Blackout

by Candace Owens

  A 2018 study by the Economic Policy Institute was commissioned as a follow-up to a similar study conducted some fifty years earlier. The results offered insight into the condition of black America today, compared to the black America of Lyndon B. Johnson’s time:

  1) African Americans today are much better educated than they were in 1968 but still lag behind whites in overall educational attainment.

  2) African Americans are 2.5 times as likely to be in poverty as whites, and the median white family has almost 10 times as much wealth as the median black family.

  3) With respect to homeownership, unemployment, and incarceration, conditions for black Americans have either failed to improve relative to whites or have worsened.

  4) In 2017 the black unemployment rate was 7.5 percent, up from 6.7 percent in 1968, and is still roughly twice the white unemployment rate.

  5) In 2015, the black homeownership rate was just over 40 percent, virtually unchanged since 1968, and trailing a full 30 points behind the white homeownership rate, which saw modest gains over the same period.

  6) The share of African Americans in prison or jail almost tripled between 1968 and 2016 and is currently more than six times the white incarceration rate.

  In short, despite overwhelmingly casting our votes for Democrat political candidates, disparities between white Americans and black Americans still exist and across many categories have worsened. Certainly no sane person would make the argument that America has become a more racist country since the 1960s, which gives way to the obvious truth that these disparities have little do with systemic oppressions. But obvious truths have never been the way of the Democrat Party.

  Like FDR and LBJ before them, today’s Democrat leaders establish their bases by theatrically harping on the struggles of minorities. They lament the injustice of our circumstances, with an all-too-familiar silver-lined promise that a vote for them will surely turn things around. Of course, the success of this repeat broken-promise strategy is fueled by our acceptance of their victim narrative. And because victims cannot also be victors, the end result is a paradoxical nightmare: an endless cycle of voting for necessary change, while refusing to change the way in which we vote, necessarily.

  * * *

  “What the hell do you have to lose?” Donald Trump’s words were direct and precise, and as I watched him from my television screen in his August 19, 2016, campaign stop in Dimondale, Michigan, I could not help but nod in agreement. He was emphatic as he implored blacks to consider voting for him in the upcoming presidential election. “You’re living in poverty; your schools are no good,” he said. “You have no jobs; 58 percent of your youth is unemployed.”

  In his blunt, matter-of-fact way, Trump called attention to a reality that had gone unspoken for far too long: While Democrats have long acknowledged our struggles and the crimes enacted against us, they have done little to provide actual remedies or prepare us for a future that does not center on our brokenness. Trump’s speech was a call to action for anyone who dared to abandon the status quo in favor of real change. This moment—Trump’s simple question—forever altered me. I instantly felt a tide of urgency, because deep down I knew the answer to his question. Deep down we all know the answer to his question.

  We now know that Trump was, indeed, elected as the forty-fifth president of the United States, just as we also know that the majority of the black vote went to his Democrat opponent, Hillary Clinton. What has transpired since then has been a social fracturing like nothing we have ever seen in this country. Hard lines have been drawn in the sand, and blacks have, predictably, stood on the left side of them, but as we approach the 2020 election, I am asking the black community—I am asking you, reader—to consider the realities of our current economic state, the condition of our schools and neighborhoods, the number of our young men who are incarcerated.

  The Democrat Party teaches that more law, more government, more state is the answer—but they are wrong. We cannot rely upon a hopelessly inefficient and burdensome government to fix what we ourselves refuse to do.

  My challenge to every American is simple: reject the Left’s victim narrative and do it yourself. Because we will never realize the true potential that this incredible country has to offer—in the land of the free and the home of the brave—if we continue to be shackled by the great myth of government deliverance.

  Throughout the rest of this book, I will detail just why I believe the Democrat Party’s policies have led to the erosion of the black community by fostering a persistent victim mentality. I will explain how a radicalized push for feminism is both emasculating and criminalizing men who are needed to lead strong families, and I will reveal the fallacy of socialism, in its inherent argument for the very same government that crippled black America in the first place. Lastly, I will expose the inefficiency of the left-leaning public education system and tackle the media’s role in the collective brainwashing of our youth.

  And then I will ask again: What do you have to lose?

  Because I believe the answer is everything, if we do not blackout from this toxic, illiberal, progressive agenda, which has precipitated little more than helplessness.

  1 ON CONSERVATISM

  There has been a lot of conjecture about how I became the person I am today—why I believe what I believe, what drives the energy that so deeply commits me to the truth. The answer is and will forever be my grandparents.

  I was nine years old when my paternal grandfather showed up at my childhood home and upended my life as I knew it. Up to that point, it was the custom for my three siblings and me to visit my grandparents’ home on the weekends. They lived in a middle-class neighborhood in Stamford, Connecticut, in a home that was well-kept and comfortable. We loved our weekend visits because they had a yard that we could run around and play in, and where my grandfather could teach us to ride bikes down their long driveway. It was nothing like our home. As a family of six, we lived across town in a small, three-bedroom apartment within a run-down, roach-infested building.

