-By Warner Todd Huston
ESPN regular Stephen A. Smith has a dream but it isn’t one most public African Americans have these days. Smith says he wishes that for “just one” election every black person in America would vote Republican.
Smith made the comment at the Impact Symposium at Vanderbilt University during a discussion about inequality.
“What I dream is that for one election, just one, every black person in America vote Republican,” he said. “Because from what I’ve read, and I’m open to correction, but from what I’ve read, Barry Goldwater is going against Lyndon B. Johnson. He’s your Republican candidate. He is completely against the Civil Rights Movement. Lyndon B. Johnson was in favor of it. What happens is, he wins office, Barry Goldwater loses office, but there was a senate, a Republican senate, that pushed the votes to the president’s desk. It was the Democrats who were against Civil Rights legislation. So because President Lyndon B. Johnson was a Democrat, black America assumed the Democrats were for it.”
He also added, “Black folks in America are telling one party, ‘We don’t give a damn about you.’ They’re telling the other party ‘You’ve got our vote.’ Therefore, you have labeled yourself ‘disenfranchised’ because one party knows they’ve got you under their thumb. The other party knows they’ll never get you and nobody comes to address your interest.”
Now, notice that Smith isn’t saying that he thinks that blacks should sign onto in every last thing in the GOP agenda. Only that blacks need to pay attention to the GOP so that the two groups can interact and better work together, better understand each other.
His point is that blacks have put themselves in a lose-lose situation in America today. On one hand the GOP won’t much bother to concern itself with the problems of blacks because they won’t get their vote anyway. On the other hand, the Democrats take blacks for granted and don’t really care much about blacks’ problems but suffer no repercussions from it because blacks vote 100 percent for them anyway.
Smith’s point was that Democrats are NOT the black man’s fast friend like they pretend. That is a most sentient point.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing news, opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that wrote articles on U.S. history for several American history magazines. Huston is a featured writer for Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart News, and he appears on such sites as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, Wizbang.com, and many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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