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Dear People of Color
Dear People of Color,
We of the Democratic Party would like to thank you for your support these past several decades. Your continuing loyalty to us is extraordinarily generous and all the more so because, let’s face it, we’ve certainly never earned your trust, loyalty, or gratitude.
We’re the party that invented the Ku Klux Klan, after all. We led the opposition to the Civil Rights Act. We tried to keep segregation alive in the South well into the Apollo program. We fought hard — literally fought a war — to keep slavery alive in the United States, only to be defeated by the first Republican president. Given all that, it would have been understandable if you had turned your back on us and supported our opponents. We appreciate that you didn’t.
We’d like to say that we rewarded your loyalty by making your lives better, but that unfortunately isn’t the case. The cities we have run for decades as political monopolies are crime- and poverty-ridden traps that have locked generations of you in miserable schools and deteriorating public services. Under our stewardship, literacy and basic skills have declined, incarceration has soared, and your children are subjected to random acts of violence and brutality at the hands of street gangs.
Yes, things got better for people of color recently, with real incomes rising and unemployment falling. But those were the Trump years, and they’re thankfully behind us. We’re back to business as usual now.
But not for very much longer, and that’s why we’re reaching out to you now. We need your help just one more time. We need to make up a little story about you in order to flog our latest legislative scheme. We have to tell people that you’re too dumb to get a driver’s license, too incompetent to use a computer, too illiterate to understand the first thing about getting to a polling place and casting a legitimate ballot. We need to portray you as the hapless victim one more time, despite the clear evidence to the contrary. Yes, you need an ID to take a flight or buy a gun or open a bank account or buy Sudafed at the drugstore. But we have to pretend that you just can’t get it together and show an ID when you go to vote — and that any effort to require people to do that is just terribly unfair to people like you.
No, it isn’t very believable. It sure isn’t very respectful. Obviously, you aren’t less able to do these things than other people, and it’s kind of insulting of us to pretend you’re somehow too lame to pull it off. But we’re going to try it one more time. And here’s the thing: if it works, we won’t need to use you like this anymore. If it works, and if we federalize the voting process (despite the Constitution pretty clearly saying we can’t), then we won’t need you anymore. We won’t need your votes, because we’ll own the voting process.
Since we won’t need you anymore, we won’t have to pretend that we’re on your side, that the policies we implement that have hurt you so much are actually good for you. We can start treating you just like we treat everyone else, instead of casting you as eternal victims in need of our generous and high-minded assistance. Wouldn’t you like that, to be treated with a bit of respect, treated as real people, instead of something just a little bit less than that? Sure you would. And, who knows: When we don’t need you anymore, we might actually start treating you that way.
Or not. But anyway, go along with us one more time. Pretend you really think you’re prevented from voting by the same basic rules that you and everyone else have to follow every day, in practically every other aspect of life. Help us gut the electoral system. Then, just maybe, you’ll finally be free of us.
Or not.
Published in Elections
Love it. Assuming they know they’re lying when they say the blacks will be free of them. They’ve kept them in chains too long.
The DNC destroyed their families and their churches, then exported their jobs, then gave them an unserviceable national debt. Who isn’t excited for the next act?
Thank you, but I just can’t. There are a handful of people I will never voluntarily hear speak, and she’s one of them.
Believe it or not, I feel the same about a particular male politician.
So do I.
However, I believed that the nation was better off under his administration than what followed. So I voted for him anyway.
Reply if you like, but let’s end the discussion there, since it’s not the topic of the thread.
An apt video on voter I.D. laws and the Black community for your topic, Henry:
Democrats have always been the party of racsits.
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/10305695
Saul Alinsky changed the methods used by the democrat party to use the “poor and disenfranchised” as the pawns for their own power grab.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/the-godfather
That’s because of the Hot Sauce she carries with her at all times.
Bzzzzzz. Thank you for playing, but that is WRONG. The constitution pretty clearly says that they can.
Try Article 1 Section 4. Here, I’ll quote it for you.
They have always had the power but never chose to do it in the past. I would argue that having Senators chosen by State legislatures put the kibosh on that until the 17th amendment. Since then, however, the only thing holding them back has been precedent and peans to “democracy”.
