Deneen Borelli: America’s New Rosa Parks

If America were a bus, Deneen Borelli would be the new Rosa Parks.

Borelli is the very model of a human being, an African American and a woman who is just plain tired up to here at all of the back of the bus treatment dished by liberals—black and white alike—to conservatives who happen to be black.

Ms. Borelli has in a figurative sense, as Rosa Parks did in the original and literal sense, sat down in a seat reserved for liberals at the front of the American bus. She won’t get up, she isn’t moving and she most assuredly doesn’t care that liberals don’t like the fact.

And most assuredly, they don’t.

In her autobiography, My Story, Parks wrote this of her famous refusal to give up her seat to a white rider because of her race:

People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.

Tired of giving in.

It is a perfect description of Deneen Borelli and her refusal to give up her seat on the American bus to those who, like the racist Montgomery bus driver of so long ago demanded of Rosa Parks:

“Well, if you don’t stand up, I’m going to have to call the police and have you arrested.”

Today, Rosa Parks wouldn’t be arrested. In the 21st century Rosa Parks would be threatened and then smeared from one end of the Internet to the other.

Which is precisely what has happened to Borelli.

Borelli opens her book Blacklash: How Obama and the Left Are Driving Americans to the Government Plantation, just re-released in paperback form, noting exactly the kinds of things that are said about her in liberal land.

A warning here: the following quotes are directly from Borelli herself, the raw language used about her printed verbatim in the opening of her book.

One of the first links that comes up when you Google my name is an article entitled the “Black Tea-Bagging: ‘Nigger’ Deneen Borelli Please!”

Note that it seems the author believed it was not good enough to just identify me as black—I am a black and a nigger. The black is to let you know my skin color because apparently that will tell you something relevant about me. The second part, the nigger part, is to underscore the author’s belief that I am something less than a white person. Not an American, not a freethinker, but subhuman: a nigger, because my racial and ethnic ancestry is broadly associated with slavery, degradation, and abusive treatment.

That’s right, my long list of accomplishments and my position as a mentor and role model are not front and center. I am not referred to as a Tea Party activist or a noted conservative commentator. My entire life is reduced to one very ugly slur. Instead of questioning my ideas or thoughts, people attack me. …..

And black nigger is not the only name I’ve been called. I could list dozens. As a result of my conservative views, I am targeted and called names…..Because I am black, because I am depicted as a black nigger, and because I am a woman who is not afraid to speak the truth, I have become targeted for race-baiting…

Borelli goes on to list some of the other attacks that have come her way, not sparing the reader the disgusting detail:

“You can not speak for black people, so take your Stepin Fetchit ass back to your master on the plantation. Get your head out of your ass or out of Rush Limbaugh’s ass.”

“You are a despicable piece of garbage! A nigger crawling back to the plantation.”

There’s more. But you get the point.

The real question here is: Why? Why all this visceral, raw hatred for Deneen Borelli? A clearly talented, thoughtful, energetic soul who believes, along with millions, in the American ideal of a color-blind society built on ideas of liberty and freedom?

Borelli knows the answer, and so do the rest of us.

She is a conservative. But more importantly, she is a conservative who happens to be black.

And as with a whole host of conservatives who happen to be black—Justice Clarence Thomas first and earliest among them and Dr. Ben Carson in the last few weeks—to be a conservative and black is an open invitation to liberals to spew their never-far-from-the-surface inner racism.

Borelli’s tale is a timely reminder of what we have often discussed (as here) in this space:

Progressivism and judging by skin color is what makes the world of the Left spin.

This is why MSNBC has become such a sewer of racial bigotry—because as a thorough-going leftist cable news outlet they must at all times fly the flag in its two most primitive colors: race and progressivism. It makes no difference whether one listens to the black Al Sharpton or the white Chris Matthews: Martin Luther King and the success of the civil rights movement — the latter a movement that was needed to overcome a century and a half of liberal racism—are dead letters. As long as progressives rule the roost, there will never be a color-blind, content-of-your-character America because the Left can’t afford to let that happen.

Note well the subtitle of Borelli’s book: How Obama and the Left Are Driving Americans to the Government Plantation.

At a stroke, Borelli—whose photo is on the cover of the book—severs the connection between being black and being Left. Not to mention being an Obama supporter.

In the racist world of the American Left this is seen as little short of treason. The mentality is the 21st century version of slavery—and it is no accident that the Left was literally the political home of slavery in its original form in America.

Borelli devotes an entire chapter to the NAACP. The once great flag bearer for racial equality and a color blind America. The chapter title? “The NAACP as Liberal Front Group.”

The chapter begins with this quote from an NAACP statement concerning the Shirley Sherrod dust-up. Recall that Sherrod, an African American who worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Georgia, was seen in a video giving a speech to a local NAACP group and seemingly endorsing racism. As the world turned, the video clip was just that, a clip that presented Sherrod’s words inaccurately. When the full statement was seen in context, Sherrod, who had been fired by the Obama Agriculture Secretary, was offered her job back and an apology was forthcoming. (Her full talk, to a local NAACP group, was still filled with the time-honored progressive/skin color tie-in, but another subject, another day.)

