Good Advice to Black Voters

[Adam's Apple]

November 11, 2004
Blacks Need to Become a Swing Vote
By John McWhorter

So much for polls that had President Bush getting twice as many black votes as he did in 2000. In 2000 he got 8 percent of the black vote. This time, he got only 11 percent. Eighty-eight percent of the black vote went to John Kerry.

What's interesting is that no other racial group in America has a vote-skew anything like that. Latinos voted 53 percent for Mr. Kerry and 44 percent for Mr. Bush. Asians were 56 percent for Mr. Kerry and 44 percent for Mr. Bush.

Blacks get insulted when people say we all think alike. But then why don't we take our individuality to the voting booth?

For one thing, a great many black people associate the Republican Party with racism. This means that voting Democratic is often less about making a personal choice than voting on the basis of a group concern.

This is understandable. But it's also obsolete. It's time for the black community to start spreading its vote across the two main parties.

The Democrats have no reason to address our concerns in any real way, because we're a slam-dunk.

And that leaves black America powerless. Help comes only when someone decides to try something out of the goodness of their hearts, and then there is always the question of follow-through.

This is why groups with pull make the parties court their vote.

Not that all of us should start voting Republican -- that would just leave us with the same problem. We just need to reconsider the idea that voting Republican is automatically disloyal.

For the record, President Bush did not get my vote. I voted for John Kerry because that's what my personal take on issues and priorities led me to do. But a lot more than 11 percent of us might find that Republicans have important things to offer us as well. Faith-based initiatives come to mind, as does education reform.

About racism: Our progress will have more to do with a party's policies than how some of its members might feel about their kids marrying ours. In 1912, W.E.B. Du Bois endorsed Woodrow Wilson over Theodore Roosevelt. Mr. Wilson was a bigot, as was President Roosevelt. But Du Bois was interested in whose policies would allow blacks to make the best of the worst in the real world.

The civil rights revolution was four decades ago. Even President Clinton's Dialogue on Race is a fading memory. Soon Latinos will outnumber blacks. We're in a war in Iraq. The days when helping blacks was front and center on the government's agenda are gone. We have to start playing ball the old-fashioned way.

I know some think racism is the defining experience of being black, and that this means that our voting must reflect that. But must it, if this leaves us with no purchase upon national resources for our betterment? Must it, when Latinos are no strangers to racism, and yet they split their votes?

In that light, we have to ask: Does our voting pattern really represent the diversity among us in experiences, aspirations, values? Do we really want to give in to allowing racism to define us?

Because today, if we do -- if we vote as victims rather than as individuals -- we only perpetuate our victimhood. We become the Democrats' mascots, instead of a force to be grappled with.

This article originally appeared in the Dallas Morning News. John McWhorter is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

 

[NATO AIR]

In urban areas like Philadelphia, Detroit, Miami, Atlanta, Baltimore, D.C., Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Chicago, New Orleans, Boston and NYC, the urban black bloc vote is almost guaranteed democratic because of democratic mayors who make sure urban blacks are taken care of in some way (through job programs, urban development, school reform). there have been republican mayors who've accomplished the same thing, but not nearly as much.

you're going to be stuck with 80% of the black vote going to democrats for quite a while, until republicans in washington start specifically sending a message to urban blacks that their needs or hopes will be addressed.

 

[Adam's Apple]

Republicans need to follow John Thune's lead. Instead of going to the reservations to get to know the Indians and vice versa, Republicans need to set up shop in the black neighborhoods and begin to get to know the blacks as people. Only then will blacks begin to know Republicans as people.

 

[NATO AIR]

at the same time republicans could do more to support young black men and women who are successful and could be turned on to politics. you need leaders and great examples, and the republicans since JC Watts have really lacked one in this area.

another thing, build connections with guys like Obama and Ford. Ford in fact is a "blue dog" democrat in the House who votes along nearly conservative lines at times. These guys are the new black leaders for now, develop relationships and bonds with them and take away a lot of the Democratic Party's rhetoric about Republicans being anthema to black voices and issues.

