40 Acres and a Mule
Or at Least Some Political Leverage...
To gain a louder voice black Americans will have to (collectively) leave the Democrat Party ‘plantation’. Only then will they gain the influence a group of their numbers and prominence in American history deserves. Right now they have probably been harmed far more than helped by the government in the post-Jim Crow era. Coincident with the black migration away from Democratic Party politics is a growing chorus of voices pushing back against victim mentalities and paternalistic narratives. These self-abasing ideas haven’t proven to be helpful to black America and they seem to be slowly dying, from the bottom up, and the middle outward.
Our common country is the United States. Here were we born, here raised and educated; here are the scenes of childhood; the pleasant associations of our school going days; the loved enjoyments of our domestic and fireside relations, and the sacred graves of our departed fathers and mothers, and from here will we not be driven by any policy that may be schemed against us.
That very little comparatively as yet has been done, to attain a respectable position as a class in this country, will not be denied, and that the successful accomplishment of this end is also possible, must also be admitted; but in what manner, and by what means, has long been, and is even now, by the best thinking minds among the colored people themselves, a matter of difference of opinion.
—Martin Robinson Delany, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (1852)
[O]nce you’ve pledged your vote to a party in perpetuity without any qualifications and with zero expectation of getting anything in return… how do you make that party do what you want? You’ve already promised to give them the only thing they care about. Your vote’s already committed, so why on earth should they move in the direction of your values the slightest bit? It’s like a wife promising to never leave her husband no matter how badly he treats her…
In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville observed in 1835 that “the greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.” A compelling statement: Indeed, America is always in the process of becoming a more perfect union.
2024 - The State of The Union
A shockingly high number of America’s biggest public policy failures concern and center African-Americans: gun deaths, failing public schools, unemployment caused by minimum wage legislation, inner city crime and poverty, disparate impacts of the legal and criminal justice systems. These are undeniable realities.
It is also undeniable that black Americans vote overwhelmingly Democrat. Black voters represent 13% of the electorate, the second largest racial minority in the U.S, and have chosen to vote ~90% Democrat during the last three decades.
Regardless of how you view American politics or which policies you favor, it appears near undeniable that Democrat politicians often take black voters for granted. This is the natural effect of being, in effect, a captive bloc of voters. Politicians and party functionaries only give a client group as much as they demand, and the only leverage that group can use in the negotiation is their vote. Regardless of your partisan sympathies you must acknowledge that black voters have long been bargaining their allegiance away for a very cheap rate.
We are witnessing the early stages of a process which can be called, without exaggeration, the biggest fear of the Democratic Party. Black folks are beginning to shed their long-time status as reliable (85-90%) Democratic voters. Sex is now more salient as a political variable (more on that later), and race less. Within that context, polls indicate that in this election Black men may vote for Trump at rates exceeding 30%. This is bad news for the Democrat Party but can only improve the political standing of Black voters in the landscape of policy-making in the long term. Black Americans (as a group) have suffered the negative effects of policy-making, social pathology, and urban decay & corruption at rates much higher than any other demographic. I cannot recall the last time I heard a national politician propose a policy or address an issue which unduly affects black voters (crime, family fragmentation, public school decline, etc.). Worse, the Left (including most national media outlets, which are relentlessly progressive) seems to have decided that it’s unseemly or inconvenient to mention the 13-14,000 black men killed by murder every year, or the disastrous performance of black students in many public schools. These issues cannot easily be blamed on the power structure (which even in black neighborhoods and voting precincts is labelled ‘white’ by leftists) and so they aren’t good kindling for inflaming narratives of racial grievance.
A lot of excellent social science has been done about the disastrous effects of federal transfer payment programs and mass incarceration on the black family during the period 1950-1980. Roland Fryer studied the effects of the fatally tight grip of teachers’ unions over proposals to improve teacher quality in public schools. Whether or not these hypotheses are true they are interesting and are integral to improving policy-making in the United States, especially for black communities. Their exclusion from so much of the mainstream has not been at the behest of black voters or students-it’s been driven by an ideology which correctly identifies these questions as toxic for its political goals. A decade ago the legacy media could fairly well suppress these kinds of conversations but that ability is fading fast. The fortunes of black America can only rise as a result.
