Why do impoverished Black people support Hillary Clinton?

When I think of Hillary Clinton, and the strong support she has from black people, it simply blows my mind.  Here is this woman, an elite northern school graduate from middle class Chicago whom was not only president of the young republicans but also a Goldwater girl in 1964 in the form of both volunteer and supporter. In case you may have forgotten, Barry Goldwater was the first Republican to win the Deep South since Reconstruction by campaigning to defeat the Civil Rights Act and consequently was the main person whom motivated Hillary Clinton to get into politics.

As expected, black politicians have lined up in like they were camping out to get the latest IPhone or new pair of Yeezies to endorse her. It as if by doing such and showing your loyalty to master, she will let you move into the big house as a reward for being faithful to the Clintons.  This was the way it was in 1992.

In 1992 when black folk put Bill Clinton in office in addition to some theatrics of his own (playing the saxophone on the Arsenio Hall show and walking up to an American citizen during the debate to answer questions directly), African American communities across America in rural and urban areas were suffering and had been devastated economically. If one is old enough to recall, one reason for this was Bill Clinton’s ability to say things to the black community that he would say in opposite to white communities. On the same day in the morning Bill Clinton would be singing Lift Every Voice and Sing at a NAACP or black Baptist church meeting and later on that night speaking to a room full of Dixiecrats tell them how he was willing to be tougher on crime and make our cities safer than republicans ever could.

Bill, the democrats, the service economy, big banks, Wall Street and the average white American won but not black folk, we got the shaft. The late 1980s and early 1990s was a period of mass losses in factories across the nation and the diminution of U.S. manufacturing.  All because big corporations were moving abroad as a consequence of globalization and in search of cheaper labor and fewer regulations.  This continued at an even larger scale and greater pace with Clinton as President.

At the start of his presidency, America saw unemployment rates among young black men multiply to pornographic levels. As a direct result, crime increased and we were watching the start of the crack cocaine epidemic. Now Blacks were in essence caged in segregated public housing hoping that the Democratic president would do something to help as he promised during his campaign. He was able to secure 83 percent supportfrom black voters in 1992.

Unfortunately under the Clinton regime we observed the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates in American history. He was firmly in support of the sentencing disparity for crack versus powder cocaine, which not only resulted in disproportionate arrest and sentencing for African Americans, it also increased funding for drug-law enforcement as a continuation of prior republican administrations war on drugs.  He also pushed for a federal “three strikes”law and in 1994 he signed a $30 billion crime bill that mandated life sentencesfor some three-time offenders, and provided $16 billion for state prison grants and the expansion of police forces among other things.  

By 1996, after securing 84 percent black vote to gain a second term and using coded language about race (crime, welfare, crack cocaine) to divide the nation and divert attention from the economy that worked only for the top one percent, the federal the penal budget became twice the amount that had been allocated to food stamps. 

The next move for his administration was to cut billions from public-housing and child-welfare (Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC)) budgets and have them re-directed to increasing incarceration. In fact, Clinton cut funding for public housing more than 60 percent ($17 billion) while increasing funding for prisons by more than 170 percent ($19 billion).

So what Bill Clinton supported from a policy perspective was what democrats in large urban areas had been supporting for the prior 50 years - discriminatory laws that keep black and poor people in their place while extracting lifeline resources that serve to sustain people during times of economic hardship. But this wasn’t enough for him; he had to go even beyond cruelty.

Next the Clinton Administration eliminated Pell Grants for prisoners seeking higher education to prepare for their release and overtly supported laws that would make it easier for public-housing agencies to deny shelter to anyone with any sort of criminal history.

It was President Clinton who proposed the “one strike and you’re out” initiative, which meant that families could be evicted from public housing because one member (or a guest) had committed even a minor offense – this was his brainchild. No black men whom had been released from prison with nothing could no longer return home to family if they lived in federally assisted housing or else the entire family would be kicked out. On top of this, the Clinton Administration promised,signed into law and made certain that anyone convicted of a felony drug offense would never be able to get federal financial aid if you had drug convictions.  He signed into law a lifetime ban on welfare and food stamps for anyone convicted of a felony drug offense.

