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Where Is the Black Silent Majority?
“Most black people know that George Floyd is no more representative of blacks than Derek Chauvin is of police officers. They know that the frequency of black encounters with law enforcement has far more to do with black crime rates than with racially biased policing. They know that young black men have far more to fear from their peers than from the cops. And they know that the rioters are opportunists, not revolutionaries.” — Jason Riley
In his WSJ article, Jason Riley referred to a quote from Daniel Patrick Moynihan where he wrote that there “is a silent black majority as well as a white one” and that “it shares most of the concerns of its white counterpart.”
Jason Riley is a man of wisdom, and he happens to be black. But his comment surprised me. Perhaps the majority of black people can see through the lies and distortion of information about law enforcement and the black community. But if that’s true, I continue to be puzzled by the loud voices of what Mr. Riley calls the black minority, and how they seem to be driving the agenda of black Americans.
I know that old habits are hard to break, such as the black community voting for Democrats. But many of us expect that more black people will begin to publically act like they share more values with the greater community than with the extreme. How much longer will they justify their support of Democrats? When will they have reached their limit in tolerating the black extremists? When will they finally act like they understand that the Democrats despise them and expect them to vote for them? When will they decide that they are alone at the ballot box and no one can stand over them and force them to vote against their own interests?
I think the time is now.
Published in Group Writing
Are you sure of that @MichaelKennedy?
Concur with that. He became noticeably better about the jumble-of-half-sentences thing shortly after he was elected, but it was hard to take during the campaign. It’s like listening to Yankee German; instead of waiting for the piled up verbs one has to reconstruct a wider range of sentence fragments. I have to admit they usually balanced out.
I would recommend purchasing and watching Larry Elder’s new film Uncle Tom; you can access it at UncleTom.com…the on demand price is 19.95 and is worth every penny.
There is a really good segment in the film where they discuss how the Republican Party since 1932 has basically given up on trying to win the African-American vote….the voters are there….but the Republican Party has ignored them due to thinking they are not worth the effort due to ties with the Democratic Party. President Trump, while you can argue the scenserity of it, was the first Republican Candidate to try and get the African American vote since Herbert Hoover.
It is time the Republican Party change this strategy and work for the votes of African-Americans with conservative principles….they could get at least 35% of the vote which would change everything. Tim Scott this week really put himself in a position to lead that charge. There is absolutely no reason the Republican Party should continue to abandon the African-American vote…it will take work but the votes and support is there if the Republicans will work to get them.
Basically the African American voter has been abandoned by both parties…the Republicans don’t try and the Democrats take them for granted and just play to the African-American political class (Thomas Sowell has much to say about this by the way)
I completely agree, @billgollier. I believe they are ready to hear us and we need to make the effort. No more excuses!
I doubt that leads to any changed votes. My wife told me today that she had recently spoken with our left of center daughter in law regarding elections. She (DIL) said she had a lot of respect for Mitt Romney now that he’s marched with other protesters and that he’s a Republican she would vote for.
I disagreed with my wife because its easy to say “that’s a __________ (fill in your opposing party) I could vote for.” Elections don’t happen in isolation. There are at least two candidates. Maybe my DIL could vote for a Mitt IF (and that’s a BIG IF) the democratic candidate was too extreme.
Black voters haven’t yet reached a level of disgust with the Dems AND they haven’t yet given up on their core mistrust of the Republican party.
I think the Broken Windows theory of Policing is about preventing window breaking not doing the actual breaking yourself
I think he meant figuratively “breaking the wellbeing” of lots of people, but I’ll let @arahant speak for himself.
It’s about addressing things that are wrong immediately, before they get a chance to snowball into something more.
There was some shift in voting patterns in the 2016 election.
Bear in mind that we will rarely hear from such people in the conventional news channels because liberal journalists are so hostile to such opinions.
It’s odd that Black Americans are one minority that doesn’t seem to speak up on Ricochet.
Yes, they rarely invite people who won’t agree with them. I remember seeing Rick Santorum a couple of times on one of those stations, and I don’t know if he’s been asked back. No matter how tactful you try to be, you are dismissed if you don’t follow the political line. I was uncomfortable watching him, as he tried to be polite.
@zafar imagine being terrified of racists, or loathing them, and then being overly sensitive. Have you had a passenger in your car that was recently in an accident? Skittish.
I think he means that he doesn’t ignore the smallest attacks.
Added: Oh. Never mind.
I’m pretty sure there is a lot of ‘silent majority’ of all races. But somehow they never seem to show up to vote for republicans in Presidential elections. Maybe they don’t vote?
Hard to prove as data is widely censored on things like that. Here is a typical site.
https://blackdemographics.com/economics/employment/
No mention of who or what they work for.
The problem is the damage done by The Great Society and Affirmative Action. The intentions were good but the Sociology was terrible. I have told the story several times about how my best friend and I spent many Friday nights in an all black tavern in Chicago. We were the only white faces. The owner thought we were over 21 as my buddy had worked as a helper on a beer truck even though he was only 17. Anyway AA convinced everyone that blacks could not get along with out white help. Devastating.
No its not.
They vote 90 percent democrat. This is a conservative site. Tge think conservative means racist
Turning the avalanche at the start, even if done imperfectly, has more downstream effect than a measured response that comes six hours into the news cycle.
I read somewhere that Trump had an approval rating near 35 percent among blacks back in December.
If 35 percent of blacks actually vote for him, it will probably win him the election and suck the air out of the Marxist BLM organization, if not the movement.
It will also bring down the level of racial strife in this country, and perhaps increase the level of trust between non-progressive whites and blacks.
But, I just don’t think it will happen.
What about the ten percent who don’t?
Perhaps better to speak with than to speak about?
I know a black guy who was the only black person out of about 150 people to go to a rally in support of law enforcement.
Afterwards his black peers said the worst things ever about him on the Internet. You can’t imagine the hatred he received.
“Black Likely Voter approval of the job of Donald Trump is now over 40%.”
Trump may now have a higher level of support among blacks than whites or non-blacks.
This isn’t a racial site, it’s a conservative political and cultural site, I would think. If the population of Ricochet is, I don’t know, 350; and the black population in America is 12%; and Trump approval within the black population is 40%, then 40% of 12% of 350 is 17. I’d guess we have 17 black people here on Ricochet.
This. Plus, for all the heat to be taken, tokenism isn’t all that appealing. I can’t blame anybody for that.
Honestly, I’d be curious if we do. Most topics that come up draw comments from Ricochetti on ‘the inside’ of whichever group is central to the issue. For some reason this one doesn’t.
Ricochet’s very own Peter was pretty resolute.
It is hard to get at the info. You’d probably have to crunch raw census data.
There is this from NPR during the Obama years:
The government payroll has been a route into the middle class for many of the blacks who made it. The manufacturing sector of the economy. . . well, you know what happened there.
This was published a couple of weeks after Trump’s election:
At one point, Prince Georges County, Maryland was the richest per capita black majority jurisdiction in the world. Probably still is. The big industry in PG, which borders on DC, is government.