Obama has Failed African Americans

By Alan Caruba

January 16, 2012 – Dr. Martin Luther King Day.

It is always a difficult endeavor for a White man to write about the African American—Black—population. The suspicion of prejudice always lingers, but it must also be said that many White people, particularly those who voted for Barack Obama in 2008, are seriously disappointed with him and, not surprisingly, so are many Blacks.

A quintessential Black liberal, Harry Belafonte, has been quite open regarding his unhappiness with Obama. Belafonte marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. during the Civil Rights era. In a recent interview he said that Obama had “a splendid opportunity to do more than most presidents would have ever been able to do and he let that opportunity slip away from him,” adding “I think if there was a kind of moral compass serving Barack Obama in the way we had all hoped, the moral force would have helped him make choices.” And where there is no moral force?

Belafonte is, of course, speaking for himself, but a January 2nd Associated Press article by Jocelyn Noveck, “Hollywood Stars less Vocal in Obama Support”, suggests that those who might be expected to be strong supporters of Obama have also experienced second thoughts. Matt Damon, who campaigned for Obama, told Elle magazine, “I think he misinterpreted his mandate.” Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs told Source magazine “I just want the president to do better.”

Black, White, Hispanic, or Asian, Americans have taken Obama’s measure over the past three years, but for Blacks the expectations were likely even higher than the rest of the population.

Forty-four years since the assassination of Dr. King, Blacks in America continue to experience difficulties that reflect a community plagued with social problems.

The Civil Right Act of 1964, passed in the wake of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, tore down the century of barriers that Blacks had endured. White Americans took pride in ridding the nation of this stain on its reputation. The election of a Black President was symbolic of the progress that had been made.

In early January, Julianne Malveaux, president of Bennett College for Women in Greensboro, North Carolina, wrote an editorial, “African-Americans Lose, While Others Gain.” While unemployment plagues American workers, Malveaux noted that the “African American unemployment rate increased from 15.5 to 15.8 percent,” adding that “the estimate of the African American unemployment rate”, in real terms, was “a whopping 28.3 percent.”

Every President gets blamed for unemployment and Obama took office in the wake of a huge financial crisis that began as former President Bush’s second term was coming to an end. Massive bailouts kept the banking system from collapse, but it must also be said that Obama’s solutions, his stimulus programs, have been judged to have been failures.

Moreover, Obama has added more debt in three years than all previous presidents combined, from Washington to Clinton. As a result, he became the first President to preside over the downgrade of America’s sovereign debt rating.

It is just my opinion, but I believe that among Obama’s legacy will be the likelihood that it will be a generation or more before another Black politician is elected to lead the nation.

It must be said that African Americans have made progress. They will make progress.

Data posted on BlackDemographics.com set the 2010 Black population at 42 million, 13.6% of the U.S. population of 308.7 million.

The statistics regarding America’s African-American population, however, paint a daunting picture. Despite the passage of the Civil Rights Act at least half of the male Black population nationwide has been in prison.

African American women have 30% of all abortions and, according to the 2010 Census, Black females make up less than 14% of the total population.

From 1974 to 2004, the median income fell 12% for Black men while rising 75% for Black women. Other sources state that African Americans accounted for half of all new HIV diagnoses and, in 2009, just under half of new AIDS diagnoses.

Most certainly these statistics and others do not reflect anything that a Black President could impact in three years, but they suggest that the African American community is in serious trouble and that being a Black President is simply not enough. Still, one is mindful of the political risks his predecessors took to right a wrong.

The Democratic Party's answer has always been to throw money at such problems. It hasn’t worked. Politically, the great irony of Black support for the Democratic Party is that it was the party that fought against the Civil Rights Act and other measures to end the infamous Jim Crow measures in Southern States.

It’s not too soon to question whether Obama will receive the level of support given him by African Americans and by liberals in 2008. I doubt it. He has squandered the greatest opportunity ever given any man.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

The Hideous MLK Memorial

By Alan Caruba

I was a young working journalist during the era of the Civil Rights movement and one evening I was covering a speech by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on the campus of Drew University in Madison, NJ. I was accompanied by Vivian Braxton, a civil rights activist who said, “Let’s go backstage and meet him” when the speech was finished.

Backstage, Dr. King stood alone while others stood at a respectful distance, afraid to approach him, so overwhelmed by the power of his words and personality. Vivian, however, headed straight for him with myself in tow. My first reaction was that he was shorter than I had thought and my second was a smile that was an embrace.

