Reminds me of the headline: “World ends: women and minorities worst affected.”
I had a conversation yesterday where a Republican lauded that quote as evidence that Republicans could get their message out without using overt racism like the Democrats of the early 20th century so more blacks should vote Republican. I just dropped it after that; if someone wants to keep that level of delusion, it just makes getting elected easier for Democrats, I guess.
THIS is what the Republican Party engenders: Racist Yard Display Of An Empty Chair, Noose, Watermelons and ‘Go Back To Kenya’ Sign
And it’s because candidates like Mitt Romney intentionally stoke the racist fires with ads that not only lie about the black president’s policy on Welfare waivers, but gin up racist hatred and resentment using an ad that tells white people (by only depicting white people as the “workers”) that the black president wants to hand out checks to lazy people (read, other black people).
It’s filthy and has no place in 21st century political discourse. It creates an atmosphere that allows smegma stains like the guy with the chair, watermelons and noose to feel perfectly comfortable erecting that despicable display in his front yard. And that teaches others, including kids, that it’s appropriate or even funny to diminish a black man with those vile stereotypes.
I get that you consider yourself conservative, OMG, but not only is the Republican Party not the party of actual conservatism or conservative principles (they merely pay lip service to the notion to win elections then behave as anything but conservatives), but they are a party that hates you. And honestly, I think you should be ashamed to associate yourself with them.
But then, I feel that way about many other groups, too: gays, Jews, working folks, the elderly, women. Hell, even the 1% damn well ought to be Democrats since they make out like bandits whenever the Democrats are in control, and lose their shirts whenever Republicans take over.
An example to discuss from a totally different situation:
There used to be a guy in my town that I knew. He was a middle-aged black man who had gained some small measure of fame through activism based on race. He used to lead the local NAACP until he was forced out of the position (IIRC). Then he became known for dressing in Confederate regalia and marching around town with a Confederate flag. He got chummy with a group of local white supremacists, and at one point was photographed by a reporter with the supremacists at a cafe, where they were all putting napkins on their heads as though they were Klan hoods.
OMG: is it fair to criticize this man for what he was doing? Is it fair to discuss his race as part of that criticism?
Obviously black folks who join the Republican party are nowhere near as, um, eccentric as this dude was. But if we can criticize him, mentioning his race, for his activities, then if similar criticism is out-of-bounds for black folks who like Republicans, we need to show why.
The simple answer is that liberals have done more for blacks than conservatives, and they do it in a non-insulting, demeaning manner. Certain blacks like you feel the opposite. Maybe you’re just bitter, maybe you really hate gays or love the rich, whatever, but you can’t think of yourself as the smartest person in the room if you don’t go against the grain. Blacks know that they still need a lot of help, that the deck is stacked against them, so they vote for the party who have put forth honest plans to help them level the playing field instead of pretending like we’re all born equal and racism doesn’t exist
Maybe if you are an oyster and are invited to a luncheon–to find the only two parties there are a walrus and a carpenter–you are much better off sitting next to the walrus.
A disproportionate number of black individuals in America are are on welfare (along with a disproportionate number of teen pregnancies, a disproportionate number of them being imprisoned and a disproportionate number of them being murdered). Their lifespan is six years below the American average. Do you think governmental policies will affect them in the same way they affect non-black American citizens?
There are simply black people out there whose natural instincts incline toward conservative values. They instinctively see the value in individual responsibility, in study and hard work and sacrifice to get ahead. They recognize that people don’t value what they are given but don’t earn, and that people are not free when they owe obeisance to their government. And they recognize the unfairness inherent in the concept of government-enforced income redistribution.
But apart from that they’ve also seen how their self-appointed liberal saviors have made the plight of blacks infinitely worse over the last five decades through the trap of welfare, which made large numbers of blacks dependent on a barely liveable stipend for their existence but which also kept them trapped at that level. They’ve seen how public housing projects which liberals created for their alleged benefit have instead become cesspools of drugs, street gangs and crime. They’ve seen how the liberal abandonment of family values and a vigorous hands-off-anything-goes attitude toward any negative aspect of emerging trends in black communities have resulted in a huge underclass of poor, barely literate, young and no longer young black people who grew up in single-parent homes without a father, and with a largely absent young mother, often with drug or other problems of her own, and wholly unprepared to properly raise a child. And then when you consider that the response of the nation’s liberal educational system to the influx of black students who’ve been raised in this kind of environment has been to dumb down the curiculum in an effort to make things more “fair,” it’s easy to see that liberals in point of fact have not been much of a friend to blacks at all. To paraphrase Steve Jobs speaking to the group who failed him on the MobileMe app, the correct response of blacks to liberals should be: “You should all hate each other for having let us down!”
