- Originally published in The Courier-Journal February 3, 2005 Thursday metro Met Edition
Copyright 2005 The Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY)
By: BAYE BETTY WINSTON
President
Bush's philosophy of "you're either with me or against me" may be a
real problem for some black conservatives. Not even they can buy
everything that the President and his administration are selling.
I don't know many African Americans
who oppose a decent minimum wage or who support military pre-emption. I
don't know many black preachers whose congregations don't include more
than a few tithers who wouldn't be able to tap the plate were there no
Head Start, no subsidized housing or no Medicaid.
While
the President may cling to the notion that he's a uniter, his agenda
for black America couldn't be more clear - divide and conquer. We saw
it last week when Bush met separately with different groups of presumed
African-American leaders.
To
make absolutely sure there'd be no chance of these good colored people
bumping into one another on the way in or out, the meetings were held
on different days.
Bush met first with friendly African Americans, including certain preachers and business leaders.
The next day, he met with the Congressional Black Caucus, whose 43 members are all elected and all Democrats.
It's
no secret that Bush deliberately put the CBC out to pasture. During his
first term, he met with the elected black officials only twice, and
once was in an unscheduled session that reportedly happened because CBC
members refused to leave the building without seeing the President face
to face.
So there's a lot of bitterness
there, and CBC members haven't hesitated to criticize many of Bush's
judicial nominees, his opposition to affirmative action and his budget cuts to many federally funded social programs.
This bitterness, which extends to the traditional civil rights
community as well, has opened the door for other African Americans to
slip in and gain favor with the President and the GOP.
Many are disenchanted with Democrats and the liberal policies that they
believe have robbed African Americans of the boot-strap values that
helped earlier generations rise despite serious obstacles.
Some
blacks in Bush's coalition say they're just being strategic. It doesn't
benefit black Americans to put all their political eggs in one basket.
The
black preachers the President courts say that he shares their moral
values; they also oppose gay marriage and abortion rights.
And there are also, I have no doubt, hustlers in the group - African
Americans with no track record of helping their brothers and sisters
and who are in politics just for the money.
In his meeting with the friendly African Americans,
Bush said that their stake in helping him remake Social Security,
including especially having younger workers divert some of their
contributions to personal investment accounts, is that black people
on average don't live as long as whites and so are short-changed by the
current system. They put more in than they can expect to get out.
In
other words, Bush expects that even 50 and 75 years from now black
Americans will still be dying at unconscionably earlier ages than
whites.
What that says to me is that
rather than allowing themselves to be divided and conquered in separate
meetings with Big Daddy in the White House, African Americans would get
a lot more mileage out of meeting with one another and developing
strategies that will prove the President wrong.
If the best that African Americans
can look forward to in 50 or 75 years is more of the same, I say a pox
on all our houses - black Republicans and black Democrats, black
conservatives and black liberals. For all will be guilty of badly
failing our people.
I'm crazy enough to hope that somewhere, serious African Americans
are getting together quietly. If courageous slaves had enough sense to
get together in secret to plot their freedom, surely all these African Americans
strutting around today bragging about how they've made it - "Look Mom,
I'm at the White House!" - ought to be able to do the same.
Betty Winston Baye's columns appear Thursdays. Read them online at
www.courier-journal.com.