I introduced myself as a freelance journalist who was there to cover the speech for a local black newspaper and Dr. King found that very amusing. We chatted briefly and I tucked away a great moment in my memory, never anticipating that he would fall victim to an assassin’s bullet or that, years later, a Washington, D.C. memorial would be created in his honor.

Opened to the public on August 19, a statue of Dr. King stands thirty feet tall and in an irony that boggles the mind, was carved in China, the work of a Chinese sculptor, working in an Orwellian, totalitarian society.

It is also one of the most hideous works of “art” imaginable for anyone who recalls the times and the character of a man who said, “I am not interested in power for power’s sake, but I am interested in power that is moral, that is right and that is good.”

The statue depicts a scowling figure, his face fixed with the look of every despot whose statue is intended to instill fear or awe in those who gaze upon it. His arms are crossed over his chest as if protecting himself or preparing to pass a harsh judgment.

It is hideous because it completely obliterates the gentleness of Dr. King, the heart that strove against injustice. The awfulness of the statue reminded me of another of his quotes, “Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”

I have no idea what the memorial committee had in mind when it sanctioned this statue, but I have little doubt that Dr. King would have been mortified by it. He was a man who, on that long ago evening on the Drew University campus, greeted Vivian and me with a big smile in the midst of a great struggle to secure the rights of blacks in America.

In these times in which Arabs in Syria, Libya, Egypt and Tunisia have put their lives on the line to overthrow their tyrants, Dr. King had anticipated that human aspiration saying, “Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”

So, now, on a four-acre site on the Tidal Basin between the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials, a huge intimidating statue stands where a life-size statue would have permitted visitors to marvel at the power of love over hate, morality over oppression, and the struggle for justice that is the birthright of all men and women.

“Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking,” warned Dr. King. “There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.”

Dr, King’s life was devoted to making all Americans think about the kind of society, the kind of nation, in which they wanted to live.

“A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan.”

The memorial will be dedicated on August 28 by President Barack Obama, a man who was elected more for the color of his skin, than the content of his character. The date marks the 48th anniversary of Dr. King’s speech, “I have a dream”, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Dr. King surely would be appalled that young blacks would be rioting in the streets of American cities, looting, attacking people, nearly a half century after the achievement of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts for which he gave his life.

I think he would have been appalled by a thirty-foot-tall statue that resembles those of tyrants like Mao tse Tung, Stalin, or Saddam Hussein.

For my part, the King Memorial completely misses his message of humility combined with tenacity, of spirituality linked to non-violent struggle, of faith that great wrongs can be put right by people of faith and of courage.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Black America's Gains and Losses

By Alan Caruba

You know that Barack Obama is in trouble when even the Congressional Black Caucus begins to criticize him.

Maxine Waters (D-CA) recently told a gathering that the CBC is “frustrated” with regard to unemployment, a problem that has hit blacks harder than whites. The only thing holding the CBC back from being more vocal, said Waters, was its fear they will lose the support of the black community.

It says something about Congress and politics in America that the only race-based caucus is the Black Caucus.

Like many Americans, I watched the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s unfold with the feeling that, a century passed the Civil War, it was long overdue.

The movement had a leader of remarkable talent, Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr., plus others from the ministry and labor movement. It was a time of turmoil that ended with the assassinations of Dr. King, President John F. Kennedy, and of Bobby Kennedy.

Others died too in the struggle but they have become relegated to being minor historic players. When the dust settled President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. The changes in American life since then have been extraordinary. Afro-Americans were assured their voting rights, equal housing, and other opportunities that had been routinely denied.

Whites accommodated themselves to the changes, having already accepted the 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, that "separate but equal" schools, a widespread practice in the southern and border States, were unconstitutional.

While many blacks have achieved middle class status and risen to levels of real achievement, the vast bulk has not. These comments acknowledge individual success stories, but address the larger black community.

As a general observation, blacks in America have chosen to ignore the gains in legally protected civil rights equality.

By most indices the black community has not changed. In U.S. cities they remain ghettoized, as much from choice, as external circumstances. Instead of moving forward, integrating and assimilating into the larger white population; blacks have emotionally remained apart, nurturing a sense of being victims, holding onto an animus for whites.