One example: black men kill other black men at rates around 400x higher than police do… but the overwhelming majority of national news articles about black men being killed in the past 5 years focus on the police. The reason for that shocking mismatch is purely rooted in political narratives and agenda-building. Black folks know what the problems in their neighborhoods are (and are clear-eyed about the proximate causes), but they’re not the target demographic for consumption of these stories. Rather, it is rich, white progressives. A similar disconnect could be seen in 2020 when overwhelming numbers of black poll respondents wanted MORE police in their neighborhoods at the same time that white progressives-acting ostensibly on their behalf, apparently without speaking to any of them-pushed to defund the police and LOWER rates of police activity in black neighborhoods. This is the most tragic recent example of terrible policy-making arising from ignorance and ‘good intentions’ (really a kind of patronizing status-consciousness but not, in any case, a desire to harm) that I can recall in the United States. If black voters had been an essential part of the conversation, rather than a captive political appendage to the Democrat Party and thoroughly taken for granted, the conversation might have proceeded differently.
15% is still astoundingly low but polls indicate that up to 30% of black MEN (a low propensity demographic as a whole) may vote for Donald Trump. Consider the trends though-If 25%, 30%, 40%… of black voters become willing to consider non-Democrat politicians in races this will MASSIVELY affect our politics. It will increase the leverage black voters have in American elections tremendously.
Let’s see where the data takes us in 4, 8, 12 years. Unfortunately for Democrats they have almost nothing to gain among a population which already supports them so consistently-but plenty to lose.
Federal and state transfer programs have proven incapable of resurrecting the prosperity of many black neighborhoods in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Detroit, etc. What are some of the policy changes on the horizon? More of the same, actually. Why would a party machine change its relationship to a group when it historically claims >90% of that group’s political support?
Thousands of American city blocks are bleak and haunted, like these. An argument could be made that government social programs have, in many cases, done more harm than good (see the ‘Moynihan Report’). Whether or not you believe that, the fact that black neighborhoods and checkbooks and schools are-on average-in especially dire straights seems undeniable. I detect 3 general approaches to the situation: (1) a change of attitude, focusing particularly on education and incentivizing marriage and employment; (2) more of the same-increase school funding and government benefits within the frameworks of 60-year old agencies; (3) ignore the problems and refuse to address their existence or potential solutions whatsoever. I’ve heard some ideas from (1) and (2) (mostly on the Right and Left respectively) but the overwhelming Democratic Party approach seems to be (3): ‘pretend everything is fine’.
So black America struggles. Those struggles have a unique historical context. The heavy oppression, endurance, and civil liberation of the African American population (a term I rarely use but one which seems apt here) is perhaps the most sustained and stirring mythos in all of American history. It would be an obvious error (which no resident of the United States would ever make) to say that the situation of black America is roughly equal to that of white (or even immigrant) America in most particulars. The factors and dynamics of those disparities are some of the most emotional and contentious questions in contemporary political debate.
The assumption among vast swathes of the prosperous and professional is that this sorry state of affairs is somehow tied to racism-not just the historical complex of racism and racist policies but present day racism. I think the evidence tying these huge problems to contemporary racism (which is, by all metrics, historically low and diminishing) is generally weak. Unfortunately the proposition of racism’s central role in today’s society functions like an article of faith on the Left. Read the article below for one of hundreds of relevant instances of flawed narrative-building. Our power structure seems more and more inclined toward these distortions, for some reason.
Is this mindset useful, for policymaking or for personal growth?
writes:We often hear so-called antiracists say that problems like low academic achievement, high out-of-wedlock birthrates, and disproportionately high levels of criminality in troubled black communities will only be remedied once “white supremacists” change their ways. This is the “bias narrative”—the problems of black America are caused by the prejudices of white America. This point of view, besides being empirically dubious, places the fate of African Americans in the hands of those least sympathetic to their plight
has identified that the story of current black oppression is deeply linked to an agenda which seeks more control over people’s lives (ostensibly to improve them and smooth out inequities) and more control over hiring and regulatory and administrative decisions (ostensibly to protect victims of ‘systemic racism’ and to rectify ‘inequities’). The black link to the Democratic Party originates in a conception of blacks as a victim of American society and the party/government agency/DEI trainer/non-profit as the savior. As more time passes that story becomes less and less believable. Racism has sharply declined in American society and that’s a difficult reality to deny. Blaming the problems of tens of millions of busy citizens on such a feeble and ephemeral variable seems increasingly specious. Indeed, it’s only a popular idea among the wealthiest and most well educated voters, who seem to be informed less by personal knowledge or policy education, and more by a fashionable urge to appear virtuous and right-thinking to other wealthy and high-status individuals in their communities.[R]ewriting our narratives about race, criminality, and policing will not address all of our problems. But it is necessary. And it must happen, first and foremost, at the level of the individual.
