation.” Shortly after, Republican Barry Goldwater won (then unheard-of) five Southern states, and Richard Nixon embarked on his “Southern Strategy” of appealing to white resentment towards the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, public busing laws and what was perceived as a weakening of states’ rights.

Republicans have created a coalition where they use race to advance their political agendas. These racially charged tactics continue to persist today.

Ronald Reagan likewise tapped into white resentment of civil rights by making his first public address after the 1980 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, Miss. In the town where three civil rights workers had been killed during the Freedom Summer of 1964, Reagan used the coded language, “I believe in states’ rights … I believe we have distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended to be given in the Constitution to that federal establishment.”

George H. W. Bush famously ran the Willie Horton ad in the 1988 election, designed both to make Michael Dukakis look soft on crime and to pretty much terrify the average white voter. The ad highlighted a black man who had committed assault, armed robbery and rape while on a weekend furlough away from prison. Needless to say, Bush won in a landslide.

There are exceptions of recent Democratic presidents from the South like Jimmy Carter’s successful election in 1976 (the only Southern state he won in 1980, however, was Georgia) and Arkansas native Bill Clinton’s relative success.

In 1988, 2000 and 2004, Republican candidates won every state in the former Confederacy.

In contrast, Virginia was the only Southern state to vote for President Barack Obama last year.

Aside from being the first black president, Obama has reached several other firsts during his presidency.

As Salon.com recently noted, this political benefitting off of racism continues today and is involved in the unprecedented, desperate attempts not only to thwart Obama’s politics but to personally attack him.

Obama is the first president to have been threatened with the possibility of defaulting on the nation’s debt for political reasons. He is also the first president not to have his appointees, notably Richard Cordray of the Consumer Protection Financial Bureau, confirmed not because Congress personally opposed the selections but because of opposition toward the existence of the agencies.

President Obama is also the first president to have been accused of being born outside the U.S. even after he publicly released his birth certificate. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s famous dictum that his primary goal was to make Obama a one-term president was absolutely unprecedented. Similarly, Newt Gingrich’s characterization of Obama as the “food stamp” president was an astonishing new low, even for him.

It is obvious but worth noting that the Democratic Party also has an immense history with racism considering it was the party of slavery. Additionally, Republican leaders like Speaker of the House John Boehner or House Majority Leader Eric Cantor are not racist. Neither is opposing the Affordable Care Act or Obama’s political philosophy.

But the overwhelming personal disdain that the Tea Party has for Obama most definitely contains racism, and it does not exist exclusively on the fringe of the group.

The truly troubling reality is that no one, aside from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) repudiation of “racist elements” within the Tea Party, seems willing to acknowledge or even consider the possibility that such an obsessive disdain for the President and his agenda is based largely upon race.

Aside from the Tea Party’s rhetoric, one needs to look no further than Republican efforts to enact voter identification laws to minimize minority turnout or Republican gerrymandering to increase white voters and exclude minority voters in their districts to see the racial undertones of Republican politics. In fact, the NAACP stated last year that there have been only 10 reported cases of in-person voter fraud since 2000 – a claim largely reaffirmed by the fact-checking group PolitiFact.

And while the national percentage of non-Hispanic whites fell from 69 percent to 65 percent between 2000 and 2010, the average Republican Congressional district increased from 71 percent white to 73 percent.

With last week’s attempt to make the federal government default on its debt, many have begged for the Republican Party to reevaluate its strategy, but the party desperately needs to question its highly-personal opposition to the President.

Disagreement is the essence of democracy, but the Tea Party’s actions continue to put democracy at risk and are likely to continue.

Unfortunately for the Republican Party, the country is becoming more racially diverse and such desperate attempts to remedy this on the ballot will soon look as repugnant and racially-motivated as their dissent during the Civil Rights movement.

Online Editor Ross Fogg is a College senior from Fayetteville, Ga.

Emory Wheel
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The Emory Wheel was founded in 1919 and is currently the only independent, student-run newspaper of Emory University. The Wheel publishes weekly on Wednesdays during the academic year, except during University holidays and scheduled publication intermissions.

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