Social failures are so rampant among blacks that it is appalling to contemplate how many are born into single-parent families, often raised a mother or grandparents because the men are absent. They drop out of school. Unskilled and often illiterate, employment opportunities are limited. Blacks and crime have become synonymous to the point where they fill the nation’s prisons far in excess of whites and Hispanics. Drug use ravages black communities.

To say whites are disappointed is an understatement. It is a source of resentment that is rarely expressed aloud to avoid being deemed a racist or engaging in hate speech.

So how does one explain the phenomenon of the first black President?

Observers attribute it to a large turnout of younger voters, born well after the 1960s, to union members, many of whom were government workers, to 98% of the Afro-American community, and, of course, Democrats in general. Many white voters who wanted to affirm their belief that equality was an American value pulled the lever for Obama.

Barack Obama has exacerbated white disappointment and it is likely that many blacks, too, are experiencing buyer’s lament.

Among whites, there’s a feeling that scores are being settled with incidents like Obama’s condemnation of a white Boston police officer, the appointment of Eric Holder as the first black Attorney General, and of others like Van Jones as Obama's “Green Jobs Czar.” Jones is a self-identified Communist and a radical environmentalist who resigned and is now safe in the bosom of progressive organizations.

The latest affront to a predominantly white population is an executive order, issued on August 18, titled “Establishing a Coordinated Government-wide Initiative to Promote Diversity and Inclusion in the Federal Workplace.” In other words, whites need not apply.

When whites became aware of Obama’s preacher, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, saying “God damn America”, they had to actively ignore the fact that Obama had spent many years in his church, that Wright had married him and Michelle, and baptized their children. Theirs was no casual relationship, nor were others from any earlier point in his life such as the Communist Party member, Frank Marshall Davis, who advised young Barack that his white grandmother had a right to be scared of blacks because “She understands that black people have a reason to hate.”

It will be a long time before the majority white and Hispanic populations forget or forgive the legacy of Barack Obama.

Obama has wreaked economic havoc on America since taking office and this time people—black, white, Asian and Hispanic—have taken notice.

© Alan Caruba 2011

Flash Mobs: Being Young, Black, and Male in America Today

By Alan Caruba

Those who follow my commentaries know that I rarely discuss race in America. I find it an unhappy topic at best and, from my readings in U.S. history, I feel safe in saying there was never a good time to be Black in America.

Slavery before, during and after the American Revolution was a stain on the nation and, though some were slave owners, the Founding Fathers knew it. To get the new Constitution ratified among the thirteen States, they had to trim their sails to the point where Article One, Section Two refers to “those bound to service” and, for the purpose of taxation of “free persons”, the slaves were counted as “three fifths of all other Persons.” Ugh.

It would, of course, take a Civil War to end slavery, though Lincoln’s preferred solution was to put the slaves on a ship back to Africa. That was not likely because by 1861 when the war began, there were 3,954,000 slaves, the majority of whom lived on plantations where, from Virginia to Texas, they often outnumbered whites by 13 to 1.

My awareness of Blacks was limited in my youth, growing up in an upscale New Jersey suburban community where they were quite scarce. You could count the number of Black students in my high school on one hand. When I was drafted in the Army most of my service in the early 1960s was on a base in the Deep South. It gave me a close up view of segregation. When I was discharged, I became a journalist on a weekly serving a small New Jersey city neighboring Newark. I was there when the city’s first Black mayor was elected.

It was the time of the Civil Rights movement, filled with marches and tumult. I met Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1967 Newark erupted in rioting, the result of poverty, and of sense of being powerless and disenfranchised. The Italians who had run the city gave way to Black politicians and, five decades later, they still are in charge, but the social problems remain.

If anyone would have told me that America would elect a Black President, I would have said that was impossible. I was wrong and so were the many Blacks who rejoiced in the election of Barack Obama, confident that he would take the lead, representing them, paying particular attention to their issues. Obama proved to be more concerned with Islam.

I got to thinking about that when several commentators, referring to how he would be remembered, said that Obama would no longer be remembered as the first Black President, but rather as the first Downgrade President. When he addressed the nation on August 8, his cool detachment seemed alarmingly at odds with the tumult on Wall Street and around the world that had been triggered by Standard & Poor’s decision.

How do Blacks perceive Obama, I wondered.

A friend, Milton, a retired Black corporate executive, attorney, business owner who edits and writes for BlackQuillandInk.com, a website for Black conservatives, responded to my question noting that Black support for Obama’s candidacy was about 98%, but has slipped since to around 86%.

