The Elder Statement : Black Americans

Photo Credit: James Karales

By John Perazzo, Jun. 2006, Discover The Networks

Victims of the Left: Black Americans

This essay examines specifically how the left, in its self-identified quest to elevate African Americans by means of myriad social justice campaigns, has in fact done incalculable harm to the black community in the United States.

Table of Contents (Click on the numbered topics to jump to the desired category):

1) How the Left Created Black Victimology and Black Rejection of American Values

2) Affirmative Action: How the Left Has Harmed Blacks through the Bigotry of Low Expectations

3) How the Left Consigns Blacks to Substandard Education

4) How the War on Poverty Devastated the Black Community

5) How the Failed Crusade of “Sex Education” Harmed the Black Community

6) The Crime Wave that Has Decimated Black America

7) How Blacks Have Been Victimized by Leftist Policies Concerning AIDS

8) How the Left Demands Black Conformity of Thought

9) Notes

1) How the Left Created Black Victimology and Black Rejection of American Values ( Return to top):

At the dawn of the civil rights era of the 1950s and 60s, Americans came face to face with the defining social and political issue of their time: the need to address their country’s lingering racial injustices. Those inequities were particularly abhorrent in the South, where, following the long epoch of slavery, Jim Crow laws mandating segregation treated blacks as less than fully human from the 1890s through the early 1960s. Conditions for blacks in the North, though not nearly ideal, were considerably better. While northern blacks also encountered plenty of prejudice and discrimination, they at least had an elementary sense of personal security and were treated with far more respect than their southern counterparts.[1]

Around the middle of the twentieth century, there were hints that racial justice would become the trend of America’s future from border to border. Membership in the NAACP increased tenfold during World War II,[2]reflecting a growing awareness—among both blacks and whites—of the urgent need for reform. Two years after the war’s end, Jackie Robinson broke major league baseball’s color bar. A year later, President Harry Truman announced that segregation would be eliminated from the nation’s armed forces. Truman also appointed blacks to numerous government posts in his administration. Many whites, particularly in the South, were reluctant to accept black Americans’ ever-growing inclusion in once exclusively-white realms. Nevertheless, white racial attitudes were gradually but indisputably evolving in every region of the country. Consider the following:
In 1942, opinion polls found that the proportion of whites favoring school integration was just 30 percent, and a paltry 2 percent in the South. By 1956, these figures had grown to 49 percent and 15 percent, and by 1963 they stood at 62 percent and 31 percent.[3]
In 1942, about 44 percent of all whites, and only 4 percent ofsouthern whites, favored the racial integration of passengers on streetcars and buses. By 1956, these numbers had swelled to 60 percent and 27 percent, and in 1963 they reached 79 percent and 52 percent.[4]
In 1942, scarcely 35 percent of whites nationwide, and 12 percent of whites in the South, were comfortable having a black person of the same income and education move onto their block. By 1956, the corresponding figures had grown to 51 percent and 38 percent, and in 1963 they stood at 64 percent and 51 percent.[5]
Between 1942 and 1956, the proportion of all whites who viewed blacks as their intellectual equals rose from 41 percent to 77 percent; in the South the shift was from about 21 percent to 59 percent.[6]
Between 1944 and 1963, the overall proportion of whites who felt that blacks “should have as good a chance as white people to get any kind of job” doubled, from 42 percent to 83 percent.[7]

Clearly, from the World War II era through the early 1960s white Americans’ racial attitudes grew decidedly more enlightened. This was reflected not only in polls, but also in the fact that Lyndon Johnson, when contemplating a possible run for the presidency in 1960, publicly pushed for the passage of new civil rights legislation—well aware that no longer could a candidate perceived to have segregationist ideals win a national election in the United States.[8] In short, the steady and inexorable transformation of white attitudes toward blacks had set the stage for the golden years of a civil rights movement that would make powerful appeals to America’s conscience. In December 1956, after a court order officially desegregating Montgomery, Alabama’s buses took effect in response to the boycotts inspired by the famous Rosa Parks incident, Martin Luther King, Jr. declared: “There is a new Negro in the South, with a new sense of dignity and destiny.”[9]

In 1956, in large part because of King’s charismatic presence and gifted oratory, media coverage of racial issues grew to unprecedented levels. Time,Life, and Newsweek tripled their coverage of civil rights topics that year.[10]Civil rights reform was on America’s mind, as evidenced by a massive wave of demonstrations in the late 1950s and early 1960s. These rallies were led by such organizations as the NAACP, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the newly formed Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).[11]Boycotts, sit-ins, voter-registration drives, and protest marches spread like wildfire across the American South. In 1960 alone, some 70,000 students staged sit-ins in about 100 southern cities, occupying seats in such traditionally segregated facilities as lunch counters, restaurants, and libraries. And the media took notice. Whereas during 1959 The New York Times had given coverage to just 10 civil rights demonstrations in the entire country, in 1960 that figure grew to 414.[12]

Over a ten-week span in mid-1963, some 758 civil rights demonstrations took place in 186 American cities, with many white participants. The summer of 1963 alone saw 50 southern cities agree to desegregate their public facilities.[13] Without a doubt, the psychological transformation that civil rights leaders had hoped for was well underway.

