BET Experience

Commentary: No Room for Romney's "Anglo-Saxon" Politics

Both at home and abroad, Mitt Romney has shown that he doesn't get the multiethnic population he wants to lead.

By Farai Chideya, theroot.com

Posted: 08/01/2012 04:36 PM EDT

Filed Under 2012 Olympics, Barack Obama, Barack Obama 2012, President Barack Obama, The Road to the White House, Mitt Romney, President Obama, 2012 Election

(The Root) -- So much for the melting pot.

When an anonymous foreign policy adviser to presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney criticized President Obama in the United Kingdom's Daily Telegraph for slighting Britain and ignoring America's "Anglo-Saxon heritage," it was a political shot heard 'round the world -- or at least on both sides of the pond. Romney, who denied that anyone associated with his campaign had made the comment, also got into hot water last week for criticizing London's handling of the Olympic Games. He got verbally spanked by both the British prime minister and the mayor of London, as well as by the British press, for his gaffe. (To wit, the Sun called him "Mitt the Twit.")

But the controversial Telegraph quote about heritage might have been more meaningful because it flirted with the sin of omission. Of course, the Founding Fathers were all of English ancestry. What we now call America was not a desolate land when Europeans arrived but one populated by thousands of Native American tribes. As for African Americans, well, the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619. Some blacks were indentured servants or even free in the early colonial years, and many intermarried, particularly with white indentured servants. What makes America unique is precisely the grand intermixture of cultures from every populated continent that began before the nation itself was founded.

Does this all feel very "America 101" to you? Well, it does to me, too. And yet Romney's chosen rhetoric makes it imperative to restate the basics. While I'd like to think that the 2012 election will be less racially heated than the one in 2008, underlying tensions remain.

Some incidents are easier to write off as crackpot, like the Obama effigy hung by the Quran-burning Florida minister. Some are inept, like the race-baiting "Plan to Defeat Barack Hussein Obama," backed by a wealthy conservative but quickly leaked to the press.

The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of BET Networks.

Read the full story at theroot.com.

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