It was his view that the Blacks “have been poisoned to dislike non-Blacks” and to see themselves “as victims.” I understand the victim part, but was surprised by his observation regarding the animosity, if only because White America has gone to fairly extraordinary lengths to redress the ills of the past.

As America’s most famous minority, Blacks are now outnumbered by Hispanics and are being by-passed by virtually all other minority in America in terms of achievement and upward mobility. The chains may have been removed, but, as the syndicated columnist. Walter E. Williams, noted in July 2010, “The pathology seen among a large segment of the Black population is not likely to change because it is not seen for what it is. It has little to do with slavery, poverty and racial discrimination.”

“Today’s black illegitimacy rate is about 70%,” said Williams. “When I was a youngster, during the 1940s, illegitimacy was around 15%...Today, only 35% of black children are raised in two-parent households.”

And it gets worse. In an August 2010 Washington Post article by columnist George Will, he wrote that “By the early 2000s, more than a third of all young black non-college men were under the supervision of the corrections system. More than 60% of black high school dropouts born since the mid-1960s go to prison. Mass incarceration blights the prospects of black women.”

In recent weeks, from the Wisconsin State Fair to Philadelphia, from Milwaukee to Los Angeles, reports of flash mobs of young Blacks attacking whites are stirring racial fears. The most dangerous factor in Black cities and neighborhoods are the hordes of young males, raised by one parent, dropouts from school, no skills, no jobs, no prospects, and lots of angry energy that is too often diverted into crime and violence.

Barack Obama’s economic policies have failed the nation, but they have been especially adverse on Blacks. Black unemployment and foreclosures, for example, have skyrocketed under Obama and remain disproportionately high as compared to other communities. In short, Obama has done nothing for Blacks in America either on the macro and micro level to improve their opportunities or attitudes.

He has nothing in common with them; a half-white Columbia University graduate and Harvard educated lawyer, former instructor at the University of Chicago, married to a Princeton and Harvard graduate, herself an attorney. They have two girls that go to private school and their inner circle of friends, Black and white, are dedicated Marxists.

The editor of BlackQuillandInk.com says. “The Black community refuses to admit how wrong they were in voting for Obama.”

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Good Old Days

By Alan Caruba

It started with a haircut in the morning. I sat in a barber chair I had sat in initially around the age of five. In those days, the 1940s, four Italian gentlemen cut hair and it cost 25 cents for a kid and $1.25 for an adult. Same shop, but my haircut cost $16.00 not counting the tip. Except for the owner, some lovely gals cut hair there these days.

When my parents moved to an upscale suburb of Newark, New Jersey in 1942, they paid $11,000 for a three-bedroom home with a stand-alone garage. I sold it for many multiples of that and it was essentially the same house with a few improvements. I sold because, in 2000, the town had reevaluated the property and literally doubled the taxes. Ten years later, a second reevaluation was deemed worthy of an article in The Wall Street Journal.

My parents put two sons through college on the earnings of my Father, a CPA with vivid memories of the Great Depression. He was a liberal, a Democrat, and advocate of the United Nations. Starting in the 1950s Mother taught gourmet cooking in the adult schools that sprang up after the war, earning enough to purchase the family cars and otherwise contribute to the budget. They remained married for over sixty years. He never learned to drive.

After the haircut, I topped out the gas, a little under a half-tank, and paid $21 for a mixture of gasoline and ethanol, the latter mandated by the government and heavily subsidized. The cost included state and federal taxes. I can recall when gasoline in the 60s and 70s was around 60 cents a gallon. I can also remember long lines at the pumps in both 1967 and 1973-74 when the Saudis, angered by the U.S. support for Israel, implemented oil embargoes.

A visit to the supermarket these days is a carnival of sticker-shock. The price of food has been rising thanks in part to the increase of the cost of energy to produce it and the diversion of corn to produce ethanol that reduces the mileage you get from the gas you purchase and likely harms your car’s engine. Corn is a major feedstock so the cost of a steak is rising too.

During WWII, the milk was delivered to my home by a horse-drawn wagon. Before refrigeration became widely available, we kept it in an ice box that required the delivery of large blocks of ice. There was radio, but no television. If you wanted air conditioning, you had to go to the local movie theatre. Price of admission, plus popcorn cost a kid about twenty-five cents. I saw my first television program in the 1950s. Within no time, everyone had a TV.