  Living among a cluster of impoverished residents meant that fistfights, police visits, and drama were commonplace. I am told that this is what inspired my grandparents to insist that our entire family move in with them—a fear that their offspring might become that of their surroundings. And so in short order, we were whisked away from the instability of our neighborhood into an environment that would more properly fertilize our futures. In retrospect, this move across town was one of the greatest blessings of my life. It gave me my first real chance to choose something different. I didn’t know it at the time but it would come to represent my earliest introduction to conservatism.

  PLANTING THE SEEDS OF CONSERVATISM

  My grandfather was born in 1941 on a sharecropping farm in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Born into the segregated life of the Jim Crow South, his childhood was shaped by work and routine. He took on his first responsibilities when he was just five years old. It was his task to lay the farm’s tobacco out to dry in an attic. He tells me today that he would complete this task at the crack of dawn, before the blistering Carolina sun could make the prospect unbearable. He was one of twelve children, and everyone had a job to do.

  His father, my great-grandfather, was a notorious philanderer who would leave his wife and children intermittently, to live with his mistresses. His actions placed a further strain on his family financially, and pressure on his many sons, to step up and take responsibility. The burden forced my grandfather to become a man at a young age. In one instance, still just a young teenager himself, my grandfather decided to show up at the home of his father’s mistress. He there confronted his father, telling him that he needed to return home to his family, and take care of his responsibility.

  Watching his mother and siblings suffer from the dishonorable behavior of a man formed immutable elements of my grandfather’s character. He made the decision then that when the time came, he would become the man his father never was; one day, he would prioritize his family ab
ove all else. And indeed he would.

  It is necessary to know who my grandfather was in his day to understand who I am in mine. In the prism of our genetics, I am the light refraction of my grandfather’s spirit. My character, my work ethic, even my stubborn nature, are so closely embedded in him.

  There is no doubt that my grandfather experienced real racism in his childhood. In the 1940s segregated South, the domestic terrorism of Democrat Ku Klux Klansmen was part and parcel of the black American life. I should pause here to explain why I refer to them as the Democrats’ Klansmen, since in the elaborate rewriting of their own history, their party has attempted to dissociate themselves from the Ku Klux Klan.

  In the spring of 1866, just one year after the Civil War, a group of six Confederate war veterans met in the law office of Judge M. Thomas Jones and began the Ku Klux Klan. The group was dedicated to what would come to be defined as “the lost cause,” a postwar belief that the Confederacy’s purpose was heroic and just. They began menacing black Americans and their Republican allies locally in an effort to retain white supremacy. Later that same year, looking to raise the stakes of the Klan from a local club membership to a nationally recognized organization of influence, they elected their friend Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Democratic National delegate, to the senior position of KKK Grand Wizard. Author Jack Hurst said of Forrest, “As the Klan’s first national leader, he became the Lost Cause’s avenging angel, galvanizing a loose collection of boyish secret social clubs into a reactionary instrument of terror still feared today.” Under Forrest’s leadership, the Klan began a proper reign of terror that consisted of midnight parades, whippings, and murders. By 1868, less than two years after their inauguration, the Ku Klux Klan had infiltrated the Democrat Party’s campaign for the presidential reelection. Their efforts began in the spring, with Forrest taking meetings with racist whites throughout Atlanta to organize statewide Klan membership in Georgia. Shortly thereafter, Klansmen strategically murdered George Ashburn, a white man and Republican organizer. Forrest’s friend Frank Blair Jr. was nominated as the Democrat vice-presidential candidate, to support New York governor Horatio Seymour, whom they selected to be their presidential hopeful. Their campaign slogan was “Our Ticket, Our Motto, This Is a White Man’s Country; Let White Men Rule.” But despite their best efforts, Republican presidential nominee Ulysses S. Grant defeated Seymour and won the national election. That is not to say the Klan’s efforts were not somewhat successful. In fact, in the states where they murdered the most blacks, Georgia and Louisiana, Grant lost. Today, Democrats will make the claim that the Klan, although led by a Democrat delegate with the express purpose of winning them the upcoming election, was not, technically, established by their party. This is utter nonsense, born of nuance and doublespeak. The Klan was created to do their bidding, and led by their party leaders in their effort to do so.

  Fortunately, through rigorous policy and reforms, President Grant fundamentally annihilated the Klan, but some forty years later, they would experience what came to be known as their rebirth.

  In 1915, white men draped in bedsheets walked down Peachtree Street in Atlanta, firing their rifles in the air to celebrate the release of the silent film Birth of a Nation. The feature-length production told the story of the brave sacrifices that the Confederate Klansmen had made to protect the South. The film was an adaptation of the book The Clansman, which romanticized and glorified the days of the Ku Klux Klan. The book was written by a man named Thomas Dixon Jr., a dear friend and classmate of incumbent Democrat president Woodrow Wilson. Wilson, himself a racist who began resegregating the federal workforce while in office, made the extraordinary decision to screen the film in the White House. With his patronage, the film became a blockbuster success. It made no difference that the film distorted blacks as rapist villains and whites as their oppressed victims; merchandisers began selling Klan hats and robes. The Klansmen had made a comeback, and it would take many decades before they would lose power again.

