Last week, Sherrilyn Ifill, Maryland School of Law professor and Chairwoman of the U.S. Programs Board of George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, penned an op-ed for CNN entitled, “Why black voters reject [Mitt] Romney.”
In the article, Ifill states:
It’s not enough to say that blacks are voting for President Obama because he’s black and that racial solidarity trumps politics.
Ifill uses a NBC/Wall Street Journal poll taken early in the summer that put black support for Romney at 0% to back her claims of black hatred of the Romney/Ryan Republican ticket.
Maybe Ifill isn’t up to date on social media, because immediately following the release of that poll, #BlackConservativesforRomney exploded on Twitter.
Ifill continues:
One of the reasons African-American voters do not support Romney is that they see the Republican Party’s treatment of Obama, from the first weeks of his presidency, as an assault on a kind of racial collective dignity.
That is not fact–it is opinion. The thrust of Ifill’s argument is that black voters should support Obama because the Big Bad Republicans are picking on him.
Ifill uses John Sununu calling Obama “lazy,” Joe Wilson’s “you lie” moment at during Obama’s health care address to Congress in 2009, Arizona State University not bestowing an honorary title to Obama, a video of Tea Partiers apparently spitting on a U.S. Congressman (at least she had decency to add “apparently” to a charge that was never proven), a bumper sticker that read “Don’t Re-Nig,” and other such examples to prove that black solidarity is the only option.
My personal favorite: Ifill apparently refers to a well-known incident in which a Tea Party member brought a gun to a rally–but, like MSNBC, never mentions that he was black.
Ifill concludes:
Each of these affronts was directed at Obama–but was experienced viscerally and personally by millions of black voters.
And so, Ifill suggests, Blacks should vote based on perceived disrespect of Obama rather than the pain they feel in their own pocketbook.
Not once does she mention black unemployment, dropout rates, murder rates, divorce rates, abortion rates or any other actual political or social issue that might need to be addressed in the black community.
Nor does she mention what could be perceived as blatant disrespect from Obama to the black community–such as his “take off your slippers and put on your marching shoes” comment; doing a Midwest bus tour in 2011 and never stopping in any black communities; skipping the Bud Billiken parade on the South Side of Chicago to attend fundraisers on the same weekend that 23 people were shot on the streets where President Obama once organized; excusing idiotic scare tactics like Joe Biden’s “gonna put y’all back in chains,” not supporting the school voucher program in Washington, D.C. that would allow poor blacks to attend the same schools as his daughters; or turning his back on black pastors on the issue of gay marriage.
To quote Representative Emanuel Cleaver on the topic of black unemployment:
If (former President) Bill Clinton had been in the White House and had failed to address this problem, we probably would be marching on the White House.
Well, pro-life black groups like Alveda King’s Priests for Life have marched on Washington to stand up for the life of the unborn. Bishop E.W. Jackson has started the group Exodus Now (where I often speak) urging blacks to uphold the sanctity of marriage and to hold Democrats accountable for their platform.
In North Carolina, a state Obama won in 2008, efforts led by Kevin Daniels, President of the Frederick Douglass Foundation of North Carolina, have registered more black Republican voters than any time in that state’s history. Numerous black Conservative/Republican documentaries are also making their way across the country, including Runaway Slave and Fear of a Black Republican.
Not to mention the numerous black Tea Party speakers–Deneen Borelli, Marcus Lloyd, David Webb, Alfonzo Rachel, and Angela McGowan, to name a few–that care about limited government, fiscal sanity, and personal freedom.
In my opinion, black Leadership has lost all credibility in the Democratic Party. Because of liberal elites, black and white, Obama doesn’t have to actually produce results for the black community: the color of his skin is more important than the economic woes of a black community struggling with a 17% unemployment rate, broken families, a church besieged with conflicts of faith, and generational poverty.
Elitists like Ifill will step in and tell black America what is really important: Barack Obama.
But there are plenty of blacks who have protested President Obama because they care more about the future of this country than the ego of one man. These are the blacks that will vote for Romney/Ryan in 2012.
Photo credit: Gage Skidmore
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