When I attended elementary, middle and high school there was zero talk about illegal drug use because there was none and I cannot recall any mention, let alone the teaching of heterosexual or homosexual sex of any kind. The school day began with a pledge of allegiance and a prayer. We did not have a politically correct curriculum or have to listen to fantasies about the planet heating up.

We did not recycle because everyone knew it was just the garbage.

It was the rare child who came from a family that had experienced divorce or who was being raised by a single parent. There was no segregation in the north, but my high school was almost completely white. That ratio has been reversed.

The Draft ensured that every able-bodied young man would serve a minimum of two years in the military learning the arts of warfare. We had all been born early enough to have passed through World War Two as very young children. This was followed by a conflict in Korea in the 1950s when we were teens. By the time the Vietnam War came along it was a new generation of conscripts fighting it. After that, the military became entirely staffed by volunteers.

The biggest scandal of the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower involved a vicuna coat his chief of staff had accepted as a gift. It would take Watergate to stain and end Nixon’s presidency, an ugly sexual dalliance to undermine Clinton’s, and a parade of congressional felons that constitutes a non-stop perp-walk these days.

Since I was a lad the government added a Department of Education, a Department of Energy, a Department of Homeland Security, the Environmental Protection Agency, and others I cannot recall. Regulation of everything has exploded. Borrowing and spending has exploded. If anybody had told me back then that the government was broke, I would have thought he was crazy, but the debt ceiling kept being raised until there is, in effect, no ceiling.

In my memory, American society began to shift from traditional values and patterns in the 1960s. The century-long failure of the South to rid itself of the aftermath of the Civil War, the Jim Crow laws, eventually found expression among blacks, but it also caused riots in U.S. cities.

In time, gays in New York would rebel against police harassment and a whole new movement would be sparked, culminating in the demand for same-sex marriage, along with an end to Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in the military. The lives of women changed with the advent of “the Pill” and demands for more equality.

Sex, drugs and rock’n roll became the order of the day. We have gone from Frank Sinatra to Lady Ga-Ga. Later generations than mine share a more chaotic vision of society and a far more costly one in which to live.

It has taken the emergence of the Tea Party movement to capture and focus the independent voters who have seesawed back and forth between the comfort of Eisenhower's conservatism to the free-spending of Lyndon Johnson, the conservative values of Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama’s effort to force European-style socialism on America.

In my life, we have gone from the Great Depression to an era in which whole nations have discovered that a highly centralized government inherently cannot function without bankrupting its citizens whether they live in the U.S., the United Kingdom, Portugal, Greece or in the former Soviet Union.

As international organizations have flourished, from the United Nations to the European Union, the more unwieldy, corrupt, and grasping they have become.

We live now in the Age of Terrorism. No one in authority seems to want to acknowledge the source, the threat to civilization called Islam. Few Americans knew anything about Islam before 9/11. Now you can’t get on a plane without a full body scan and search.

If your grandpa or grandma say they miss the “good old days”, keep in mind that in many fundamental ways, they really were good.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Why Some PhDs are Jerks

By Alan Caruba

I was talking with a friend about the latest hot topic involving Prof. Henry Lewis Gates of Harvard and the arresting officer, Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge Police Department.

We both agreed that some of the stupidest people we have ever known were PhDs who too frequently turned out to be over-educated fools.

In this country, we have been taught to revere anyone with the title of doctor, starting with physicians and working our way through the maze of doctors of law, education, music, library science, and the long list of fields of a study that grant these degrees.

These days physicians leave medical school owing about $100,000 on the average and, if the president’s healthcare reform passes, they will never be able to pay it back no matter how long they are in practice. Having to pay $200,000 for insurance against malpractice every year has done more to drive up the cost of medical care than anything else.

I used to work for an institution of higher knowledge, a well-respected institute of technology and, while I came to respect the technical achievements of those pursuing engineering or architecture degrees, I also learned that many of those teaching these ancient skills and modern technologies often displayed all the personal failures of judgment and deportment of those far less educated than they.

The one thing one learns in a college or university is that the admiration which its faculty and deans feel toward themselves. It is their bulwark against the real world where people are actually growing, inventing, making, and selling things.

The problem, as my friend noted, is that PhDs may know a great deal about a particular thing, they are often totally out of their league when it comes to extrapolating that niche of knowledge to practical matters or the great issues of the world.