So people like Clarence Thomas, Allen West, J.C. Watts, Stacey Dash, et al. not only see value in the common sense approach to life which characterizes conservatism, but they also see the damage that’s been done to the black community by liberal efforts on their behalf and they want no part of it. So they find themselves aligned with conservatism both by their inherent value system and as a result of observation and conscious thought.
They’re also smart enough to see that racism exists in each party and that the percentage of true racists in conservative ranks is likely not that much different from that among the left, with the exception that racists on the right get airplay and the ones on the left don’t. Black conservatives are perfectly capable of looking around the country and seeing Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice being embraced happily and enthusiastically by the Republican base - with countless other conservative black men and women being elected to public office all around the country, and it’s obvious to them that the liberal portrayal of conservatives as black-hating racists is largely partisan nonsense.
Sure. Like any group.
There is nothing inherently conservative about these values- liberals (and most people of any political persuasion) share them.
Everything government does, IMO, is “government enforced income redistribution”. That’s pretty much the definition of government- whether it’s fighting wars, enforcing laws, or building roads.
Obviously liberals disagree with pretty much every point made here- this is all opinion.
That very well could be why those black conservatives align themselves as they do. But obviously many other black people would strongly disagree with all of those points.
Equally “nonsense” is the claim that liberals always portray Republicans as racists.
I don’t really think we need another point by point rebuttal. Suffice it to say that all the things you have said are (at best) debatable; and I do not intend on getting in to a drawn out debate with you about that, paper towel rolls, or anything else.
That said, if what you suggest is so transparently obvious, then why do only 1 in 20 Black people realize it? Are we just too stupid to see that truth?
Another? I don’t know that a simple handwave in denial counts as rebuttal, but whatever.
Still, the paper towel tube was a perfectly cromulent experiment which was devised to get people to test their unthinking assumptions, and as such might serve as a good example for this thread. Perhaps we could come up with a way to get black people to examine the negative ideas they accept as truisms about conservatives that subjective observation and a little bit of thought would dispel.
Not at all. Lots of smart people believe all sorts of nonsense. Some of it gets passed down from ignorant or bigoted family and loved ones, some of it gets absorbed by osmosis from one’s environment, and a lot of it in this case comes from leftie propaganda coming from Democrat politicians and their lackies on the left, be it the media, Hollywood celebs or professional racial rabble rousers like Al Sharpton and Jessie Jackson.
Much of the success the latter types enjoy comes from the practice of painting any opposition to liberal solutions as racist. In point of fact many conservatives have always abhorred racism and the problems it has created, but they’ve disagreed with liberals as to how they should be addressed.
Many of us felt forced busing, for example, was a bad idea and caused more problems than it solved. We weren’t opposed at all to integration, but we thought forced busing was a bad way to go about it. More than a few blacks disliked it as well. We felt that court rulings on housing and hiring and school integration would naturally result in a more natural distribution of blacks among formerly all white neighborhoods and that this in turn would eventually result in a more natural and harmonious integration of our schools. But our mere objection was all it took for the left to accuse us of racism and wanting to keep our precious white children from being exposed to those nasty black kids.
Same with affirmative action. We felt that affirmative action would result in several needless problems that once again would make things worse rather than better. It would place untrained, inexperienced and largely incapable people in positions they weren’t qualified for, and of course it ran counter to the idea of eliminating discrimination. We felt again that recent court rulings would result in a natural distribution of blacks in the work force and that as they began to gain experience and training they too would begin to rise in the ranks to attain management and executive level jobs too. But again, noooo. Our mere objection was all it too for leftie politicians and activists to begin the meme that conservatives hated blacks and wanted to keep them picking up garbage and sweeping floors.
And what about schooling? The liberal notion of how to deal with disadvantaged kids? Dumb down the curiculum for everybody. The conservative idea? Work to develop programs and incentives to encourage disadvantaged kids to take schoolwork more seriously and work to do better. Which method on its surface makes the most sense to you? But noooo…to the liberal mind this is far too hard. It’s simply unworkable. You can’t expect this kind of hard work and dedication from black kids. They’ll never go for it. They’ll laugh in your face. The only thing to do to make it fair is dumb things down so they can keep up, and then everything’ll be okay. You conservatives just want to make it hard on black kids and make damn sure they’ll fail.
Now, you tell me which ideology is most insulting to black people?
Actually it wasn’t, but don’t let the fact that nobody agrees with you deter you.
We have, and to put it charitably, we completely disagree.
If you honestly believe conservatives, or more specifically, republicans, have always abhorred racism, then it’s pretty clear you have a VERY selective memory.
Let’s take a trip down memory lane. What was the GOP solution at that time?
