Zone1 It is time to retire a dumb idea and the rhetoric that goes with it.

[Tom Paine 1949]

Actually both black Conservative Thomas Sowell and Democratic Liberal Patrick Moynihan had, in my opinion, some sound things to say about problems in race relations and the developing problems of poor black families in the 1960s, but they also both missed the boat in other respects. The quote of Thomas Sowell is a case in point:

“Despite the grand myth that black economic progress began or accelerated with the passage of the civil rights laws and “war on poverty” programs of the 1960s, the cold fact is that the poverty rate among blacks fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent by 1960. This was before any of those programs began.”

This may be true but dramatically misses dealing with the influence of the great early and middle twentieth century Northern migration of blacks who found jobs (mostly at the bottom) of thriving factories in Northern cities. There were the Depression of course, but that was also a period of at least some common struggles, and then there was the reopening of limited but new opportunities during and after WWII and the post war boom — with sometimes disorienting “freedom” in the North. For those blacks who went North there was an immediate access to “civil rights” unavailable in the South in those days. But with the formal winning of Civil Rights laws in the mid 60s there was also the start of the terrible Vietnam War, the closing of American factories, the loss of the Gold Standard as the U.S. lost its overwhelming economic dominance of the world, and spread of drugs and social disintegration — not only but especially among blacks. For many those were the years of useless riots, war, assassinations, and no progress — despite the Civil Rights Laws

As Sowell himself noted there was great progress after the 60s among middle class families that managed to stay together, get educations and enter new arenas, and that continues to this day. But ghetto life was not easily escapable nor good jobs available for millions of unskilled blacks or black veterans burned out after the war, and a profoundly demoralized subclass of African Americans also solidified, as drugs and crime ravished one generation after another, and many spent years in prison.

 

[el midgetron]

Todays Democrats would have opposed slavery. Todays Republicans filibustered a Voting Rights Bill and todays Republicans are people like you, and you are a virulent racist. So you can stop this disingenuous argument.

You don’t even oppose racism or slavery. It’s all just a victimhood power-play for the establishment left. You are just a leftist who will defend your establishment masters and their BLATANT history of being on the wrong side of history.
Riddle me this Joker, why did the KKK lynch white republicans? I don’t even like the partisan sissy fight. Republicans aren’t perfect either. But they have done more to further the progress of black people than the Democrats ever will. Opps, I just gave you the answer.

 

[Woodznutz]

Blacks were Republicans for 100 years before many of us left tthe Republican Party. We left because the party didn't do a damn thing to stop Jim Crow while expectiing blacks to vote republican forever because of Abraham Lincoln. But we got tired of nothing and switched parties.

The conservative plantation theory holds that African Americans support the Democratic party in exchange for welfare benefits and other handouts, that the Democratic party cultivates black welfare dependency in order to keep black voters firmly in their camp, and that the liberal establishment through either incompetence or cynical calculation frustrates the aspirations of black Americans in critical areas such as education, family life, crime, and economic mobility.

If Democrats were buying votes with welfare benefits, one would expect support for the Democratic party to be less pronounced among high-income blacks and more pronounced among low-income whites. The opposite is the case. Wealthy African Americans, who have no financial stake in welfare benefits other than being taxed to pay for them, are politically very similar to less wealthy African Americans. By some measures, wealthy blacks are more liberal than poor blacks.

Which is not to say that black voters are not keenly interested in the welfare state, economic intervention, redistributive taxation, and the rest of the Democrats’ dependency agenda. They are. As I have shown at some length, it was the New Deal rather than the Democrats’ abrupt about-face on civil rights that attracted black voters. The last Republican presidential candidate to win a majority of the black vote was Herbert Hoover, and the majority of black voters were Democrats by the 1940s — a remarkable fact, given that the Democrats were still very much the party of segregation at that time, with future civil-rights enthusiast Lyndon Johnson fighting laws against lynching. African Americans remain more intensely supportive of New Deal programs such as Social Security and the minimum wage than are whites, even when their personal financial situations ensure that they are unlikely ever to earn the minimum wage or depend upon Social Security.

Conservatives should ask ourselves why that is. Not because it will help the Republican party win more black votes — that is an unlikely outcome — but because our first loyalty is to reality. Across income groups, African Americans are on balance less enthusiastic about free-market economic policies than are Anglo Americans; there is a rich tradition of entrepreneurship and self-improvement in black culture, but that does not translate into sympathy with the traditional conservative rhetoric on these subjects; and, shockingly, when asked by pollsters about their attitudes toward “capitalism” and “socialism” — using the actual words — more African Americans expressed positive views of socialism than of capitalism.

It is not surprising that blacks have less faith in the productive and transformative power of the free-market economy than do whites. Black Americans were for some centuries treated as an economic commodity themselves and were systematically excluded from full participation in the economy for generations after that.

The Plantation Theory | National Review

Cornel West is a very smart man who has some very dumb opinions, but when he’s feeling froggy he can be a hoot. In a recent interview, Professor West mocked Al Sharpton for playing the odalisque in…

www.nationalreview.com

This conservatives speaks to the reality off what blacks have faced instead of the dumb --- rhetoric we see here. Telling us that we are on a plantation because we vote against extremism is not going to get blacks to run to the republican party in large numbers.

Constantly using slavery as an excuse for failure is wearing pretty thin.

 

[Meister]

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