The NAACP, learning of their own mistake in seeing the clip, issued this statement, coming to Sherrod’s defense:

With regard to the initial media coverage of the resignation of USDA Official Shirley Sherrod, we have come to the conclusion we were snookered by Fox News and tea Party Activist Andrew Breitbart into believing she had harmed white farmers because of racial bias.

Borelli’s point: Defending African-Americans is what the NAACP has always done. Unless….unless.

Unless, of course, in Borelli’s words, “you’re black, but conservative.” In which case, she says, she discovered that blacks who are conservative “….shouldn’t turn to the once-venerable civil rights organization, the NAACP, for help against discrimination. Apparently, this group helps only liberal-minded blacks.”

To illustrate the point? Remember those racial hatreds spewed at Borelli that she mentions in her opening chapter? There are more, of course, and on July 16th, as it happened, the Senior Vice President of the NAACP, a gentleman by the name of Hilary O. Shelton, was booked on a Fox show—America’s Newsroom—to discuss the general issue of racial epithets and allegations—none ever proven—of their connection to the Tea Party. Shelton was booked with—Deneen Borelli.

In Rosa Parks mode, Borelli was not about to give up her seat on America’s bus. Shelton took his time to make all manner of allegations about the Tea Party being racists—then Borelli demanded that he back them up. She, a Tea Party member herself, writes that as she demands his proof:

“He can’t tell me there is evidence, because none has surfaced. There’s nothing that says this actually happened, just unfounded claims that get repeated and repeated. I wonder if his inability to address this proves he knows it’s race-card politics.”

The following night, Borelli gets a second chance to confront Shelton, this time on Geraldo at Large. That time Al Sharpton was added to the mix. Borelli, noting the NAACP support for the liberal Sherrod, turns directly to Shelton and asks why the NAACP hasn’t been there for her—for Deneen Borelli, a black woman who happens to be conservative.

Shelton’s on-camera response?

“Why, yes, ma’am… Just give us some details.… The very broad answer is… yes, we repudiate anybody calling you a bad name in the political arena.”

So. Ten days later, not hearing a word from Shelton since the TV lights were on, Borelli fires off a letter of her own to Shelton. Politely thanking Shelton for saying on Geraldo at Large—which is to say, national television—“that the NAACP will issue a statement condemning the use of racial and other slurs to denigrate me because I am an outspoken female conservative.”

Borelli than lists some of the things spewed her way and the way of her organization, Project 21, a conservative public policy organization formed by blacks who happen to be conservative.

Among the slurs, she listed the following in her letter to Shelton:

“Uncle Tom,” “Sambo,” “house negro,” “treasonous,” “black tea-bagging ni**er,” “sell out,” “retarded,” “hypocritical,” “coon,” “Stepin Fetchit,” and a “modern day mammy,” “despicable [sic] piece of garbage,” “black cancer,” and “black bitch.

Then she listed some of the violent e-mails that come her way, the first in all capital letters:

“I HOPE THE NEXT NOOSE WILL BE AROUND YOU ARE [sic] ONE OF YOUR COLLEGES [sic] NEXCK AND HANGING FROM A TREE IN THE TOWN SQUARE.”

Another? And remember, I am reprinting these texts exactly as Borelli reprints them in her book—and as she reprinted in her letter to the NAACP’s Senior Vice President Shelton.

“You faggot niggas need to be lynched by the Klan. I pray a nightrider strings you up every one of you no count good for nothing niggas, it would serve you right for trying to think that these crackers love you. I hate a house nigga worse than I do a Klansman. Rot in hell you scurvy dogs. I would laugh to see your body strung up. It would save us real brothers the time and trouble to do it.”

Borelli closed her letter to Shelton with this sentence:

“I look forward to seeing the NAACP’s condemnation.”

The response?

In Borelli’s words, not a “peep” to threats to her of a public lynching.

Can you imagine this? In the 21st century, a black woman is being threatened with lynching and the NAACP is silent?

Why might this curious response be?

To shed some light here it should be noted who was busy doing all that lynching in America originally.

That’s right: Progressives. Liberals. The Ku Klux Klan, described by Columbia University historian Eric Foner as “a military force serving the interests of the Democratic Party” and University of North Carolina historian Allen Trelease as “the terrorist arm of the Democratic Party.”

Progressives flatly refused to pass anti-lynching laws in the day precisely because the lynchers were in fact political family. Without racists, progressive Woodrow Wilson—a dyed in the wool segregationist—would never have been president. The history of the American Left is filled with support for lynching.

So it makes complete sense that Borelli the conservative would be targeted by yet another generation of Leftists threatening her with being lynched.

What’s changed—and the change is as dramatic as it is tragically sad—is that the NAACP has abandoned black Americans for liberalism. Which means?

Which means that if you are a black woman or man in America—and you happen to be conservative—the NAACP will leave you, no pun intended, twisting in the wind.

Notes Borelli of the stone cold silence coming to her from the NAACP and the stark difference between the way the group treated liberal Shirley Sherrod and conservative Deneen Borelli:

But I’m not remotely surprised.