And don’t forget to mention another reason the DemocRats will not need the black vote any longer. That would be the hordes of illegal immigrants now flooding the country, to take away the last of their jobs, and become the biggest voting bloc in favor of the party which invited them in.
I stand corrected.
Blacks started moving heavily Democrat when the KKK was at its zenith. They completed the shift when the Democrat South was still keeping them down and kicking them around. I don’t feel any sympathy for them or their plight. If one day they want to get around to kicking out these politicians they have been voting for for 100 years I will be around to hear what they want. Until then no pandering and no caring about their communities. They are more than fine with it and keep voting for more decade after decade. Therefore, so am I.
I thought Blacks only started voting Democrat in the 1960’s. Any historians out there?
Color me surprised.
If you think you can play the democrat game of blaming all their problems on america or whites or history or whatever better than the democrats, you go ahead. And go ahead and call anyone who doesn’t want to go along with it racist. Some of us want out of the fruitless decades long groundhog day racial politics where we are all supposed to look at group by their skin color and pander to them. But it doesn’t surprise me you’re a diet liberal who just wants to slightly reframe what leftist dems push.
I’m pretty conservative, actually. But yes, I was kind of hinting that I suspect you might harbor some odd feelings about colored folk.
What odd feelings? What did I say that was odd? That they voted for their current state of affairs for 100 long years and have therefore earned their current condition. And I’m not going to feel bad for a group of people who won’t help themselves or change course in any respect? That’s a racist statement to you? If it is you sure sound like a leftist critical race theorist or you’re illiterate. Pick one.
Blacks got a pretty good deal from FDR in the New Deal. They started voting Democrat at that point and then the deal was sealed by LBJ when he pushed through legislation that denied the rights of free association to white business owners and forced them to accept black customers and the like. It was a step too far for Republicans who saw that as an abridgment of white civil rights.
The Republican approach to freedom for blacks was to leave them alone, let them be free. But this didn’t fly because, as one black writer put it, “… nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.” Or, as I read it, there was a great desire on the part of many blacks to return to the plantation, to be taken care of, and that’s what many of them in effect did.
From that graph, it looks like Blacks did not start voting democrat until long after the New Deal had been enacted, and its creator dead and gone. In fact it looks like a dramatic shift happened during the re-election of Harry Truman in 1948. I’m searching my brain to figure what it was that they liked so much about Truman that they started abandoning Republicans. This is just a guess, but I think the reason so many Black men gravitated toward Trump is because he looks and sounds “tough.” Harry Truman was the same kind of tough character (without the gross bravado and narcissism) and maybe they liked him more than Roosevelt who was a more typical intellectual effeminate democrat male.
I think you might be mistaken about the White business owners who didn’t like being forced to accept Black customers. Those were overwhelmingly Democrat business owners in the South, not Republicans. Republicans never had a problem with serving Black customers, and I don’t ever remember Republicans making a fuss about an abridgement of white civil rights.
I agree that Republicans in general had no problem associating with blacks, but some did strongly feel that people should be able to associate as they please in their private capacity including in who they serve in their privately owned businesses. It had been held since court decisions in 1875 that prohibitions against discrimination in government facilities did not extend to private facilities. Prohibitions against discrimination by privately held businesses such as hotels, motels, restaurants, theaters, and other public accommodations engaged in interstate commerce were a big part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and probably did a lot to cement blacks as Democrat Party voters. LBJ was at the forefront of getting that law passed and so got the credit for himself and his party, as deeply ironic as that is, LBJ and a big part of his party being such a dyed in the wool segregationists and racists. This was the aspect of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that touched people the most deeply and affected them in their daily lives the most and so was the most controversial.
After passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act some whites continued to claim that they should be able to discriminate:
The thing is that the discriminatory whites here had a good point. The law did impinge on their civil rights. It was a case of balancing one right against another, but the right to be served by public facilities regardless of race, creed, etc., was deemed primary.
However, a much higher percentage of Republicans voted for the Civil Rights act than did Democrats. And Southern Democrats led a 74 days long filibuster against the act. So that doesn’t explain why Blacks voted overwhelmingly for Democrats.