The recent passing of Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense for Lyndon B. Johnson is a case in point. A good and decent man, McNamara was a wunderkind of the Ford Motor Company who had previously taught at Harvard. He was one of “the best and the brightest” brought into government by John F. Kennedy.

The re-airing of a C-Span interview with him made clear that he went to his grave knowing that he, President Johnson, and his colleagues had been quite thoroughly wrong about expanding the Vietnam War beyond the provision of U.S. military advisors. One can be very gifted in an area of expertise, but that does not necessarily transfer to real world, real time situations.

Moving forward in time to the present, President Obama has surrounded himself with lots of PhDs and each one is just weirder than the next. Dr. John Holdren, his science advisor, once advocated putting stuff in the food supply that would reduce the fertility rate. His Energy Secretary, Dr. Steven Chu, is a Nobel Laureate who thinks painting all our roofs white will stave off global warming. His Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, is hell bent on ensuring that not a drop of oil is sucked out of the vast U.S. reserves, nor a single new ton of coal if he has anything to say about it.

Barely a day goes by when one of these loons says something so stupid that you have cause to fear for the future of the republic.

The reason “Joe the Plumber” made all those headlines during the campaign was that he was not a PhD. He was a working man with a very useful skill and he was smart enough to know that Obama was a…how can I say this nicely? Someone not telling the truth and a Marxist.

Prof. Gates suffers from the hubris that goes with being a Harvard professor. He has made his reputation on the basis of his research about the Negro race in America. Any ghetto homeboy could have told him to be polite to the police officer, but Prof. Gates flew into a rage when asked to identify himself and continued to hurl the racism charge at a police officer who was immediately defended by his Black and Hispanic colleagues.

President Obama, despite saying he was unfamiliar with the details of the incident, could not resist visiting the theme of racial profiling. We are now decades passed the great achievements of the Civil Rights movement but the beat goes on.

America used to be a meritocracy. Now the nation is so heavily into “diversity” that we are dumbing down the standards for everyone from firemen to surgeons.

It’s a good idea to proceed with caution when some PhD advises you on anything more complex than your digital camera. It is said that a little education can be a dangerous thing, but too much education can actually blind those chosen to lead the nation and teach its youth to the lessons of history and to plain old common sense.

Democrat Party Secrets Revealed

By Alan Caruba

The Democrat Party has made much of the fact that this year they had a woman candidate and a black candidate vying for the party’s nomination to be its candidate for President.

To some of us with long memories and who lived in the South as I did from the mid-1950s through the early 1960s, the Jim Crow, segregated society that existed was a fact of life with all its indignities. Throughout the South the Democrat Party was the Party. You could find five possums faster than you could find five Republicans. It was a solid voting block that Democrat Presidents counted upon.

That’s why the preening of the Democrat Party over how much more sophisticated and egalitarian it is these days strikes me as a lot of posturing.

And that’s why Jeffrey Lord’s article in the current issue of The American Spectator
(http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=13681) is so instructive. When the Democrats gather in Denver to congratulate themselves on selecting a black presidential candidate, they might also want to explain why the Democrat National Committee website has been sanitized to remove the following:

No reference to the number of Democratic Party platforms supporting slavery. There were 6 from 1840-1860.

No reference to the number of Democratic presidents who owned slaves. There were 7 from 1800-1861.

No reference to the number of Democratic Party platforms that either supported segregation or were silent on the subject. There were 20 from 1868-1948.

No reference to “Jim Crow laws,” nor is there any reference to the role Democrats played in creating them. These laws segregated public schools, public transportation, restaurants, rest rooms and public places in general.

There is no reference to the fact Democrats’ opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1866. It was passed by a Republican Congress and signed into law by President Ulysses Grant. The law prohibited racial discrimination in public places and public accommodations.

There’s much more, but not only did the Democrats oppose the Civil Rights Act of 1866, they also resisted that one signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson in 1964, mostly as a tribute to the slain John F. Kennedy.

In my lifetime, the Democrat Party was so divided over civil rights that, in 1948, a group dubbed the “Dixiecrats” led by Sen. Strom Thurmond actually fielded candidates of their own at one point in a States Rights party. They eventually returned to the fold.

After signing the bill, Johnson famously told an aide that the Democrat Party had just lost the South for the foreseeable future. He was right.