Actually you were. The GOP ran several candidates who openly campaigned on that issue. That fact that you can pretend this didn’t happen makes it clear you do not want to engage in a sincere debate.
You felt that way even though there is ZERO evidence that that would have happened, and a lot of documented history to lend credence to the fact that very little would have changed.
There is very little evidence that that has happened, and again, a lot of evidence that it hasn’t. More importantly, the fact that you think being against AA means you are against discrimination when the whole point of AA is to counteract existing ongoing discrimination is bizarre.
But you ignore the fact that the “natural distribution” was affected by the discrimination and racism against Black people. The government didn’t step in just because liberals pushed them to. Most sane people realized the natural order was not one that lived up to our standards of equality and decency, and that giving things more time was not likely to help.
If you honestly believe that is a fair characterization of things, I don’t know what to tell you.
Between your ideology and the fantasy-made-up-liberal ideology straw man you made? If that’s your interpretation of what liberals believe, then you really have no idea what liberals believe. Feel free to ask!
A perfect example of how liberals are letting down the black community can be seen in their unwavering support for public teacher’s unions. The inner cities have godawful schools, and yet the teacher’s unions fight tooth and nail to prevent any reforms other than simply giving them more money - a strategy which has been proven to fail. Support for school choice is very high among African Americans, and especially inner-city people, but the Democrats constantly oppose it under pressure from the teacher’s unions and their large campaign donations.
As to why people would vote for the party that has done long-term damage to them, that’s what happens when you create a culture of dependency. This has nothing to do with race, btw. You can see the same thing in the Atlantic provinces in Canada, where the population is almost completely white. Canadian governments pandered to that population for decades by subsidizing fishing, allowing the people to go on unemployment in the off-season, providing heavy welfare benefits to the unemployed, etc. As a result, the people became dependent on those handouts for their existence, which meant voting for the party that is always promising to increase them.
When you ask an Atlantic fisherman why he needs off-season welfare, he’ll tell you that it’s inevitable - that fishing is important, but fishermen can’t make enough during the fishing season to live year-round, so there’s really no choice. Thus they are dependent on government to maintain a key part of Canada’s heritage and to maintain our fishing capacity.
If you go to Maine, which has the same kind of industry but no government subsidies, and ask them what they do in the off-season, you’ll get a very different response. There, the lack of government support forced the economy to adapt, so Maine fishermen generally have second winter careers. Companies set up to take advantage of the winter labor glut.
The interesting thing is that Maine fishermen don’t feel dependent on the government to support them, and therefore are not pawns of redistributionist politicians who demagogue them and convince them that they are being shafted in order to build political support. Polls of job satisfaction and overall happiness have shown that Maine fishermen are much happier than the ones in Atlantic Canada, who have come to believe that somewhere, there is always someone trying to cut back on their subsidies and their standard of living, and that they’re still not getting their ‘fair share’. The culture there has become militant and dependent.
The same thing happened with farmers in New Zealand. When temporary hard times hit, the government responded with a flood of subsidies and price supports which distorted the market and caused a temporary downturn to become permanent dependency on government. The quality of New Zealand veal declined because the government fixed the price regardless of quality, the rivers became polluted because the government subsidized fertilizer, and farming methods became inefficient because the government subsidized farmland when it was used inefficiently.
In New Zealand’s case, the government went bankrupt, and farmers were forced to go without the subsidies. Of course, the left and the farm industry united to proclaim that disaster was about to strike and that New Zealand farms would be wiped out. In fact, the opposite happened. Forced to compete in the market without government support, new Zealand farmers innovated, reverted to efficient practices, and worked to improve the quality of their products. Within a few years, the New Zealand farm industry was healthier and more profitable than it had been with all the government ‘help’.
The same thing happened on Canadian Native Reservations, where well-meaning liberals looked at the state of the reservations and gave their residents subsidies. This created a perverse incentive for Natives to remain on their reservations, lest they lose their subsidies. So those populations became dependent and hives of crime and alcoholism. It wasn’t the natives’ fault: It was the fault of the people who incentivized them to make very bad life choices.
I think the recent fight between the Chicago teachers and Obama’s former chief-of-staff, now Democratic mayor of Chicago is enough to disprove your “unwavering” claim. If that’s a perfect example, it’s flawed. It’s so flawed, I’ll just ignore the rest of your post.
I don’t recall anybody disagreeing with me that it wasn’t an effective way to get people to think about their unthinking assumptions. As to the rest of it, well, they’re still disagreeing with me that Paterno covered up for Sandusky’s child rape despite it being a year later and zero evidence, so you’ll forgive me if I don’t put much credence it that.
So you do. And some don’t. Those we call conservatives.
