The word “freedom” for many black Americans is inextricably
linked with the word “slavery.” While it has been 148 years since
the Emancipation Proclamation, and 47 years since the landmark
Civil Rights Act, for many, the words of Martin Luther King in his
famous speech still ring true: “The Negro lives on a lonely island
of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.”
Many black Americans still find themselves spiritually and
economically enslaved on the figurative 21st-century
plantation.
Why is that still so? After all, for the last 47 years, our
leaders have passed bill after bill ostensibly to free black
Americans from the manacles of poverty and provide ever-stronger
safety nets for those disadvantaged.
But two very formidable forces have conspired over these last 47
years — almost the span of my entire life—to shackle the economic
freedoms and aspirations of the black community: liberal
progressive policies, generally supported by Democrats, and the
socialist ideology espoused by prominent blacks such as Al Sharpton
and Jesse Jackson.
It is always curious to me that black Americans typically vote
Democrat, when it was a Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, who
issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, and a Republican from
Ohio, Representative James Mitchell Ashley, who brought forth the
bill to support an amendment to end slavery throughout the United
States.
Nearly 100 years later, when the initial Civil Rights Bill came
before the full Senate in 1964, it was a group of 18 Southern
Democrats who argued most fervently against its passage.
While the Civil Rights Act passed, finally ending the
reprehensible practices of segregation, the liberal progressive
policies passed during these last nearly five decades have perhaps
done more damage to black Americans’ prospects than the racial
policies of the past. Unemployment in the black community stands at
16.7 percent, food stamp enrollment is up, and nearly
three-quarters of all black children do not live with their
biological fathers.
Welfare policies devised by the left to aid single mothers have
instead worked perversely to incentivize more young women to have
children out of wedlock.
High minimum wages advocated by labor unions— from whom
Democrats receive tremendous financial support — mean employers
are less apt to hire unskilled black youths, or any youths for that
matter.
For the left, “spending on education” generally means job
protection and preserving benefits for teachers, rather than
actually improving education for students in public schools, where
black students can build a foundation for economic advancement.
But the effects of these so-called well-intentioned policies,
while damaging, are certainly not as toxic as the socialist
orientation and noxious rhetoric of “leaders” such as Al Sharpton
and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Words do indeed have meaning, and the
defeatist and demoralizing screeds of these prominent speakers do
not inspire, but instead reinforce the victim mentality, and
generate class hatred and jealousy — further cultivated by our own
President Barack Obama.
Since the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People’s founding in 1909, socialism has been, unfortunately,
deeply ingrained in the black community. In fact, NAACP founder W.
E. B. DuBois received the 1959 “Lenin Peace Prize” and formally
joined the Communist Party USA two years later.
One of the primary tenets of socialist ideology is the creation
of a welfare state, which is precisely what has happened in the
black community. It is, in effect, a virtual plantation, where
black Americans remain enslaved to damaging economic policies and
poisonous attitudes of the rhetorical “overseers” who continue to
reinforce exploitive, negative mindsets.
The only way for black Americans — and all Americans for that
matter — to enjoy the full fruits of economic freedom is by once
again embracing the spirit of individualism and self-determination
laid out in our Constitution and exemplified by true black leaders
such as Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington. It is only by
abandoning the damaging liberal progressive policies and throwing
off the shackles of the victim mentality can black Americans
finally be “free at last.”
