Crossposted with embedded Google videos at My Left Wing
Delores Brewer, Republican candidate for Mayor of Alexandria, Louisiana, is yet to issue an apology to every man and woman who has been raped, attacked or molested. She has also failed to apologize to the African-American voters of Alexandria, Louisiana.
Trivializing rape in a desperate attempt to gain votes from women, particularly white women, Brewer aired the following television advertisment:
Although Brewer and her Republican handlers from Baton Rouge vehemently deny it, Brewer patently conflates her rapist and her Democratic opponent, Jacques Roy, in the television spot: therein she claims both of them have attacked her; both of their “attacks” required her to regroup and rebuild her “strength” and “integrity;” and both, the ad implies, have “disrespected” the community. The parallel structures it erects cannot be more pellucid. And she has admitted it, although she refuses to apologize to those whose experience of rape and molestation she exploited in order to tape a commercial whose bathetic and sanctimonious message ranks it one of the most offensive and cynical political advertisements in Louisiana history.
But Brewer’s cynicism and underhanded tactics do not end here. Witness the following press conference of 12 October 2006, where she flagrantly reveals her commitment to the Southern Strategy:
According to Brewer, the African-American, Democratic “machine” will defeat her in the runoff. Notice her comments in the eighth minute of the clip. Inciting white voters while dismissing African-American voters as so many mindless cogs and wheels, Brewer is engaging in a politics of division that will not unify the city but only rent it asunder. Not only should she apologize to the African-Americans she has dismissed as thoughtless subjects; she should also apologize to those who pass as white, as she is preying upon their deeply repressed fears and prejudices.
But it gets worse. In her press conference of 12 October 2006, Brewer repeatedly cites the alleged abuse showered upon her by Bridget Brown, an African-African attorney representing the City of Alexandria in a case they have against Cleco, Corp., who regularly has contracts with the city. Because Brown and the City Council dismissed many of Brewer’s claims of Brown’s conflict of interest, she depicts them as so many pigs in the following advertisement:
But notice how the only pig in the commercial that is not white is the one the narrator of the advertisement refers to as Bridget Brown. Bridget Brown, according to this metaphor, is just as dirty as the other pigs, but she is different, she is of a different stock, and she really does not belong into the broader community of white pigs. In other words, she is an outsider, an interloper, and this is displayed by the color of her skin, her brown, dirty skin.
Delores Brewer and the Louisiana Republican Party who helped create her ads should apologize for their racist, sexist and insensitve advertisements. Resorting to the Southern strategy and the rhetoric of white victimhood may be quaint, especially those who are nostalgic for times yore, but it has no place in twenty-first century American politics. Please join me in asking Delores Brewer and the Louisiana Republican Party to refrain from engaging in these deplorable campaign tactics.
