Poet W. H. Auden said professors are folks who talk in other
people’s sleep. True enough. I recall some nodding off in my
college history classes (not by me, of course).
No one, however, slept through the history lesson Tuesday
night at the monthly meeting of the Hillsborough County (Tampa)
Republican Executive Committee. But then Frantz Kebreau is not your
ordinary professor. If fact, he’s not a professor at all but an
airline pilot and former Navy pilot with more than 300 carrier
landings, taking some time away from the clouds to promote a more
earthly understanding of the blessings of American freedom that
people of all races can enjoy (at least and until politicians zero
those freedoms out).
One of the favorite indoor sports of liberals is to call
conservatives, particularly those with the temerity to embrace the
tea-party, racist. To hear media-appointed black “leaders” like
Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpie, not to mention some of the more
demagogic members of the Congressional Black Caucus, you’d think
all white American conservatives, regardless of protestations to
the contrary and spotless lives, are closet Ku-Kluxers who can
barely contain their inner Bull Connor. These bigots we’re told,
given half a chance, would have our black brothers and sisters on
the back of the bus again in a heartbeat.
When there’s dumbness and demagogy in the air, Hollywood
will be heard from. Morgan Freeman, a fine actor who can project
intelligence and maturity on the screen, got in on the fun saying
Republican efforts to retire Barack O’Barnum next year are “a
racist thing,” and show “the weak, dark side of America.” Samuel L.
Jackson, another black actor, echoed Freeman with this analysis of
the campaign to replace our socialist president with a
conservative: “It all boils down pretty much to race. It’s not
politics. It’s not the economy.”
OK, I get it. White conservatives and Republicans (not
entirely coterminous categories) aren’t really sore with O’Barnum
for ballooning the national debt by $4 trillion and making national
bankruptcy a real possibility, or for nationalizing one-sixth of
the economy through Obamacare and generally trying to push as much
as possible from the private to the public sector. It’s not about
setting federal agencies on a jobs-killing regulation binge, or for
traveling the world apologizing for America’s alleged sins and
bowing before tyrants. It’s not his rejection of American
exceptionalism and total ignorance of the importance to world
stability of a militarily strong America either.
No, no. These items are just trifles. What conservatives
are really sore with our community-organizer-in-chief about is that
he’s not Caucasian. And isn’t that just like those racist
Republicans?
Kebreau, whose parents immigrated to America from Haiti,
is having none of this. Since 2009 he’s been on the news, talk
shows, and speaking circuit making the point that, though few
Americans know it, the record of the Republican Party for a century
and a half has not only been more supportive of Black Americans
than that of the Democratic Party has, but much more so.
In his Tuesday lecture before a couple hundred GOP
activists in Tampa, Kebreau pointed out that the more than a dozen
civil rights acts introduced into Congress over the past century
and a half were all introduced by Republicans and opposed by
Democrats, often vociferously. In each case a higher percentage of
Republicans supported real civil rights than Democrats, including
the all-important Civil Right Act of 1964. A full 80 percent of
Republicans voted in Congress for this game-changing legislation
that was the beginning of the end for Jim Crow. Only 63 percent of
Democrats supported it, not including Democratic icon and former Ku
Klux Klan member Robert C. Byrd, who filibustered it.
One hundred percent of Republicans supported the 13th
amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which ended slavery, while only
23 percent of Democrats did. The 15th amendment, giving all
Americans the right to vote, was a 100 percent to zero percent
Republican shutout.
Democrat Woodrow Wilson, our first true progressive
president and touted by John Kerry as one of his favorites,
segregated the federal civil service and the U.S. military and
bears large responsibility for the decades of segregation that
followed and the heartache, violence, and death required to put an
end to it.
These historical facts are hiding in plain sight. But we
live in an age of historical illiteracy. And these are not things
members of the main(left)-stream media would like to talk about
even if they knew them, which they don’t.
Nowadays black voters, usually in percentages north of 90
percent, are wholly-owned subsidiaries of the Democratic Party.
Things have been trending in this direction since the New Deal,
which provided jobs for many unemployed blacks. The last Republican
presidential candidate to receive more than 20 percent of the black
vote was Tricky Dick in 1960.
Since then black voter devotion to the Democratic Party
has been, excuse the expression, slavish. It’s a real
head-scratcher to me on the academic and personal level why this
endures now that so many blacks have entered the great American
middle class and higher. I’ve known, worked with, played ball with,
and buried my nose in the happy-hour froth with so many blacks who
are personally conservative, but who almost invariably cast their
votes for candidates who do not share their values.
In contrast to the gift of freedom and earned dignity,
Democrats and liberals have bequeathed black Americans a stifling
welfare system that’s gone more than a fair long way toward
dismantling the black family, as the melancholy statistics on out
of wedlock births and one-parent families testify to. The Democrats
also invented and cling to the policy of affirmative action, which
is not a cure for discrimination but a socially corrosive form of
it. There’s hardly a more effective way of keeping Americans at war
with each other than the racial spoils system of affirmative
action, wherein the good things are divided up along racial
lines.
Countless groups, like Tampa’s Republicans, as well as
news junkies, have heard Kebreau make these and other points in
pursuit of his stated goal of a truly color-blind society. The only
kind of society, in Kebreau’s view, which has any chance of
enduring peacefully and prosperously.
Kebreau told me he probably won’t stay on the road
pitching his ideas for the duration, even if he continues to get
the standing-O’s he received Tuesday night. But he’ll stay at it
until after the 2012 election, because he’s concerned about the
socialist direction the country is taking. He sees the freedoms he
cherishes being threatened and eroded, and he doesn’t like
it.
Kebreau will eventually make it back to the cockpit. When
his flying days are over he could do worse than consider the
classroom. He’s an acute thinker, a tireless researcher, and a
talented speaker who will not have to pass out NoDoz tablets to his
students to keep their attention.
