In 2012, the Democrats, espousing the "liberal" welfare state policies of the Left , received 93% of the Black vote!
93%! - an incredible number in any circumstance. But absolute insanity when those policies promote the wrong side of key issues for the black community.
In a previous post Racism, Obama and Reality [ARCHIVE Issue#6], was this observation:
Liberals desperately need blacks. If the Democratic Party lost just 30 percent of the black vote, it would mean the end of the liberal agenda. That means blacks must be kept in a perpetual state of grievance in order to keep them as a one-party people in a two-party system. When black Americans finally realize how much liberals have used them, I'm betting they will be the nation's most conservative people. Who else has been harmed as much by liberalism's vision and agenda? http://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2014/12/31/liberals-use-of-black-people-n1936579/page/fullI
Will "black Americans finally realize how much liberals have used them?"
The liberal agenda advancing the welfare state has been disastrous for blacks. One would never know it from the mass media's cheer-leading "coverage" of that agenda. But prominent blacks have written and/or spoken cogently on the harm caused, including the adverse impact of welfare, the destruction of the black family, abortion as a weapon against blacks, failed schools kept that way by blocking school vouchers and school choice, unemployment rates, the attacks on religion, the promotion of same sex marriage, and abdication of personal responsibility. By "prominent", I do not mean persons born with the 'silver spoon', but people who have grown up in the black experience and have attained prominence.
Examples abound.
Thomas Sowell, a black economist and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, who grew up in Harlem, wrote:
Anyone who is serious about evidence need only compare black communities as they evolved in the first 100 years after slavery with black communities as they evolved in the first 50 years after the explosive growth of the welfare state, beginning in the 1960s.
You would be hard-pressed to find as many ghetto riots prior to the 1960s as we have seen just in the past year, much less in the 50 years since a wave of such riots swept across the country in 1965.
We are told that such riots are a result of black poverty and white racism. But in fact -- for those who still have some respect for facts -- black poverty was far worse, and white racism was far worse, prior to 1960. But violent crime within black ghettos was far less.
Murder rates among black males were going down -- repeat, DOWN -- during the much lamented 1950s, while it went up after the much celebrated 1960s, reaching levels more than double what they had been before. Most black children were raised in two-parent families prior to the 1960s. But today the great majority of black children are raised in one-parent families....Such trends are not unique to blacks, nor even to the United States. The welfare state has led to remarkably similar trends among the white underclass in England over the same period. Just read "Life at the Bottom," by Theodore Dalrymple, a British physician who worked in a hospital in a white slum neighborhood.
You cannot take any people, of any color, and exempt them from the requirements of civilization -- including work, behavioral standards, personal responsibility and all the other basic things that the clever intelligentsia disdain -- without ruinous consequences to them and to society at large.
Non-judgmental subsidies of counterproductive lifestyles are treating people as if they were livestock, to be fed and tended by others in a welfare state -- and yet expecting them to develop as human beings have developed when facing the challenges of life themselves.
One key fact that keeps getting ignored is that the poverty rate among black married couples has been in single digits every year since 1994. Behavior matters and facts matter, more than the prevailing social visions or political empires built on those visions. http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2015/05/05/race-politics-and-lies-n1994127/page/full [Emphasis added]
Education is an issue ... the teachers' unions are the single biggest obstacle to black youngsters getting a decent education -- and among the biggest donors to the Democrats. Among the few signs of educational success for low-income minority children in the public schools are the KIPP and Success Academy charter schools. But teachers' unions are bitterly opposed to increases in the number of such schools, and Democrats do what the teachers' unions want, because money talks.
As long as blacks vote automatically for Democrats, while the teachers' unions insist on getting their money's worth, it is all but inevitable that the education of black children will be sacrificed in the public schools, wherever Democrats are in control.... the teachers' unions...donate more than 90 percent of their money to Democrats. ... [Republicans] should include appeals not only to black parents with children in successful charter schools, but also the larger number of black parents on waiting lists for charter schools, and anyone else in the black community who understands that a good education is the key for the next generation to advance.