To be charitable, perhaps the Democrat Party is just trying to make amends for all those decades in which racism was intertwined in its politics. I suspect, however, that today’s generation of Democrats running the party and supporting it have little knowledge or recall of its ugly history.

For that reason alone, I have always wondered why blacks in America have clung so strongly to the Democrat Party. Didn’t anyone tell them that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican?

Apologizing for the Past

By Alan Caruba

I read and re-read the news report that on Tuesday the U.S. House of Representatives had passed a resolution described as “the federal government’s first formal apology for the ‘fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity’ of slavery and the legal segregation of African-Americans.”

Apparently the reporter was unaware of two key Amendments to the U.S. Constitution or the Civil Rights Act.

The resolution passed with a voice vote. It had been offered by Rep. Steve Cohen, a white man in what is described as a Memphis voting district with a large black population. Forgive me for being cynical, but I’m thinking this is going to be the central theme of his campaign for re-election.

Rep. Cohen hailed the vote as “legislation (that) can open the dialogue on race and equality for all,” To which I ask, how much dialogue is needed, given the fact that I lived through the Civil Rights movement, heard Dr. Martin L. King, Jr. speak and met with him afterward, and recall that then-President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law in 1964.

That’s 44 years since the law was signed and you can add in a dozen or more years that led up to it. That’s a whole heap of dialogue. Back then you could use terms like Negro or Black, but now black Americans are all semi-officially Afro-Americans. Who do people think caught and sold their fellow black citizens of Africa to the white slave traders back in the days when there was good money to be made?

It wasn’t that long ago that one tribe in Rwanda hacked to death thousands of people from another tribe. It was 1994 and the crime was genocide. Such acts are not particular to either white, black or any other people. They are just crimes that humans perpetrate for all manner of really bad reasons and are thus deemed crimes against humanity.

I am not making any excuses for slavery in America. Slavery then and slavery now is despicable, but I must confess I asked myself why the U.S. House of Representatives is apologizing now? What is so significant about 2008 that makes this resolution necessary?

Rep. Cohen said, “Apologies are not empty gestures, but are a necessary first step towards any sort of reconciliation between people.” I do not need reconciliation. I value my white, black, Asian, and Latino friends, but I value them as individuals, not as members of racial or any other group. Most of all, I do not need empty gestures.

I happen to believe “I’m sorry” and “I apologize” are two powerful expressions of good will and remorse, but I think they should be expressed between individuals. I cannot imagine how the House of Representatives thought it was speaking for me or presumably for all white Americans.

Talk about presumptuous! Here’s the House speaking on behalf of a generation, some of whom worked very hard to bring about the end of segregation despite or because they were white and speaking for subsequent generations, all of whom have to read about segregation in history books.

I remember the segregated South because I lived there for a spell. It was not a nice place. Some of those that opposed the end of segregation used bombs and other violent means to express themselves, but most Southerners knew that blacks were being wronged in so many fundamental ways, that the world was changing, and they had to change with it.

There are a lot of Americans, mostly liberals, who can only see what was wrong about American history. Morally it was wrong to import slaves and work them to death on plantations. Morally it was wrong to chase the native-Americans from their lands. Morally it was wrong to deprive Japanese-Americans of their rights and property during World War II. These things occurred in different eras and virtually everyone involved are dead.

Why the present generation of Americans has to apologize for the actions of previous generations escapes my understanding.

But, then, I am not running for re-election in a Memphis, Tennessee district or any other district where, thanks to the 15th and 24th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, Afro-Americans can vote.

Black Statistics

By Alan Caruba

The speech Barack Obama gave on the subject of race in America has received all kinds of congratulatory statements. I saw news reports showing Obama on a stage full of American flags behind him and, perhaps cynically, thought that this is what every politician does in moments of crisis. Get out the flags!

Since I cannot address any of the points he made, let me refer you to the National Urban League’s annual State of Black America report, issued in April 2007.

“Empowering black men to reach their full potential is the most serious economic and civil rights challenge we face today,” said Marc H. Morial, the Urban League president, adding that is necessary, not just for blacks, but for the entire American family.

Here’s what the Urban League had to say in 2007.

African-American men are more than twice as likely to be unemployed as white males while earning 74% as much per year. Unemployment for black men was 9.5 percent, as compared to 4 percent for white men.

Black men are nearly seven times more likely to be incarcerated, with average jail sentences about ten months longer than those of their white counterparts.

Black males between 15 and 34 are nine times more likely than whites to be killed by firearms.

