SACRAMENTO — A California Republican Party leader has called on the highest-ranking African American in the state GOP to stop "parading" his race by complaining about "how awful it is to be a black Republican."
In an angry letter distributed to GOP activists statewide, Randy Ridgel, a member of the party's Board of Directors, responded to an accusation by fellow board member Shannon Reeves, who is black, that Republicans have treated African Americans as "window dressing."
"I, for one, am getting bored with that kind of garbage," Ridgel wrote. "Let me offer this suggestion to Mr. Reeves: 'Get over it, bucko. You don't know squat about hardship.' "
Ridgel added: "I personally don't give a damn about your color ... so stop parading it around. We need human beings of all human colors in our party to pull their weight, so get in without the whining or get out."
Ridgel, a retired white rancher from rural Lake County, also endorsed an essay suggesting that there would have been an upside to a Confederate victory in the Civil War.
Regarding blacks freed from slavery at the end of the war, Ridgel wrote: "Most of the poor devils had no experience fending for themselves, so they fared worse than before the war and during the war."
Reeves called Ridgel's letter "an ignorant, offensive statement of the highest order."
"It is that type of ignorance that is systemic among an old guard within this party," Reeves said. "And that ignorance must be rooted out of the party or the party will continue to offend voters, and we will continue to lose elections from the statehouse to the schoolhouse."
The racially charged spat among state GOP board members is playing out through a series of open letters shared with state party colleagues, and comes just as the Republican Party is struggling to move beyond the controversy involving Trent Lott. The U.S. senator from Mississippi lost his post as majority leader after speaking favorably about Strom Thurmond's segregationist bid for president in 1948.
"It's basically touching a very raw nerve at a very bad time," said Bruce Cain, a political scientist at UC Berkeley. "It's certainly a huge setback to have someone like Shannon Reeves quarreling with right-wing rural Republicans."
The exchange between two members of the state Republican Party leadership grows out of the campaign for the chairmanship of the party. The election by about 1,400 party delegates will take place next month at the state GOP convention in Sacramento.