When Bill was finished, more than half of working-age African-American with criminal records was now by legal sanction, burdened with congressional and presidential approved discrimination in housing, employment and access to education. Moreover, after his two terms as President, Clinton left the nation with the highest rate of incarceration in the world, thanks to his 1994 Crime Bill which saw conservatively, more than 80% percent of all drug offenders sent to prison being black men and the unemployment rate for non-college-educated black men (including those behind bars) being north of 40 percent - all with the approval and support of the current democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and the unusual accomplice of the black vote. Now I know many will say that this was Bill and Not Hillary. Truthfully they are one in the same – HILLBILL.

So all I am asking is what have the Clintons done to keep black folk voting for them other than belong to the Democratic Party? Why do impoverished Black people living from paycheck to paycheck support Hillary Clinton?

The housing bubble that precipitated the crash that created the Great Recession was done mostly on the backs of people of color. The bankers who profited from preying on the black communities got bailed out to the tune of trillions of taxpayer dollars; their victims mostly lost their homes. The perpetrators were never even indicted by the Obama administration, which had been tight with Wall Street from jump.

And it is bazaar how folk forget how she and her husband went after then Senator Obama.  In 2008 while campaigning in South Carolina Hillary suggested that Dr. King’s dream was wasn’t anything without President Lyndon B. Johnson passing the Civil Rights Act. Tim Russert, then the host for NBC Meet the Press said it was as if she was saying “it took a white man to get blacks to the mountaintop.” Then there is what Bill Clinton was reported to have said after it was reported in 2010 he was upset that Senator Ted Kennedy endorsed Barack Obama over Hillary. In the book Game Change written by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin it is reported in a conversation with Kennedy he said, “A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee,” describing Senator Obama.  We won’t even speak on her dismal record with Black New Yorkers or Blacks across the nation while she served as the Senator from New York.

The simple truth is that Black Americans have been voting for the Democrats consistently for more than the past forty years and we have little if anything to show for it with the exception of a few Attorney Generals, a President, and a museum. Why, because economically, we have been shown but fail to acknowledge that the economic positions of the democratic clearly elucidate it as being the party of the affluent white collar white and no one else.

How can we forget or ignore that it was the Clinton administration that deregulated banks and Wall Street which was a major factor in the financial crisis the U.S. experienced in 2008 and had a more than disparate impact on African Americans compared to any other ethnic racial group in the country. And his relationship with Wall Street and Big banks is no different from his wife.  How else can folk get upwards of $250,000 for forty-five minute speeches without doing any actual work? The role of the practices of big banks and Wall Street on the African American community cannot be denied yet she panders to us like the man on the corner begging for some change. She may speak out about redlining practices that are discriminatory and illegal and predatory lending but the only time we see or hear from her, like most other democrats is when they want our votes and support while at the same time she is all buddy-buddy with the folk who are making it extremely hard for African Americans (the people she called super predators and deadbeats) to obtain a fair and equal economic footing in America. So again I just ask why impoverished Black people support Hillary Clinton. 

For more than 40 years her party has collectively siphoned the African American vote without returning anything in exchange for our continuous and even subsistent electoral support and what have we received or to show for it economically?  A few social programs designed to make us helpless and dependent on government, the status of a permanant status as secondary class citizens in America just like during the Black Codes and Jim Crow, and historically high levels of crime in our communities, unemployment, poverty, incarceration rates, poorer health and wellness status and mass illiteracy.

I take it these basic public benefits are the aspects of Hillary Clinton’s policy that excites you and her base – have at it. Personally I deserve better and much, much more.