 

[Merlin1047]

November 11, 2004
Blacks Need to Become a Swing Vote
By John McWhorter

So much for polls that had President Bush getting twice as many black votes as he did in 2000. In 2000 he got 8 percent of the black vote. This time, he got only 11 percent. Eighty-eight percent of the black vote went to John Kerry.

What's interesting is that no other racial group in America has a vote-skew anything like that. Latinos voted 53 percent for Mr. Kerry and 44 percent for Mr. Bush. Asians were 56 percent for Mr. Kerry and 44 percent for Mr. Bush.

Blacks get insulted when people say we all think alike. But then why don't we take our individuality to the voting booth?

For one thing, a great many black people associate the Republican Party with racism. This means that voting Democratic is often less about making a personal choice than voting on the basis of a group concern.
This article originally appeared in the Dallas Morning News. John McWhorter is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

I get a bit peeved about articles like this. The author talks about "black" voting as if it were some sort of gang activity. Why is it that some blacks feel that they must do everything as a group? When I go to vote, I don't do that as a white voter. I do it as a conservative. I vote for the candidates who I believe will serve the best interest of the country. I don't vote for or against any candidate based on what I think that person will do for my race. The question of race never even enters my mind. Yet black voters continue to cast their ballots as a monolithic block. Black voters continue to support the very party chiefly responsible for the perpetuation of failed and discredited handout programs which only serve to mire blacks ever deeper in the poverty cycle.

Perhaps one part of the reason is institutional inertia. Groups like the NAACP will probably never be weaned from their lap-dog relationship with the Demcratic party. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Julian Bond continue to demand more entitlement programs from the government each year. The last, and perhaps most ridiculous attempt to rape the taxpayers was their specious "reparations" issue. Reparations was a contrived concept fabricated out of faulty reasoning and outright lies. Somehow black groups decided that we, the taxpayers, needed to indemnify them for the suffering their remote ancestors endured under slavery. Most non-black voters feel that a sufficiency of "reparations" have already been paid in the form of various welfare programs and affirmative action quotas and set-asides.

The NAACP will simply not accept the concept that neither the Republican party nor white conservatives are the enemies of black people. This extract from the website of the NAACP is an insight into their race-baiting, fear-mongering tactics:

http://www.naacp.org/
"Today, we face a renewed effort as the forces of racism and retrogression in America are again on the rise. Many of the hard-earned civil rights gains of the past three decades are under assault."

So the NAACP views Republicans as "the forces of racism and retrogession". What total baloney. I suspect that the leadership of the NAACP does not believe this propaganda. They fabricate these falsehoods in order to maintain sway over their membership.

The NAACP attempts to extort taxpayer dollars from the government in the form of entitlement programs. Their purpose for doing this is twofold. One, they show the black community that the NAACP can provide more gold from the government. Second, by creating more welfare programs, the NAACP and the government create more welfare recipients. That swells the membership of the NAACP. In addition, by creating a continuing dependency on government handout programs, the NAACP assures themselves that many, if not most of their people will be life-long members.

It seems to me that one of the things that the NAACP fears most is when blacks become successful and finanacially independent of the addictive entitlement programs demanded by the NAACP and cheerfully served up by Democrats and Republicans alike. The NAACP fears successful blacks because these people begin to think like taxpayers. They realize that they do not need government programs to succeed, that they are capable of competing on their own merit without quotas and that if they can do it, others can follow suit. If you believe that I have a misconception in regard to this issue then explain the NAACP's villification of blacks like Condaleesa Rice, George Will, Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell or even Bill Cosby. The NAACP reserves it vilest vitriol for these people, calling them "Uncle Tom" "Oreos" and traitors to their race. Cosby's treatise on personal responsibility was greeted with frosty silence and then ill-disguised anger.

The eighty nine percent of black voters who slavishly pulled the lever for Kerry in the last election have made themselves irrelevant in the next election. Republicans will make a half-hearted attempt to woo the black vote, but will know going in that it is a lost cause. Democrats will know that blacks think they have nowhere else to go so the Dems will show up at a few rallies, kiss a few babies and forget about blacks.

Black people need to assert their individualism. They need to look at the true record of all candidates. If blacks feel that a candidate or a party is racist, then they are fully justified in casting their votes for the opposition. But so long as black voters continue to line up to vote for a continuation of entitlement programs, they reduce themselves once again to a status akin to slavery. Their votes and therefore their lives will be purchased by the party willing to cough up the most money for the handout programs which are so near and dear to the heart of the NAACP.

