Indeed, organizers of the march had a list of economic imperatives that drove them out onto the National Mall that day. They weren’t simply interested in equality based on the color of their skin; they wanted a system of fairness in employment, in federal programs, and in the economy as a whole. Their demands included “A massive federal program to train and place all unemployed workers — Negro and white — on meaningful and dignified jobs at decent wages” and “A national minimum wage act that will give all Americans a decent standard of living.”
Of course, blacks experienced suppression in these fields at an unparalleled level. As King reflected during his famed “I Have A Dream” speech during the march, “One hundred years [after the emancipation proclamation], the colored American lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.”
Fifty years from the day he said those words, the same holds true.
There’s so much wrong with the post that a book-length response would be more in order. The minority voter suppression myth is trotted out, of course, despite coming off an election where a vulnerable incumbent who had no business winning prevailed because of the turnout of African-American voters. This is something progressives have to cling to in order to keep up their goal of institutionalizing voter fraud.
Many of the poverty statistics regarding the black population are true but the author commits some errors of omission in failing to mention that much of that crushing poverty is occurring in places where leftists have held sway for decades or that things have gotten worse while an African-American has been president.
Of course, the notion that the bloated federal bureaucracy can systematically introduce fairness into, well, anything is where progressive thought fails utterly.
Think Progress espouses progressive ideals and this post is pretty much a catalogue of just what miserable failures those ideals are when expressed as public policy. Thankfully for them, another hallmark of progressivism is a complete inability to recognize the real parts of reality so they can continue on their blissfully unaware ways.
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