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America’s Racist Baggage Today is the Legacy of the Democratic Party

It is very difficult for me to understand how inefficient the knowledge base of a sizeable corpus of individuals in the generations after mine have, as it pertains to history.  No more astonishing a content area is this evident is with regards to American political history, in particular history of the Democratic Party. What few are aware of is that it is most probable that race relations in America are a direct result of Democratic Party policy and ideology. De Tocqueville acknowledge this when he stated that a natural prejudice was evinced against Africans brought to these shores against their will yet forever through pigmentation, will carry the “external mark” of a stranger, born in degradation considered as “an intermediate between beast and man.” Taking this even further he wrote:

“So those who hope that the European will one day mingle with the Negroes seem to me to be harboring a delusion…I see that slavery is in retreat, but the prejudice from which it arose is immovable…Race prejudice seems stronger in those states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exist, and nowhere is it more intolerant than in those states where slavery was never known.”

Ironically the laws that would manifest over his times and major attitudes regarding Africans in America, After the Federalist Party, would be fostered by one party in particular as it pertained to policy – the Democratic Party.

That is correct; you name it, many of the collective political accomplishments that we as African Americans benefited from did not occur because of the Democratic Party but rather in spite of the Democratic Party.  If it were not for U.S. Representative Justin Morrill (R-VT) in 1862, who got the Land Grant Act passed, which established colleges for African Americans, there would be no state funded historically Black Colleges and Universities. Even before this, the historical record notes that the Republican Party was formed essential to counteract the pro-slavery policies of the Democratic Party during a period in the nation’s history in which we saw Democratic President Franklin Pierce signing the Kansas-NebraskaAct (which allowed for the expansion of slavery into newly acquired U.S. territories in 1854). Ironically the same year, Montgomery Blair, a republican argued in front of the Supreme Court on behalf of his client Dred Scott albeit it unsuccessfully where the record noted the only dissent with the court decision majority of seven democrats was Republican Justice John McLean.

Although many incorrectly believe that freed slaves were promised after emancipation and the 13^th and 14^th amendment 40 acres and a mule, this was never factually the case.  The record documents that in 1866 Republican U.S. Representative Thaddeus Stevens introduced the legislation however it was vetoed by then Democratic President Andrew Johnson. Also that same year the Republican congress was able to override President Johnson’s veto of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and his veto of the Freedman’s Bureau Act which was written to protect former slaves from Black codes put into law to deny rights granted by the 13th and 14^th amendments. In addition, two times the following year, the Republican majority had to vote to over-ride Johnson’s veto of the legislation granting African Americans the right to vote.

Being unable to compete with the Republicans in the Federal legislatures, the Democratic Party, in particular southern democrats whom were former confederate veterans found the “Ku Klux Klan in Pulaski, Tennessee, on December 24, 1865.  To be accurate, the Ku Klux Klan was founded and formed to be the military wing of the Democratic Party and actions around the nation after its inception until this very day still supports this objective. KKK violence was aimed specifically intimidate and kill newly freed slaves and Republicans.  For example, in September of 1868 Democrats in Louisiana murdered around 300 African Americans whom attempted to defend their assault against a Republican Newspaper editor. The following month, while campaigning for re-election, Republican U.S. House Representative James Hinds was assassinated by self-proclaimed Democrats and KKK members.

Now I know many would say that this was decades ago and I would agree, but what must not be forgotten is that the plan desired (in concert with democrats) was to construt and put in place policy designed to disenfranchise and keep blacks from owing land and in a position to sustain ourselves. Moreover they wanted to defeat and keep Republicans equally at bay via terrorism.  With the use of violence by the Party’s military wing (the KKK) and separating blacks from their land and placing them in positions not being able to provide for themselves, they formulated new policy at the federal level designed to make blacks dependent on democrats and the government as opposed to truly exercising inalienable rights associated with actual liberty.

Republicans fought back with policy. In 1871 the Republican congress passed the Ku Klux Klan act which outlawed the Democratic Party military wing. Republican President even dispatched troops to South Carolina after democrats threated blacks with death around the nation for even trying to vote.  In one case, African American Republican activist Octavius Catto was murdered by democrats in Philadelphia. A few years later in 1874, nearly 30 were killed when democrats took control of the Louisiana state house because Republican Gov. William Kellogg dared to have an integrated administration.