  It was this “rebirthed” Klan that my grandfather was made to contend with in his youth. What is remarkable, though, is the manner in which my grandfather recounts his dealings with them. My grandfather tells me that Klansmen did not like my great-grandfather. At night, the riders would visit their home and spray bullets through the window. My grandfather says the children would run to the back of home and hide under the bed. “And my daddy would grab the shotgun and shoot back at them boys,” he recalls. Though it would be wrong to state that he looks back upon these moments fondly, it is correct to say that he reflects upon them with pride. Not with bitterness, or anger, but pride. I regard his referring to the Klansmen as “boys” as a Freudian slip and a powerful degradation of their desired legacy. My grandfather’s memory renders them powerless against his father’s fearlessness. Is it not peculiar that those who lived through such evil can speak of those times from a position of such strength, while those who lived not a day of it choose to bemoan it with such cowardice?

  I often make the statement that liberalism is a symptom of remarkable privilege. In times of true injustice, no one debates gender pronouns and microaggressions. In times of real conflict, no one demands the government come take their guns. This was especially true for black Americans in the segregated South, during a time when engaging in any inappropriate behavior—hanging out in the streets past dark, public intoxication, using a facility not designated for your skin color—could amount to more than just embarrassment. It could amount to death. Conservatism then is about sense and survival. Leftism is the plaything of a society with too much time on its hands.

  My grandfather was sixteen years old when he took a trip up north to Connecticut. He met my grandmother, then phoned his father to say that he wouldn’t be coming back home. They married at seventeen years of age. Then, almost four decades later and after raising three children of their own, my three siblings and I moved into their home.

  Living with my grandparents was a bit of a culture shock. There were Bible studies every week, prayers before every meal, and more rules than I felt were necessary. Everything centered on the concept of respect and how even our smallest actions were manifestations of character. My grandfather awoke every morning at 4:00 a.m. to fix us a massive southern breakfast ahead of school. We had grits, eggs, bacon, and biscuits, and on special mornings, pancakes, too. Sometimes, in an early morning fog, I or one of my siblings would come down the stairs and silently sit at the dining table. Soon after, we’d discover that our grandfather had prepared a plate for everyone but us. If we’d openly inquire as to the slight, my grandfather would pretend he did not see or hear us. Only then would we remember our offense: we had not greeted him with “good morning.” As soon as we’d correct our mistake, my grandfather would look at us warmly, as though we’d just arrived into the room. “Well, hello, baby, how’d you sleep?” he’d say. His point was clear: it was disrespectful not to greet one another. Just one of his many rules.

  My grandfather expected my father and older brother to help out with the yard work. My sisters and I, however, were never required to do any such thing. Yard work was a man’s job. It was that simple. Instead, my sisters and I, all but a year a part, needed to focus on behaving like respectable young girls. My grandfather would hold doors for us, pull out chairs for us, put our jackets on for us ahead of Sunday service. They say youth is wasted on the young. How I wish I could go back and relish in how positively spoiled I was by my grandparents.

  That is not to say that we weren’t reprimanded. Our admonishments just came in a different form—and in my young mind, it was the worst form imaginable. There is one instance in particular that has stayed with me always, mainly because it’s the only time my grandfather made me cry. One night, I woke up a bit cold. In a slumber, I walked to the thermostat and cranked the heat as far up as it would go. When we awoke, the house was boiling. At breakfast that morning, my grandfather blessed the food and made a particular departure from his usual words. “Dear heavenly father,”
he began as he always did, “thank you for this food in which we are about to receive.” He then unexpectedly interjected, “Lord, please help Candace to realize she should not be messing with the heat in the middle of night…” At ten years old, I was positively convinced that my grandfather had a direct line with God almighty Himself. I sprang up from my seat before he could finish, sprinted to my bedroom, and burst into tears. I was embarrassed that my grandfather had discovered my infraction and positively mortified that he had taken the very drastic measure to report it to God. Could it not have been resolved within the lower-level court of family? Was it necessary for him to make an appeal to the supreme court of God? I was inconsolable. Later my grandfather apologized for upsetting me. Still, his point was clear: there was a hierarchy of authority in the household. And the biblical scripture of Genesis, “what is done in the dark, shall come to light,” had never rung more clear.

  At around the time that I entered high school, my parents moved us to another side of town. I wish I could say that I remained on the early path that my grandparents had laid before me, but like so many other young Americans, I was lured by a more “liberal” life. I wanted to be cool and liked and normal, so I slipped into a more secular existence that, with time, corroded my values. With my grandparents’ watchful gaze no longer a concern, I was free to live as I pleased. There were no more prayers, no more Bible verses, and in just a little time, I came to view my grandparents’ teachings as illustrations of my prior bondage.

  A SEASON OF DROUGHT

  Much has been whispered about the hate crime that I experienced in high school. Leftists use it as a “gotcha” point. Their less than extraordinary claim is that I “sued my school for racism,” thereby proving that racism is real and I am only pretending that it isn’t, for profit. My favorite part of this narrative is that it’s always presented as an exposé—we discovered something that Candace Owens doesn’t want you to know!