Tuesday, 18 March 2008

Damn Ungrateful Negroes!

Or so says Tampa Bay Times writer Bill Maxwell. In his column, he claims that African Americans have betrayed poor Hillary Clinton in the worst way.

Says Maxwell:

Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton should be leery of ever trusting the word of another black person, especially the word of elected officials, celebrities and other elites. She most certainly should never again trust the word of black preachers.

Too many blacks have betrayed Clinton. They have been disloyal. They have lied to her, many to her face.


Disloyal? This really rings of some house-slave mentality to me - that blacks should be 'loyal' to a kindly white authority figure. But... there's more!

Whenever members of the Congressional Black Caucus needed extra clout to help them with black-related legislation, they turned to Clinton. When black leaders needed a powerful voice to add weight to a symbolic gesture, such as the commemoration of a civil rights cause or an event, they called Clinton. When they needed a keynote speaker for this or that gala, they called Clinton.

She had no way of knowing that reality would be turned on its head and that all of her good deeds and generosity would be forgotten and that many blacks would one day paint her as their enemy. She misjudged her supporters as did the character in Shakespeare's play Henry VI, who said: "In thy face I see the map of honor, truth, and loyalty."

What Clinton saw was the face of Judas and a map of dishonor, duplicity and betrayal. The ugly irony of the betrayal is that Clinton is the same as she always was. She has not changed. All of the votes she cast for urban policies that aided blacks remain in the Congressional Record. That has not changed.


Wow. And here I thought American democracy was mature enough that people were past the idea that voters should ever be beholden to a politician. To be honest, that bit gave me a nasty flashback to some of the sycophantic politics I saw when I was studying in my 'other island' Jamaica, where people were so blindly beholden to a certain political party that they could not even see to look out for their own best interests. The politicians could take the worst kind of advantage of them and they would still be 'PNP/Labourite til mi dead'.

Is Mr. Maxwell serious? Frankly, African Americans shoulda 'dash way' the Clintons long time. For every thing he can list that the Clintons 'did for blacks' there are dreadful things like the disparity in crack/cocaine sentencing and so-called welfare reform that damaged the black community.

Moreover this idea that black people should be grateful to white people for defending their BASIC HUMAN RIGHTS drives me up a WALL! Do we really think so little of ourselves that we feel we need to be grateful to white people for just acknowledging that we are human and deserve to be treated as such? That as long as a white person does not express overt hostility for us, that they are our friend? Is that all we require? No-one dares suggest that the Jews should be 'grateful' to the Germans, even though the Germans have spent the last half-century or so since their defeat in WWII apologising, making reparations and generally self-flagellating themselves over the Holocaust - on a level that whites in the West whose ancestors were responsible for slavery and colonialism and Jim Crow and segregation and who have themselves benefited directly from these things, will NEVER do. Yet no-one tells Jews they should be grateful for these offerings by the Germans - because we know it is puny in comparison to the magnitude of what has gone.

Whew...

Ok then... Plus Maxwell conveniently ignores that the Clinton campaign had substantial black support (she LED Obama handily amongst blacks until January - it was WHITE folks who were the bulwark of his initial support and remain so) until they decided to indulge in nasty race-baiting that even offended their fellow whites. THAT is when blacks 'betrayed' Clinton - the only pity is that it took them so long!

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