*(Via the Washington Post) – The best black Republican sales pitch I ever heard was from Niger Innis, then the spokesman for the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE, the civil rights-era organization led by his father, Roy Innis. The GOP “is not for rich people,” he said during our conversation at the 2011 Conservative Political Action Conference, “It’s for people who want to be rich.”
There are, of course, plenty of working-class Republicans, and plenty of rich black Democrats, but it was a clever way to make a point: Striving black Americans ought to reconsider what the GOP has to offer.
The worst black Republican sales pitch is the one Kanye West just fell for: Turning Point USA spokeswoman Candace Owens’s one-woman revival of the trope that black Americans are slaves on the Democratic Party plantation. It’s shopworn, defies logic, and mainly highlights the shallow politics of those who subscribe to it.
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It took off in the tea party era. There was Deneen Borelli’s “Blacklash: How Obama and the Left Are Driving Americans to the Government Plantation”; Star Parker’s “Uncle Sam’s Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America’s Poor and What We can Do About It”; and the Rev. C.L. Bryant’s film “Runaway Slave.” Back then, he told me, “Government dependency is the plantation that Democrats support.” Then-gadfly, now-Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson referred to Obamacare as the “worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery” — a related form of hyperbole meant to make a slightly different point.
But as the Obama era wound down and the Trump era ramped up, the pejorative characterization lost something. Maybe the absence of a black president took some of the sting out of it; maybe it couldn’t be squared with President-elect Donald Trump’s promise to “take care of everybody” when it came to health care or his repeated promises to bring American jobs back from overseas, rather than take the approach that his Republican predecessors did — encouraging Americans to compete.
In any case, we were almost rid of a riff that essentially cast black voters as dupes.
Get the rest of this fascinating essay by David Swerdlick at the Washington Post.
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