What I have is a pretty good exact way of phrasing things. When I said “many,” I didn’t mean every. There were a great many conservatives all over this country, in the west, the northwest, the midwest, the northeast, the southeast, and dare I say it, even in the south itself, who abhorred racism, felt it was unfair and terrible, and wanted to see it end. Had that not been the case desegregation would never have gotten off the ground. The number of people in newsreels attacking demonstrators were a very, very small minority…many of whom were Democrats, btw.
I already said. We felt the recent court rulings would lead to a society in which the problem rectified itself in a more natural and harmonious way.
“Several candidates” does not an ideology make. Like I said, there were millions and millions and millions of conservatives/Republicans of that era who favored desegration and an end to racism. Besides, need I point out George Wallace was a Democrat?
On the contrary. There are areas everywhere where blacks have moved in on their own as employment opportunities opened up and their children began further integration into nearby schools as a result. How you begin to say this is anyone’s guess.
This is a prime example of exactly what I was talking about. Oppose the liberal idea and you immediately get accused of some form of deviltry. What you are championing is another form of intolerance in the name of tolerance. That a supposed ill is okay if its commited in service to some overriding good. Well, sorry, but I disagree. And further, exactly what I proposed would happen is happening today just as it is with housing and integration at schools. Most of it is happening naturally and voluntarily as a result of natural rhythms and opportunities at the workplace and not because it’s being forced by liberal agitation.
“Sane people” I presume is liberals? I already said that most conservatives felt that recent court rulings (and civil rights legislation, which I forgot to mention) were sufficient to solve the problem in a more natural and harmonious way. But we never got a chance to find out because the Democrats saw there were more votes to be had by pandering to blacks with programs affirmative action.
I admit that the idea of taking a bunch of kids out of disadvantaged single-parent or absent-parent homes and areas wholesale with no period of adjustment or decompression and expecting them to perform at a level with kids who didn’t have the same background is a problem without much of a solution other than either to let them fall by the wayside or take the fuck things up for everyone approach that eventually was taken. The thing is that neither would have been necessary had not liberals driven the abandonment of family values which led to millions of kids not having proper parental role models and supervision, and had they not forced integration at an unnatural pace and instead let the natual migration of blacks into white schools and communities take place as it inevitably and inexorably would have under recently enacted legislation and court rulings, and had all that happened the black community today would very likely be as relatively free of drugs, crime and street gang violence as it was prior to the advent of so many liberal efforts to rescue it, and, if the 50’s and 60’s are anything to go by, a lot better educated too.
Oh, so you found ONE guy who expressed displeasure at what the teacher’s unions were doing in an extreme case, and that disproves the whole thing, huh?
Of course you will. I’m seeing this tactic used more and more on the SDMB: Go after a post by finding one little thing you think you can pick apart, then declare it to be so grossly wrong that it invalidates everything else the poster said. Of course, this is convenient in that it means you only ever have to address the weakest part of a person’s argument and ignore the tough stuff. This makes you a lazy debater hiding behind a mask of self-righteousness.
But don’t worry - most of us can see through that particular shtick.
It’s just that, if your first point is such a ridiculous over-generalization, why should the rest of the post be believable? “Because someone did something bad in New Zealand, blacks in the US should vote Republican.” Really?
I’ll tell you what – next time I start a post with “Since Republicans just blindly do the bidding of the wealthy and support them without fail…” feel free to ignore the rest of it. OK? Especially if some prominent Republican just got into a fight with some prominent wealthy group.
Does the black vote change with income or education? Among white voters I get the impression there is a difference, those near the bottom of education and income are more likely to be democrat, those in the middle are somewhat more GOP and those at higher education levels are liberal again. As far as income, I believe you tend to lean more rightward the more money you make.
If black voters are 90% dem, is that universal across income and education?
I know also with white voters it depends a lot on where you live. White voters in the deep south are about 90% GOP. In the rest of the south like Texas, maybe 65%. In the midwest about 55% and in new england about 40%.
Are black voters showing any discrepency based on where they live in the US (rural vs urban, southern vs new england, etc)?
You know, I’m sorry I brought it up. That said, I think it’s pretty safe to just ignore anything you have to say given your conduct here and elsewhere.
Either way, you and every other republican in this thread are missing the point. The OP asked why Blacks don’t vote for the GOP. I answered the question. Rather than argue why my reasoning was wrong or unsupported by other Blacks, you spout bullshit about how we should/would vote if we could understand things the way you do. It’s clear most Black people would never vote for a republican. That’s why being Black is the most reliable voting indicator there is. Greater than income, geography, education, or orientation. You may disagree with my reasons why we hate the GOP, but the fact that most of us do is not in argument. Maybe you can try to posit something better than, “Blacks vote don’t vote for the GOP because they are too stupid/uninformed/lazy/dependent to know better”.