And the victims of the NAACP - their own membership - need to undergo a fundamental change of mindset. They need to stop viewing American as a cow to be milked. They need to view this country as a resource which an individual, through his own efforts, can work to develop. They need to realize that they can stop being a debit in society and instead become an assett. The first step in that process would be to cancel their membership in the NAACP and tell the likes of Jackson and Sharpton to take their act on the road.

 

[Avatar4321]

The last, and perhaps most ridiculous attempt to rape the taxpayers was their specious "reparations" issue. Reparations was a contrived concept fabricated out of faulty reasoning and outright lies. Somehow black groups decided that we, the taxpayers, needed to indemnify them for the suffering their remote ancestors endured under slavery. Most non-black voters feel that a sufficiency of "reparations" have already been paid in the form of various welfare programs and affirmative action quotas and set-asides.

Not only welfare. Our forefathers paid "reparations" with their blood. Many lost their lives that slaves could be free. Because the ideal that "all men were created equal" was greater than their own life. But rather than let the wounds of racism heal we have this "equal rights" groups trying to continually reopen the wounds and pouring salt on them.

They should listen to the article and split their vote. ive been saying that for a while they have no power this way.

 

[NATO AIR]

republicans have got to break the machine politics in the cities... then they can get more of the black vote.

 

[Merlin1047]

republicans have got to break the machine politics in the cities... then they can get more of the black vote.

I don't know if that is possible. I recently spoke with a black acquaintance. He is intelligent and reasonably well read. He is a family man, a devout christian and a steady church-goer.

I argued that he should vote Republican because the Democratic party was the antithesis of his value system and his lifestyle. He opposed abortion, he bemoans liberal attacks on family values and religion, he has a work ethic, he opposes high taxes and yet he voted Democrat.

When I cornered him in our discussion and he could no longer escape the verbal trap I had laid for him, he offered as his reason the lame excuse that he opposed the "corporate charity" policy of the Bush administration. He mumbled that he believe that the "pump should be primed from the bottom up, not the top down". When I rebutted that the tax reduction he enjoyed was supposed to have accomplished that very purpose, he could not dispute that, but he refused to concede.

So the bottom line is that his support of kerry and the Democrats was not the result of any rational thought process. It was the result of a knee-jerk reaction and the group-think tendencies which have caused black people to waste their votes for decades. Black voters will not become a potent factor in a national election so long as they continue to toe the NAACP line and allow charlatans like Jackson and Sharpton to do their thinking for them.

 

[NATO AIR]

Obama will lead them out of the darkness. As my former college roommate Marlo from NC A&T says, "black folks ain't heard straight talk and the harsh truth for years now. Eventually someone is gonna come along and start keeping it real and then we'll make progress. Until then, we're fucked."

 

[Avatar4321]

Obama will lead them out of the darkness. As my former college roommate Marlo from NC A&T says, "black folks ain't heard straight talk and the harsh truth for years now. Eventually someone is gonna come along and start keeping it real and then we'll make progress. Until then, we're fucked."

I understand your faith in Obama, i just dont think he will do it. He is just another Democrat. I think if anyone is going to get through to black voters, they are going to be a black republican.

 

[Adam's Apple]

I believe education is the solution. As soon as blacks become better educated and get upward mobility, then you will not see 89% of blacks voting for the Democrats. What programs have Democrats initiated to improve the quality of education for black children? Bush is on the right track with "No Child Left Behind". Despite liberals' criticism, "No Child Left Behind" is working. Test scores are up; children are learning.

It is unconscionable how the Democrats have tried to keep the blacks down and dependant at the "public trough". In an effort to keep the black vote in the corral, it is shameful how Kerry, Jesse Jackson & Co. went to the black churchs prior to the election and told blacks not to vote for Bush because of the gay marriage issue. Blacks have got to get smart and realize that they will have more power to bring about change in their status if Democrats can't take them for granted. As long as they are willing to let the Democrat politicians "take care of them", they will remain in the lower economic class.