Black males are nearly eight times more likely than whites to suffer from AIDS.

After attending elementary school, blacks “begin to fall behind on standardized tests.” (President Bush’s heralded No Child Left Behind). The Urban League reported that in fourth grade blacks perform at a level of 87 percent of whites. By the time they reach twelfth grade, their scores are at 74 percent of whites.

By high school blacks are more likely to drop out—15 percent, as compared with 12 percent for whites.

There’s no point laying out more statistics because none of this should come as any surprise to anyone in the black community and are understood by whites as a kind of cultural contagion, a pathology that defeats black males and presumably their female counterparts.

This nation went through a Civil War in the 1860s that cost hundreds of thousands of lives in order to keep the southern states from succeeding and whose great moral cause was to end slavery. After the war the states passed the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution to insure that slavery would never again exist in America and that blacks would be granted the rights of all citizens.

In the 1960s, a century after the Civil War, yet another struggle was waged to end the indignities of segregation, Jim Crow laws, and other impediments to blacks. President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law.

Here we are nearly fifty years since those days and a black man, Barack Obama, is competing to be the nominee of the Democrat Party against yet another historical breakthrough, a white woman, the first to be taken seriously as a contender for that high office.

I would suggest that whites in America have thoroughly reformed themselves, though often because of the laws that broke the back of institutional racism. They have cheered the ascendancy of many blacks to positions of honor in this nation.

I would suggest, however, that there is a deep, frequently unspoken sadness and even anger among whites that the statistics cited by the Urban League in 2007 represent a black population that, in general, has failed to live up to the opportunity that America has provided, opportunity that people died to provide.

I know the exceptions to this and I count them to be as dear as my own family, but they are the exceptions.

She's Not Martin Luther Clinton

By Alan Caruba

It is truly wonderful to watch Hillary Clinton try to talk herself out of the hole she has dug by suggesting that, without President Lyndon B. Johnson, the Civil Rights Act would never have been passed.

Actually, a lot of the credit goes to President Kennedy who was working toward its passage when he was assassinated. So, yes, these two Democrat presidents expedited the legislative aspects of the dream Martin Luther King Jr had nurtured.

The quintessential politician, LBJ for much of his early career voted with the Southern bloc of Congress against every civil rights bill that came before it. Historians believe he genuinely thought that segregation was wrong and welcomed the opportunity to end it, but after signing the 1964 bill, Johnson is famously remembered as saying to his aide, Bill Moyers, “I think we have just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.”

The Clintons, whose past residences were in Arkansas, acquired such an aura of affinity for Black Americans that Bill basked in the fiction of being called the first Black President of the United States. The prospect of an actual Black President must be driving the Clinton’s crazy.

Years and years ago, following a speech at Drew University in New Jersey, I was taken backstage to meet Dr. King. As is often the case with such eminences he actually stood alone as people were in such awe they could not bring themselves to approach, but this has never been a problem for me.

As a journalist, we are expected to engage such folks and Dr. King was delighted when my companion introduced me. When he learned I was there freelancing for a Black newspaper, his face broke into a broad smile. Why is that, he asked? I told him that black or white, all money is green. That tickled him further. Some small talk ensued and that was my brief moment with him.

What I didn’t tell him was that, while having been stationed in Georgia with the U.S. Army in the early 1960s, I had vivid memories of Black soldiers not being allowed to sit in the main waiting room of the bus station in Columbus as well as other experiences that fixed the ugliness of segregation in my mind.

Until Brown v. Board of Education and the integration of the Little Rock High School, enforced by the Eisenhower administration; until Martin Luther King, Jr. organized the movement to boycott Montgomery’s discriminatory bus system; until he led marches, was imprisoned in Birmingham, and mobilized the better angels of our souls, there was no civil rights movement and neither Presidents Kennedy nor Johnson would have been under much pressure to end the last vestiges of the Civil War.

I have yet to identify anything of lasting merit that President Clinton did during his eight years in office, nor anything Hillary Clinton has done while Senator from New York that comes close to rivaling the achievement of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Suggesting it depended on LBJ reveals her cast of mind that only politicians can bring about change.

Both Clintons were and are intent on wielding the power of the Oval Office for their personal gain. Whatever idealism they may have had in their youth has long since been drained from their plastic personalities.

What Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. achieved, he did because of his profound belief in the transformative power of justice by and for all Americans.