Richard Burr's Racist Lovefest

Lately, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in North Carolina, Richard Burr, seems to have decided that I might like to donate to his campaign. How do I know? He's sent on a handful of his brochures to my mailbox in the past month, thinking that I would be persuaded by them to support his cause.

Hey, I thought, why not give this Burr fellow a chance? After all, I don't put it beyond the Democratic Party to misrepresent their opponent. Perhaps Richard Burr was not a regressive, backward-thinking hater after all. Perhaps he was a moral, modern, do-right kind of guy.

So I opened his stack of promotional material. What I saw follows:

Gee, I thought as I flipped through the glossy pages Burr's campaign had put together. Where are all the black people? After all, according to the U.S. Census more than one in five people in North Carolina is black. Surely, the black people must be somewhere, right?

Nope. As I looked through page after page after page of campaign material, the only North Carolina residents I saw depicted were white (not only white, but comfortable to boot. Where are the working-class people who don't wear dorky country-club clothes? Hey, there's one in the September 11 photograph, but he's a New Yorker.)

This is pretty telling, since campaign literature is meant to express the candidate's image of a positive future for North Carolina. Apparently, for Richard Burr a positive North Carolina future is one with only country-club white people around.

But wait, I spoke too soon! There is one black person in all the Richard Burr advertisements I've been sent:

There he is! No, no, Richard Burr isn't black, silly! Look behind Burr, down a bit from Burr's face and a little to the left. There he is -- or at least there is a third of his face. This is the only black person in all of the advertisements Richard Burr's campaign has sent to me. He's just where a black person should be according to the code of the old South: behind, below, slightly bowed and silently listening.

What does Richard Burr stand for? The pictures speak for themselves. The question is, will we let men like Richard Burr speak for us?

Theo Lock
~~ Irregular Times