Star Parker, founder of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education, has related that, after an arrest for shoplifting, her white high school guidance counselor told her "not to worry about it, because I was a 'victim of racism, lashing out at society.'" Parker was on welfare for seven years, had multiple abortions before coming to the realization that the system was destroying blacks. She traces the problem back to the 60s:
Unfortunately, the war on poverty that Johnson embraced was little more than a bamboozling of African Americans. History confirms this as well. Fifty years and $22 trillion dollars later, the black family has been decimated by a system that encourages single parenthood and absentee fathers. Black wealth has eroded to an average of $11,000 compared with $97,000 for whites. Urban violence still haunts many communities, with blacks eight times more likely to be murdered than whites. Black unemployment is a national disgrace, hovering at more than 30% for black youth.Current Democrat policies of pandering and peddling government trinkets are an absolute failure. http://townhall.com/columnists/starparker/2016/04/20/the-liberal-war-on-black-men-n2151201/page/full
Since the launch of the war on poverty and the beginning of massive spending and big government anti-poverty programs, the black poverty rate has hardly moved. ... What did happen was the collapse of black families after the start of massive government intervention into black life, with a tripling of single-parent black homes since the 1960s. http://townhall.com/columnists/starparker/2016/01/13/fighting-poverty-with-real-american-values-n2103489/page/full
At the time of the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, 55 percent of blacks were married. Today that number is down to 32 percent. At the time of Roe v. Wade, less than 40 percent of black babies were born to unwed mothers. Today it is over 70 percent. At the time of Roe v. Wade, about 10 percent of black children lived with an unmarried parent. Today it is over 40 percent.Meanwhile, since 1973, some 60 million unborn children have been killed, about a third of which were black babies. Research abounds today showing the link between poverty and broken families. http://www.wnd.com/2016/01/liberals-continue-to-distort-truth-about-abortion/#7WZaAxb4uJqu5ElI.99
It is particularly sad that black Americans, who attend church with greater frequency than any other ethnic group, who, more than any other ethnic group, tell pollsters that religion plays a central role in their lives, sign on to the party of meaninglessness and nihilism, the party of abortion, homosexuality and socialism.
...Failed public schools are destroying black children. Yet black support for Hillary Clinton is as strong as ever, despite her support of these public schools and self-serving teachers unions. Clinton stands against parental empowerment and school choice. http://townhall.com/columnists/starparker/2016/03/16/black-americans-and-reagan-ideals-n2134368/page/full
Walter Williams, an author and Professor of Economics at George Mason University, grew up fatherless in Philadelphia. Some notable trivia: he is 6'5" and a cousin of basketball legend Dr. J. http://www.heymiller.com/2011/03/walter-williams/]
As a young man, Williams was admittedly a radical embracing "liberal" programs. After discharge from the service, he went to college and found he could not support his views with evidence. He became critical of minimum wage and affirmative action laws as detrimental rather than helpful to blacks. He discovered that minimum wage laws acted to price low skilled workers out of the market, eliminating employment opportunities. He concluded that other allegedly benevolent policies were anything but:
If we put ourselves into the shoes of racists who seek to sabotage black upward mobility, we couldn’t develop a more effective agenda than that followed by civil rights organizations, black politicians, academics, liberals and the news media. Let’s look at it.
First, weaken the black family, but don’t blame it on individual choices. You have to preach that today’s weak black family is a legacy of slavery, Jim Crow and racism. The truth is that black female-headed households were just 18 percent of households in 1950, as opposed to about 68 percent today. In fact, from 1890 to 1940, the black marriage rate was slightly higher than that of whites. Even during slavery, when marriage was forbidden for blacks, most black children lived in biological two-parent families. In New York City, in 1925, 85 percent of black households were two-parent households. A study of 1880 family structure in Philadelphia shows that three-quarters of black families were two-parent households....
