The right-wing propaganda website breitbart.com published a piece
insisting that African-Americans, based on the endorsement of a few celebrities,
are leaving the “Democrat” party and throwing their support toward President
Donald Trump.
If you believe that one, I have a bridge in Brooklyn or
oceanfront property in Kansas to sell you. Trust me when I tell you that there
is no such groundswell of support; if there were it would have happened decades
ago — as conservatives were insisting even then. Indeed, on one internet forum in
the early 2000s one person I was conversing with said that the first person of
color to achieve the presidency would be a conservative Republican. I laughed.
With good reason, it turned out — because Barack Obama proved him wrong.
The reality is that Ronald Reagan, whom conservatives still
revere but who was always contemptuous of black activists, drove most of the
African-Americans out of the Republican Party; have you noticed that no
Republican presidential candidate has received double-digit support since 1980?
That reality likely chafes the psyche of the conservatives who have a hard time
accepting that folks actually challenge them, which most African-Americans, who
don’t fear them, do — which is why that piece ended up being published in the
first place.
The bigger issue, however, is that in such propaganda the
authors, as well as their supporters, don’t even talk to people they don’t
agree with, so when things don’t come to pass, well, they just double down and
shout louder.
But Trump’s overt racism and the conservatives’
unwillingness to address, let alone confront, it will keep the African-American
community on what they call the “Democratic plantation” (though in reality they’re
the ones playing “plantation politics”). They’ve said nothing about, among other
things, housing and employment discrimination lawsuits against him going back
decades, his broadsides against Mexicans and Muslims and remark about “sh__hole
countries,” his vile attacks on former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin
Kaepernick and other black NFL players protesting police brutality and his
failure to deliver an address during Martin Luther King Jr. Day last year. (And
during his lifetime, Dr. King displayed his own antipathy toward the political
right.)
Why would any black person in his right mind support someone who does these things?