Because he recognized the unmistakably evolving racial attitudes of white Americans, Dr. King based his appeals for racial justice on the increasingly self-evident premise that it was morally imperative. Committed to helping perpetuate the remarkable social and economic gains that blacks had made during the 1940s and 1950s, King foresaw an America where one day racial unity would render segregation nothing more than a distant, unhappy memory. And indeed the continuing evolution of white attitudes during subsequent decades has demonstrated beyond any doubt that King’s confidence in that vision was well founded. Virtually all contemporary polls of white Americans show that well over 90 percent now favor integrated schools and public accommodations; that almost all oppose employment discrimination against members of any race or ethnicity;[14] that nearly 90 percent approve of interracial marriage;[15] and that more than 90 percent would be willing to vote for a black presidential candidate.[16]

But even as such major attitudinal changes were occurring, key positions in the civil rights movement’s leadership were being claimed by a cadre of anti-American leftists who uniformly characterized the United States as a veritable snake pit of racist vipers. In the names of “social justice” and “liberalism,” they pledged to defend blacks from whites, whom they depicted uniformly as reactionaries intent on restoring Jim Crow. White America, they explained, was racist to its rotten, capitalist core, and the only solution would be to revolt against its traditions, its values, and its institutions. Their assertion that American society was irredeemable, and that nothing short of a revolutionary transformation could rectify the nation’s moral inadequacies, became the dominant vision of the new civil rights movement. Among the notable figures in this development were Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, and their Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and theirBlack Panther Party; and Malcolm X and his Nation of Islam. They preached Black Power, racial hatred, and violent revolution against a satanic white America.

In a related development, the 1960s saw the emergence of a hateful, anti-white creed known as black liberation theology, whose foremost promoter was the Rev. James Cone. Cone’s views served to lend the Black Power Movement’s radicalism the implied legitimacy of a spiritual and theological framework. Claiming that “black values” were superior to American values, Cone’s writings posited a black Jesus who would lead his African American disciples in rebellion against an oppressive United States. “This country was founded for whites, and everything that has happened in it has emerged from the white perspective,” Cone wrote. “What we need is the destruction of whiteness, which is the source of human misery in the world.”[17]

Cone characterized white society as the antichrist, and the white church as an institution that was racist in toto. Thus he posited “a desperate need for a black theology, a theology whose sole purpose is to apply the freeing power of the gospel to black people under white oppression.”[18] In his landmark bookBlack Theology and Black Power, Cone wrote: “All white men are responsible for white oppression.... Theologically, Malcolm X was not far wrong when he called the white man ‘the devil.’”[19] In that same volume, Cone penned these sentiments about universal black goodness and white evil: “Whiteness, as revealed in the history of America, is the expression of what is wrong with man. It is a symbol of man’s depravity. God cannot be white even though white churches have portrayed him as white…. The coming of Christ means … destroying the white devil in us.”[20]

In his book A Black Theology of Liberation, Cone advanced the notion of a deity that sided with blacks, and against whites: “Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the Black community. If God is not for us and against White people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him. The task of Black theology is to kill Gods who do not belong to the Black community ... Black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy.”[21]

During the same period, there emerged in America a New Left movement that despised the country and everything for which it stood. As a logical outgrowth of this hatred, the New Left sought to create a new socialist order—for which a prerequisite would be to wipe clean the slate of the old order.

Toward this end, the left initiated a campaign to invert the nation’s power hierarchy, i.e. to help blacks unseat whites as the “privileged” race of a new social order. The pursuit of this objective required the left to eschew Dr. King’s dream of a color-blind society, which it did. As Dinesh D’Souza observed in 1995, “It is no exaggeration to say that a rejection of [King’s’ vision] of a regime in which we are judged solely based on the content of our character is a virtual job qualification for leadership in the civil rights movement today.”[22]Boston University law professor Andrew Kull concurred that “the color-blind consensus, so long in forming, was abandoned with surprising rapidity.”[23]

A few examples will serve to illustrate just how far from King’s ideals some of today’s leading activists and leftist scholars have strayed: …

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