In a More Diverse America, A Mostly White Convention

In my first post of the day I stated that the Republican Party has become a Christianist controlled and racist party that is largely lily white. A story in today's Washington Post supports this premise and confirms that the GOP convention has very few non-white attendees. I hope minorities of all types wake up to this reality. The GOP cares only about white evangelical Christians and only gives lip service to diversity and a "big tent" in the hope of suckering others to vote them into power. With whites projected to be a minority in not too many decades, the make up of today's GOP should be troubling to many. What I find amazing is that the GOP doesn't get it that it's the party's policies and intolerance that drives people away, and not just minorities. Hopefully, they will continue to "not get it" and will lose elections big time. Here are some story highlights:

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ST. PAUL, Minn., Sept. 3 -- Organizers conceived of this convention as a means to inspire, but some African American Republicans have found the Xcel Energy Center depressing this week. Everywhere they look, they see evidence of what they consider one of their party's biggest shortcomings. As the country rapidly diversifies, Republicans are presenting a convention that is almost entirely white.

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Only 36 of the 2,380 delegates seated on the convention floor are black, the lowest number since the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies began tracking diversity at political conventions 40 years ago. Each night, the overwhelmingly white audience watches a series of white politicians step to the lectern -- a visual reminder that no black Republican has served as a governor, U.S. senator or U.S. House member in the past six years.

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The lack of diversity is out of sync with the demographic changes in the United States. The Census Bureau reported last month that racial and ethnic minorities will make up a majority of the country's population by 2042 -- almost a decade earlier than what the bureau predicted just four years ago. Two-thirds of Americans are non-Hispanic whites, 12.4 percent are black and 14.8 percent are Hispanic, according to 2006 census numbers.

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24 state delegations at the Xcel Energy Center have no black members. . . . The minority void in St. Paul is amplified for Republicans who watched Obama deliver his acceptance speech in Denver last week. Blacks made up 25 percent of the delegates at Invesco Field, and black musicians Stevie Wonder and John Legend performed before Obama stepped to the lectern. Vendors inside the stadium sold T-shirts with slogans in Spanish. Martin Luther King's son delivered a brief introductory speech.

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"Have you ever heard that saying -- about how the definition of insanity is doing something over and over again and expecting a different result? Well, what we've done with minorities has become a form of political insanity."