2005 RNC chairman: "Republican candidates often have prospered by ignoring black voters and even by exploiting racial tensions," and, "by the '70s and into the '80s and '90s, the Democratic Party solidified its gains in the African-American community, and we Republicans did not effectively reach out. Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong."
That apology is a good start, but it takes more than a decade to make up for many decades of building a party on racism. As quoted before from Nixon's campaign strategist:
"From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats."
And then RNC chairman Lee Atwater in 1981:
"You start out in 1954 by saying, "[n-word], [n-word], [n-word]." By 1968 you can't say "[n-word]"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.[36]
And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "[n-word], [n-word]"."
But by all means, cling to the idea that there's not even a perception of racism built on legitimate history. It will only ensure that Republicans continue the slide into losing enough votes that they finally having to abandon being the racist party and become a legitimate, sane second party in American politics, maybe even offering ideas instead of just going fucking nuts because there's a black president doing Republican-y things.