Writing about the RNC & DNC Conventions,
writes:This mythology is central to the Left’s ability to wield power. It must be maintained, no matter how extensively that past injustice has been addressed or how high its supposed victims have risen.
The experience of oppression is so vital to hold onto politically that Democrats are willing to distort facts to keep it operative. In one passage of Oprah’s speech, she claimed that, like the children who integrated the Deep South under National Guard protection, Harris was “part of the second class to integrate the public schools in Berkeley, California.”
The problem? It’s not true. Berkeley Public Schools were never segregated by law, and black students attended Harris’s school long before she enrolled.
It’s an untruth that reveals a more fundamental truth: the Left has supreme confidence that it can transmit its narrative to the public from a position of power. The “fact checkers” will twist every falsehood into the shape of verity. And the party organizers can dispatch actors, stars, and personalities—including the queen of daytime television—to lend their authority to each part of the myth.
The idea that victimhood status is politically useful might not be a fair description of the Left’s conscious approach (at least publicly) but it is an unavoidable conclusion of their dialogue around race and history and policy. What if focusing on black victimhood is no longer useful for black communities? I suspect that it will continue to be an extant theme as long as it has political potential for the Democratic Party.
Unfortunately the idea of the archetypal ‘black American victim’ is not just political useful in Democratic politics but it’s emotionally satisfying for a certain kind of white American, and these people have more money and power than average… and less contact with struggling black communities.
I suspect that more contact with the actual ‘victims’ they mythologize would amend these peoples’ worldviews in many cases. Black America is not inferior, or struggling under the jackboot of white supremacy. It is a historically wounded demographic which has been particularly poorly served by government policies, even well-intentioned ones.
Coincident with the collapse of many black American homes and communities, we’ve seen an insurgent racialist doctrine-’Anti-racism'-which is especially popular among educated white people. This worldview has distracted a truly enormous number of people and diverted untold resources, for years… while doing nothing for black people.
The Promise of Tomorrow
Ultimately it will be black folks who make their own fortune in America, just like the rest of us. That is the great reality which reveals the lie of progressive projects of wealth redistribution and education incentives and housing credits-no amount of federal support has ever lifted a struggling population into wealth and stability (just look at Native American reservations if you disbelieve me). I regard the claim that black folks have the power and the responsibility to make their own lives to be a self-evident truth. Increasingly the question I hear is: what are the best attitudes and ideas for promoting that outcome? I believe it’s an emphasis on personal responsibility, and an active appreciation for and reliance on the myriad opportunities of American society.
There’s a small but growing insurgency of black voices on YouTube and Substack and out in the culture, making arguments like the ones I’ve made here. Unless you’re completely insulated by mainstream obfuscation you’ve probably encountered some of them and, I think, will see them more and more. I recently read an interesting piece by
on why he teaches lesson on the Constitution to black students as a way to instill a love of civil liberties. I came across the ‘Journal of Free Black Moms’ and Angela Harris, with the Christian Home Educators’ Support System. Those are just examples from the past week! I see the excellent studies of Roland Fryer mentioned more and more often (to the dismay of the social science mainstream). and and Thomas Sowell are old favorites. On YouTube I watch Amir Odom, Amala E., DeVory Darkins, Patience Xina, and more… all young folks with interesting takes and pleasant affect; all articulate critics of the 20th-century status quo; all black.
Does this represent a sea change? I tend to think it does but, even if the process is in its early stages, having these kinds of idealistic memetic super-spreaders out there generating content has a cumulative effect. Remember: the black vote is the Democrats’ prize to lose. Perhaps when it’s in contention, the renaissance of our Northern cities and urban public schools can begin. Wouldn’t that be glorious?
Thanks for reading! Please like, comment, subscribe, and SHARE!
More essays on the changing situation of African Americans as a culture and a political factor in the United States:
You won’t have economic development in areas that are wracked by violent crime. Young black men (15-34) are just 2% of the population and commit about half of the nation's homicides. A rate an astounding 49 times that of the average American. Most of their victims are other young black men. A major reason no one cares. They are the country's gun violence problem. Saying that truth makes me a racist in today's world.
The roots of the problem are: the lack of respect for education (read up on the disruption in any inner city classroom and the refusal of black administrators to address it by imposing needed discipline) and the casual acceptance of criminal behavior in the black community exemplified by the refusal to cooperate with law enforcement, and the failure of many (most?) black fathers to love and care for their children and especially their boy children. Those who object to this analysis deny black people any agency over their own lives. They are the true racists. Fix those issues and you have a shot at reducing gun violence in America.