Irony of ironies. Former AG Eric Holder and Barack Obama have been angling for a “national dialogue on race” for years and now they’ve finally gotten one—from Donald Trump, of all people!
Be careful what you wish for, as they say, because Holder and Obama—whatever they pretended and pretend to themselves and others—were seeking to use this dialogue to expand the liberal/progressive agenda for minority communities initiated by Lyndon Johnson, which largely has been a disaster by almost all measures compared to the majority culture.
The principal substantive result to come from Johnson’s War on Poverty was the validation of that famous prediction attributed to the Texan: “I’ll have those [N-words] voting for us for the next two hundred years.” That proved to be true and the outcome of that repulsive statement, these days, is the black family has been decimated, African-American unemployment (particularly among the young) is massive, and violence is extreme and growing in their urban neighborhoods.
Obama and Holder, intelligent men, must realize this on some level, which makes their adherence to the same strategy — more and more welfare, more and more food stamps, more and more reliance on government, year after year — more than slightly sinister, even veering to the sadistic.
And then, if that’s not enough, Democrats, including Lady Hillary, encourage and coddle groups like Black Lives Matter that utilize the same methodologies on steroids, speeding up this self-destructive bridge to nowhere and opening racial rifts across the country at a breakneck clip while turning the protectors of black communities—cops—into enemies.
You have to wonder if progressives secretly hate black people.
That may sound excessive but, if at first you practice to deceive, as Sir Walter Scott reminded us…. And self-deception, leavened with self-aggrandizing moral narcissism (I’m such a good person for helping, even if what I do makes things worse!) may be the greatest of all those deceptions, the enabler of them. (Jason Riley’s Please Stop Helping Us should be required reading for all so-called progressives, as should even five minutes listening to Larry Elder.)
Enter Trump, who is suddenly calling out the Democratic Party for basically keeping black America on this modern version of the plantation. He seems like the oddest messenger for this, but is he? The accusations of racism toward Donald have always seemed hollow and disingenuous, a political gambit aimed at goading the famously thin-skinned businessman (who may finally be learning not to fall for it—we will see). In reality, however, Trump has been a businessman who puts people, lots of people of all races, to work.
But no matter how you feel about Trump (the messenger), his message is one hundred and fifty percent correct. By calling out the Democratic Party’s decades-old plantation politics he has opened up a true dialogue on race, rather than the phony, self-promoting one sought by the left, and called to question the whole sleazy exploitation game behind identity politics.
And he is already seeing a bump in the polls for this long-awaited dose of honesty. If he keeps it up, and takes this message directly to African-American (and yes, Hispanic) communities, not only will he gain a number of their votes, he will most probably win the presidency and be the one who finally puts America’s racist past behind her.
Irony of ironies? Irony squared!
Of course this hasn’t come about yet. Far from it. Trump has just made a few speeches. He has to keep at it relentlessly. The mainstream media blowback will be incessant and vitriolic because this is an insult to their very being. The academy as well will be in an uproar. This is not just a micro-agression. This is a hydrogen bomb aggression.
The vested interests in racism NOT being solved in this country—in fact NEVER being solved—are exceptionally strong. Take it from this onetime civil rights worker. “We Shall Overcome” is a song of powerful nostalgia. The words “We shall overcome some day….” express a deep yearning for something that will never happen because the moral superiority of the singers would disappear if it did. They don’t want it to happen at heart. So they will never give up the singing. But only by giving it up will racism go away.
UPDATE: As an illustration of the pathology that is all around us, CBS News, clearly in panic, has already published a pathetic piece (“Donald Trump faces new backlash over pitch to black voters“). What has caused this “backlash”? Trump asked African-Americans “What do you have to lose?” by voting for him. What indeed? That’s supposed to be heavy-handed in the opinion of CBS when actually it’s a good question, all things considered. What is there really to lose? Perhaps the jobs of the terrified reactionaries at the network. It happened to their colleague Dan Rather. It can happen to them.
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