I’m not a Huckabee fan but the extent of his “racism” here seems to be the fact that he’s a “white man calling a black man a ‘pimp.'”

Via Salon:

In an interview promoting his recent book about American Christian political identity, Mike Huckabee commented that he doesn’t understand how Barack and Michelle Obama let their daughters listen to Beyoncé. He told ABC that he doesn’t think Beyoncé is wholesome, referring to Biblical ideas about holiness, saying, “what you put into your brain is also important, as well as what you put into your body.” Huckabee, a white man, seems to take particular focus on Beyoncé, stating in his book that it seems her husband, Jay Z, has crossed the line from husband to pimp in “sexually exploiting her body.”

I want you to hold that moment in your head for a minute – a white man calling a black man a “pimp” and criticizing a black female singer for being too sexual in her music. Let’s talk about history.

In the Oscar-nominated movie “Selma,” there’s a particularly poignant moment when clergy and people of faith from across the country respond to the call to come march in Selma, Alabama. Ministers and clergy travel to the small town that is the center of a voting rights conflict, and get in line behind Martin Luther King, Jr., Andrew Young and John Lewis as they march to the end of the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Route 80. These clergymen and -women did this knowing the stance they were taking was a risky one – one Unitarian Univeralist minister named James Reeb would later be killed by a white mob who considered him a traitor to the white race. […]

And it is in this context that Huckabee can call a multimillionaire black musician a prostitute and a sexual object without his base of white evangelicals batting an eye. It is this history – a history of Evangelicalism founded in racial tensions and racist fear over the sexuality of black people – that colors Huckabee’s comments to make them seem entirely reasonable to an audience of white evangelicals primed to gobble them up. Huckabee’s comments, indeed, are carefully calculated dogwhistles to his base, imbued with the racist history of the political evangelical identity.