When democrats returned to leadership, all of what had been put in place by Republicans was obviated.  It was the democratic congress and President Grover Cleveland who repealed the Republicans Enforcement Act which gave African Americans the right to vote. Two years later America would see a Democratic Supreme Court uphold Plessy V. Ferguson. In 1901, Booker T. Washington would begin his life long battle protesting against the Alabama’s Democratic Party refusal to allow African Americans to vote.

Even during the time of Franklin Roosevelt democratic policy was moving more towards the views of dependency politics advocated by the KKK in an effort to form a dependency class of Americans based on color alone.  In 1937 it was the Republicans who organized against FDR’s appointment of Ku Klux Klan member Senator Hugo Black to theSupreme Court and it was Democrat FDR, whom just three years later rejected the Republican Party’s call to integrate the armed forces.

In 1953 California’s Three-term Republican Governor Earl Warren wrote the land mark decision for Brown V. Board of Education after Assistant Attorney General of the Eisenhower administration Lee ranking argued the case on behalf of the Plaintiffs with Thurgood Marshall.  On a roll it seemed, a Republican Federal judge, under threats from Democrats the blacks in the back of the bus law and ruled in favor of Rosa Parks.

But as history outlines, democrats fought tooth and nail against all of these outcomes. After Eisenhower signed the Republican’s Party Civil Rights Act into law, he had to send the 82^nd airborne division to Little Rock to enforce school desegregation amidst criticism from Democrats the likes of Future Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson in 1957.

In simple terms, the legacy of racism that has it’s weighted and oppressive foot on the collective necks of African Americans today was the courtesy of the Democratic party and democratic policy that continues to day with violence in the form of police brutality and disenfranchisement via policies of dependency.  Andrew Hacker explained this in his 1992 tractate Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal. He noted that as African Americans, we must live in an existence that is far removed from free-will and free-choice. He wrote “Black Americans are Americans, yet they still subsist as aliens in the only land they know. Other groups may remain outside the mainstream but the do so voluntarily. In contrast blacks must endure a segregation that is far from freely chosen.”

The reality is, how America and Americans views race presently is a direct result of beliefs of a perverted democratic system that proffers race as its central element of contention.  This contention is, when violence was no longer acceptable after the civil rights era, was transduced to policy designed with the intent to subjugate African Americans and systematically extract wealth from our community. As a policy this has never stopped.  The most lucid view of this is the large urban cities of America.  Cleveland has been run by democrats from 1942-present (police, city council and mayor) uninterrupted with the exception of  1972-77; Chicago has been run by democratsuninterrupted since 1931; Flint, MI since 1960; Detroit since 1962; Baltimoresince 1967; DC since 1967; Philadelphia since 1952; Newark since 1953; and Milwaukee since 1960. And I would reckon if II had the time to look up a few things, I could find trend lines over the same period that would show an increase in poverty, unemployment, incarceration, high school dropout rates and poverty as well as decline in wealth, land ownership, housing and income too.

This is our biggest problem as a voting block today - Democrats running for state or national office aspiring to win black votes without appearing to give a FcK about nothing but our vote. So if we so upset about our current circumstances and conditions, why we still voting to enslave and impoverish ourselves by voting for democrats unconditionally? They gave us the politics of bigotry and oppression that is killing us currently.

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BLM Adopts Jim Crow and Promote Black Codes Policy

On a Sunday morning the 15 of September in 1963, the Ku Klux Klan murdered four girls when they bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. The church, which had been built in 1911, would be the last place Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley would ever grace. This was one of the seminal events that propelled the Civil rights movement to the forefront of the American consciousness as well shocked the nation presenting it with the horrors blacks in the south and across the U.S. had been dealing with for decades. In basic terms it painted the evil of segregation by race and the incongruence of the premise of separate but equal in the land of the free.

It seems that all of that was struggled for just some fifty plus years ago has been thrown down the drain by self-pitying, micro-aggressed, spoiled self-proclaimed social justice warriors whom appear ill-equipped and unable to exist in the real world without artificially constructing it to meet their self-absorbed make-believe worlds. I guess this is what happens when you raise a generation of mollycoddled kids who are used to getting a trophy just for paying a fee and participating rather than having to earn or work hard for it.