The NAACP has put aside the pretense that it is a civil rights organization and has exposed its real agenda as a left-wing promoter of all things progressive.

Borelli’s Blacklash makes the sound conservative point that America in the Obama era is being transformed into a “welfare nation.” And she is not shy about discussing the convergence of Obama’s leftist beliefs with the politics of race designed to not only put blacks on the government plantation—but keep them there. With the active help of once distinguished civil rights organizations like the NAACP.

In spite of all the abuse, Borelli and other conservatives who happen to be black plow on.

As this is written, the already world famous pediatric surgeon Dr. Ben Carson has come under the to-be-expected abuse reserved for those who happen to be black and are willing to take the liberal agenda head on.

In Carson’s case, the left at Johns Hopkins, where Carson has made his outstanding career, is trying to have him removed as the commencement speaker at the Johns Hopkins med school.

The doctor who spoke out against political correctness at the National Prayer Breakfast is, but of course, the latest target for liberal rage at conservatives who happen to be black.

In Borelli’s case, she has been in business, working her way “up the ranks” at Philip Morris for twenty years. Unlike the Obamas there was no Ivy League education opportunity—so she made a point after high school of continuing her schooling part time, the combination of day job plus night school meaning 18-hour days. Experiencing her way to conservatism—which, by the way, is the route taken by Ronald Reagan—Borelli spent a year volunteering for CORE — the Congress of Racial Equality.

Founded in 1942 and employing Gandhi’s principles of civil disobedience to the American civil rights movement, CORE is famous for its leadership role in the Freedom Summer Voter Registration Project of the 1960s. (Note: Three of CORE’s members were James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, the civil rights workers murdered by the Klan in 1964 Mississippi.) Today, Borelli (her website here) is the Outreach Director for Freedom Works, a contributor to Fox News, and in demand on the public speaking circuit. Last week she was the substitute host of Sean Hannity’s radio show.

Recognizing the attack on Carson for what it was—yet another example of the intolerance by liberals for black conservatives—Borelli promptly took on Touré. That would be Touré the commentator who happens to be black and who is promoted by the liberal plantation that is MSNBC.

Wrote Borelli:

Touré’s tirade is yet another example of the sheer intolerance by the left for black conservatives. I covered this subject in the first chapter of my book, Blacklash.

As a member of the black liberal establishment, Touré can’t tolerate or allow successful individuals such as Carson to shatter the pro-big government echo chamber.

Bingo.

Twenty-two years ago Clarence Thomas looked his liberal accusers in the eye at his confirmation hearing to be a Supreme Court Justice and said:

“This is not an opportunity to talk about difficult matters privately or in a closed environment. This is a circus. It’s a national disgrace. And from my standpoint, as a black American, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree.”

Have things changed with liberals? Of course not. Borelli’s sin with liberals—like Justice Thomas and Dr. Carson, not mention a growing rank of others sick to death of the racism that undergirds liberalism—is that she gets it. Deneen Borelli is viewed exactly as was Justice Thomas—and as is Dr. Ben Carson. Stop and think of that. Thomas is a Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Dr. Carson, a world famous pediatric neurosurgeon. Yet Borelli, like Thomas and Carson, a very accomplished human being, is nothing less than, in Thomas’s words, an "uppity black." Worse still for a political philosophy that pretends to oppose a "war on women," Borelli is an uppity black woman.

From the formation of the American left through the Democratic Party in 1800 , the essential formula of race and progressivism has never changed. All the turmoil over the Bank of the United States in the Jefferson-Jackson era was undergirded by support for slavery. All the fury over progressive issues from creation of the civil service to Social Security was resting on the rock of segregation and lynching and the Klan. Today it is Obamacare that rests on the idea of playing the race card, from racial quotas to illegal immigration.

The difference in the 21st century is the appearance of people like Deneen Borelli.

Ms. Borelli, like Rosa Parks, is tired of giving in. Whether that means giving in to the liberal government plantation or, as she calls it the “Old Black Guard” of civil rights leaders determined—like the NAACP—to silence conservatives who happen to be black.

The liberal worldview needs race to live—to survive.

In the pages of Blacklash Deneen Borelli details how the game works today—from the “exploitation tour” of Jesse Jackson and what she calls Jackson’s “shakedown strategy” with corporations to Al Sharpton—whom she terms “an ambulance chaser.” Concludes Borelli:

If they want to support their fellow black Americans, they need to stop being traitors to their own people.

Is it a wonder liberals want to send Deneen Borelli to the back of the American bus?

Remember what that Montgomery s driver said to Rosa Parks?

“Well, if you don’t stand up, I’m going to have to call the police and have you arrested.”

Today, liberals who fancy themselves the drivers of America’s bus have updated the line.

“Well, if you don’t shut up, I’m going to have to call the liberal media police and the masters of the liberal government plantation and have you silenced.”

One black conservative after another has faced this threat. Ben Carson faces this threat at Johns Hopkins right this minute.

Deneen Borelli has faced this threat.

And like Rosa Parks all those years ago—Deneen Borelli refuses to give up her seat on the bus.