The poverty rate among blacks is 36 percent. Most black poverty is found in female-headed households. The poverty rate among black married couples has been in single digits since 1994 and is about 8 percent today. The black illegitimacy rate is 75 percent, and in some cities, it’s 90 percent. But if that’s a legacy of slavery, it must have skipped several generations, because in the 1940s, unwed births hovered around 14 percent.
Along with the decline of the black family comes anti-social behavior, manifested by high crime rates. Each year, roughly 7,000 blacks are murdered. Ninety-four percent of the time, the murderer is another black person.... a report titled “Top 25 Most Dangerous Neighborhoods in America.” ... What’s common to all 25 neighborhoods is that their makeup is described as “Black” or “Mostly Black.” The high crime rates have several outcomes that are not in the best interests of the overwhelmingly law-abiding people in these neighborhoods. There can’t be much economic development. Property has a lower value, but worst of all, people can’t live with the kind of personal security that most Americans enjoy. According to the Bureau of JusticeStatistics, between 1976 and 2011, there were 279,384 black murder victims. Using the 94 percent figure means that 262,621 were murdered by other blacks...[Emphasis added.] http://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2013/07/31/black-selfsabotage-n1651550
Larry Elder, black lawyer, author, and talk show host, born and raised in South Central Los Angeles:
Obama cannot brag about -- and Clinton cannot run on -- his economic record for blacks. Under his watch, black poverty is up. Net worth is down. The "wealth gap" between blacks and whites is at a 25-year high. And as to the employment of black men, their "labor force participation rate" (the percentage of those 20 years of age and over who are either working or looking for work) hit its lowest rate in December 2013 -- well into Obama's second term and his economic "recovery." That low was the worst since 1972, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics began keeping such records. And since December 2010, black men's employment rate every single month to date has seen lower numbers than any month under all other presidents dating back to 1972.
David A. Clarke Jr., black Sheriff of Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, former U.S. Ranger paratrooper, with an explanation of a major cause of riots:
"You know what encourages this? The growth of the welfare state. These are underclass behaviors. Seventy percent of the kids born in Milwaukee ... are born without an engaged father in their life. So I look at the progressive policies that have marginalized black dads. They push them to the side and say 'you're not needed.' Uncle Sam is going to be the dad, he's going to provide for the kids, he's going to feed the kids ... Uncle Sam has been a horrible father. Uncle Sam does not love these kids. He might keep a little food in their mouths and that is about it. But we all know the importance of an intact family, what it can do to shape the behavior of kids."
Sheriff Clarke called progressive policies "a total disaster," not only in Milwaukee, but in Chicago, Baltimore, New York and elsewhere. "These progressive policies have hit the black community like a nuclear blast and until we reverse this government dependency, that's what creates all of this and it encourages it by the way, along with some questionable lifestyle choices."
WHAT IS NEEDED: Getting these messages to the Black Community
A 30 minute video for the Black Entertainment Network [BET] of black spokespersons addressing the reality of the plight of black communities should be produced, and constructed so it can be broken into smaller segments for use as stand-alones. In addition to Thomas Sowell, Star Parker, Walter Williams, Larry Elder, and David Clarke, there is a wide range of other potential participants from hip-hop Alfonzo Rachel to the Wall Street Journal's Jason Riley and includes Harry Jackson, Lurita Doan, Demetrius Minor, Crystal Wright, Allen West, Stacy Washington, Kevin Jackson, et al. They present images in sharp and wonderful contrast to Al Sharpton, Sheila Lee Jackson, Maxine Waters and other shills for black dependency.
This is a group that can show Alexandra Pelosi’s devastating video of the N.Y City welfare office clients without being called racist. This must-watch 3 minute video taped before the 2012 election has been pulled from many sites but was here earlier this month:
These black spokespersons can say, and have said, “Look what we have let them do to us.”
Let's remember Walter Williams' words: When black Americans finally realize how much liberals have used them, I'm betting they will be the nation's most conservative people.
Let us pray so.
No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear....Welfare's purpose should be to eliminate, as far as possible, the need for its own existence....There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right. Ronald Reagan
© Richard M. Coleman 2016