Recently, while reading, I came across something that was truly out of Alice in Wonderland. It seems there is a new “social justice” movement going on on college and university campuses across the nation in which Black college students are demanding that they be segregated from white students, calling for “safe spaces” only for students of color. At Oberlin University, students have demanded “safe spaces” for black students only, as well as rooms in the library, science center for specific use by black students. They even want black/Africa only events at some universities and at Scripps and Pomona colleges, several such have already occurred. The Afrikan Student Union at UCLA is asking for an “Afrikan Diaspora floor” as well as an “Afro-house.” The University of Connecticut is even building a new dorm for black students only. At Cal State Los Angeles, a new housing program opens up dorms for black students who want to be separated from the rest of the campus. A similar housing option is available at UC Davis.

HELLO, this is segregation. As a child of segregation and born in Memphis in 1962, this nothing to play with and not so simple a thing to be tossing around because somebody got their punk azz feelings hurt or micro-aggressed. It also seems as if these kids do not understand the historical precedents set in motion ex post facto Jim Crow regarding segregation and the concept of separate but equal. Let me remind your dumb azz. In the 1896 case of Plessy v Ferguson, the issue of whether public facilities may be segregated based on race was first proffered in the context of transportation. As a result of this case, the Supreme Court said that the Equal Protection Clause was not violated by a Louisiana law requiring whites and blacks to ride in separate railroad cars. From this point on for decades to follow, the courts would hand down a series of decisions that permitted states to segregate people of color up until the 1930s when Charles Hamilton Houston of the NAACP started a surgical dismantling of the "separate but equal" position which defined Plessy. Segregation was rampant in public education from Boston and Maryland to Birmingham and Arkansas. The final nail in obviating segregation and the postulate of separate but equal occurred in 1954 when the Supreme Court decided the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. It was the conclusion and opinion of the Court that "Racially segregated schools” are "inherently unequal."

 To be honest, I am bedeviled with what social justice means and what a social justice warrior is. First they can’t be too social if they desire to be isolated from the world, nor concerned about justice if it is only interesting when black folks are killed by cops and not each other and warrior, I won’t even go their (brave or experienced fighter). I mean they are afraid to live around people who have a different skin color than them and are even traumatized simply by reading the word TRUMP written chalk. Likewise, I am trying to figure out what social justice work is for today it seems to be the exact opposite of what it was when I was raised as a child in the segregated south. All I can surmise is that it means tweeting a lot, making a couple-a-few hashtags, protesting and marching in the streets and crying and asking for space when you hear something you don’t like. Clearly it doesn’t involve patrolling streets in Chicago or Memphis, or volunteering to tutor at your local neighborhood school, or working in the jails, prisons and homeless shelters I prefer to spend my time in personally regularly.

The concept of self-segregation is weak and is in dialectical opposition to what Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights activist in the past envisioned regarding an America that was open to all without any barriers. Moreover it is comical for people to desire to be segregated while at the same time incessantly complaining and pointing out that they (blacks) are frequently excluded when compared to other students. I would wager if whites had a white only party these same kids would protest vehemently - maybe even saying that doing such would be a form of overt discrimination by other students and a sign of disrespect.

It is also evident that what some of these new age cats want is impossible and more unlikely than taking a yellow brick road to see a wizard. There is no constitutional right not to be offended and just because a baby cries don’t mean you will or should get it. It is impossible to “bullet-proof” any person from reality.

No institution should be in the business nurturing idiotic preconceptions just because someone is uncomfortable. Moreover it is completely impossible to go through and to accommodate every possible example and or situation that might bother or upset someone: especially in places where folks are actively looking for things and ideas to become offended by. I just hope these soft as wet toilet paper social justice warriors that frighteningly and frenziedly represent the future coterie of African Americans, get a spine and learn to deal with know you cannot control everything and that are aware they are pro Jim Crow and black codes when they propose idiotic suggestions like self-segregation.

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