In politics, political parties have many labels, which define them as liberal or conservative. There are also negative labels attached to political parties that become blanketed stereotypes for everyone affiliated with them. For instance, take the Republican political party that originally started because they opposed slavery, but for the latter half of the 20th century, people labeled them as racists. In fact, Comedian Bill Maher, recently said on ABC’s, This Week, broadcast, that “…Nowadays, if you are racist, you’re probably a Republican.”
The racist labeling began during the Civil Rights Movement when Democrats joined the fight, and some white Southern Democrats were left without a political party. The Republican Party had won the Southern white votes, but with the party labeled as racist, all of the voters, regardless of color or ethnicity, also became labeled as racist.
Even though the Civil Rights Movements Republicans made significant changes to end segregation, for instance, in 1954, a Republican, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice, Earl Warren, wrote the Brown v. Board of Education decision, which led to Republican Judge, Elbert Tuttle, ordering that the University of Mississippi admit its first black student in 1962.
“The mythmakers typically draw on two types of evidence. First, they argued that the GOP deliberately created its core messages to accommodate Southern racists. Second, they found proof in the electoral pudding: “The GOP captured the core of the Southern white backlash vote, but neither types of this evidence is persuasive,” according to University of Virginia Professor, Gerard Alexander’s article, The Myth of the Racist Republicans.
He says, “it is not at all clear that the GOP's policy positions are sugar-coated racist appeals. And election results show that the GOP became the South's dominant party in the least racist phase of the region's history, and got – and stays – that way as the party of the upwardly mobile, more socially conservative, openly patriotic middle-class, not of white solidarity.”