News broke today that the Department of the Treasury has plans to move President Andrew Jackson from the front of the $20 bill that is currently in circulation to the back, and they’d be putting an icon of the abolition movement in his place.
Harriet Tubman is, by any definition of the word, a hero. Andrew Jackson, on the other hand, while a former President of the United States, has a biography that takes incredible nuance applied to it in order to come away feeling like he was much more than a war mongering racist, on the real. If you have any Native American genes in your DNA, you should probably despise Jackson, really. But as much as Jackson was a Democrat (because they actually don’t acknowledge the tectonic shift in ideology the two parties undertook in the 1960’s), you can count on Republicans and conservatives to prove just how not racist they are when something like this happens.
I headed over to several conservative and libertarian Facebook pages, and found some comments on the story that I thought would best demonstrate just how not racist conservatism makes one.
Right out of the gate, over on Being Conservative I found these responses (click them to be taken to the actual posts)
Yes. You read that right.
That’s right, she pissed off Southern farmers who just wanted her to help them get their slaves back!
Gee. I wonder why they chose Sharpton and Obama for this example…
Racism and homophobia in one shot, gotta love it. Oh, the horror! A gay on our currency?!
Apparently this person has no idea what “hero” or “myth” mean. Shockingly.
Then, I took a stroll — a gambol if you will — over to Sean Hannity’s Facebook page. I wasn’t disappointed with what I found.
Someone should tell Benjamin are bills have already had Benjamin Franklin, a non-president, on them for a long, long time. Also: freeing slaves not that big a deal I guess.
Look guys! I found a way to make conservatives care about poor people! Just put a black woman on one of our bills.
A double-whammy. Scott apparently thinks putting black people on currency is somehow racist, and Jay thinks a) Reagan single-handedly defeated the USSR and that b) helping to free slaves as a black woman was somehow less important than that.
And finally, this one is from Hannity’s page too, but I wanted to give it its very own introduction, because I saw it on a few different threads. It’s really vile as fuck, and belies everything that’s wrong with America. I also decided not to censor out the name of the person who posted it. It’s disgustingly racist; just don’t go doing anything stupid like threatening violence on the mouth-breathing racist piece of shit, okay?
Frank Panzeca. Racist douche horn of the day, with runner-up honors going to Jim Henricks.
I’ve seen idiots arguing that she shouldn’t be honored because she’s a “thief” for treating black people like people rather than property. No word yet on how those same idiots feel about honoring “terrorists” who plotted to overthrow a divinely-appointed monarch and steal his land, or some dude who endangered the public by dueling with pistols, or a guy who illegally suspended Habeas Corpus and robbed slaveowners of massive amounts of “property”, or a terrorist mass murderer who illegally made a military attack after the relevant war was over.