Ronald Reagan: A Legacy Worth Remembering

[struggle4progress]

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Now let's talk about what he did to Black people.

After taking office in 1981, Reagan began a sustained attack on the government’s civil rights apparatus, opened an assault on affirmative action and social welfare programs, embraced the White racist leaders of then-apartheid South Africa and waged war on a tiny, Black Caribbean nation.
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"Ronald Regan, it is fair to say, was really an anathema to the entire civil rights community and the civil rights agenda,” Ronald W. Walters, a professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland, told BET.com just a few hours after Reagan died, at age 93, on Saturday.
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He outraged African Americans and others by relating to apartheid South Africa as a friend and ally. His program of constructive engagement amounted to a go-slow policy under which apartheid was criticized but essentially tolerated. It was a policy that delayed the independence of Namibia, then controlled by South Africa, blocked United Nations’ condemnations of South African attacks on nearby African countries and permitted American corporate support for the racist régime. He was loyal to South Africa because, as he told CBS during an interview early in 1981, it was "a country that has stood by us in every war we've ever fought, a country that, strategically, is essential to the free world in its production of minerals."
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http://www.bet.com/package/0,,p552,00.html