No, there isn’t

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?