Cop Under Fire

by David Clarke

  Your self-worth has to be based on more than trends, popularity, or other people’s opinions.

  A lack of self-worth is one of the most pressing problems in the inner cities today. Note that I didn’t say “self-confidence.” I think we might have way too much of that. (Did you know that social scientists have determined that incarcerated prisoners have the most self-confidence of any other group? The worlds tells us that self-confidence will solve a host of problems. But the prisoners, so full of it, tell a different tale.) Self-confidence just isn’t enough.

  Politically Orphaned

  I am a man of God. I always carry a prayer book, I keep a Bible in my truck, and I pray every day. I certainly won’t let raving idiots typing out diatribes in their mothers’ basements affect the way I view myself. Hate mail like this happens so regularly that I pay little attention to it. I’m sharing a couple of these e-mails so you can more adequately understand what it’s like to be a black conservative in America today.

  Here’s another:

  You are the definition of an apologist and a House negro. Coons like yourself are the reason the black race is in the position we are presently. I feel so sorry for the blacks in your county. They don’t stand a chance against police misconduct. You, sir, are a Grade A piece of … When you are laid to rest, I hope your soul burns in the bottom pits of hell.

  Most people assume being a black American conservative is like being any other conservative. After all, we believe in limited government and low taxes through a restrained federal bureaucracy; we believe the Constitution protects individuals, not groups; we believe a strong national defense and safe streets are critical to liberty, freedom, and an orderly society; we believe in states’ rights; and we frequently believe in a Higher Power.

  That, however, is where the similarities end.

  To be a black conservative in America is to be orphaned personally and politically by the Left. That’s because the Left wants us to be set apart, be pushed out of the nest, or perhaps earn our own entry in the Guinness Book of World Records … right next to the lady with the largest collection of garden gnomes or the world’s fattest twins. We are—they would have you believe—abnormal. Even “traitors to our race,” as my admirer above mentioned. We could accurately be labeled as “independent thinkers,” since we’re not taking our marching orders from anyone but ourselves. Instead, we’re called “Uncle Toms” and “sellouts.” Oh, and everything we do or say—without exception—is attributed to us trying to gain acceptance from white conservatives.

  As if we aren’t capable of independent thought.

  Being black and conservative is such an odd combination that we need a new classification. Don’t believe me? Take a look around the world of politics. Sarah Palin is not a “female conservative.” She’s just “conservative.” Rush Limbaugh is not a “white male conservative.” He’s just “conservative.” But Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Dr. Ben Carson, economist Thomas Sowell, four-star general Colin Powell, and former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice belong to a rare class. They belong to a special category of people so unique that their oddity can’t be contained in one word. These people are never described simply as “conservatives.” They are “black conservatives”—no matter what else they accomplish with their lives. By adding the descriptor “black,” the Left wants you to begin to think of the phrase “black conservatives” as an oxymoron … words that are apparently contradictory appearing together: “jumbo shrimp,” “pretty ugly,” “living dead.”

  That’s because the Left demands black conservatives’ political and personal beliefs become their cultural identity. Did you know that Clarence Thomas was once associated with the Black Panthers? Yep. But the moment he began to think more conservatively, he became a traitor to his race for not being “black enough.” Got it? Here’s a helpful guide:

  Blackness ≠ having black skin.

  Blackness = swallowing Democrat policies whole.

  You can be called “black,” even if you’re white. That’s how important the Left believes regurgitating Democrat talking points is. We saw this in 1998 when Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison (who’s black) called Bill Clinton (who’s white) the “first black president.” Why on earth would she describe him that way? She explained: “Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.” In other words, Clinton was the first “black president” because of a string of negative racial stereotypes. (Imagine for one second the racial hysteria that would’ve ensued had Rush Limbaugh called Clinton “black” based on the fact that he liked to eat cheap food and was poor.)

  My point is this: “blackness” is a status the Left awards and revokes.

  Or at least, phony self-serving plantation gate-keeping liberals try to award and revoke it.

  They go after those who don’t walk lockstep with them, seeing them as runaway slaves. The resulting smear campaign is a modern metaphorical lynching.

  Which other ethnic group endures this politically?

  None.

  My Badge of Honor

  But here’s a message to “a member of the African American community” and others who try to intimidate me: I don’t care what you think, so your approval or rejection doesn’t matter to me. As I mentioned, I’m not defined by your opinion or my popularity. Because my identity rests in God alone, you can’t touch me.

  My faith in God also allows me to speak the truth, so get ready for it. The cultural gate keepers of blackness—people like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton—have ruined more black minds with their support of a culture of dependency than crack cocaine and whiskey. They have convinced too many blacks that perpetual victimhood is the only source of their power. They’ve made careers out of creating and prolonging turmoil between blacks and whites, which keeps blacks enslaved in resentment. They could criticize me all day every day—and some do!—and their ill-conceived, petty insults are a badge of honor. The only membership card that has any value to me is the one that guarantees me all the rights and privileges afforded by the US Constitution as a citizen of the United States. My rights are inalienable, irrevocable.

  And I plan to use every last one of them.

  This book is my effort to exercise my First Amendment right to free speech. No matter how many hate-filled, racist e-mails I receive, I will never shut up. I want my fellow black brothers and sisters to start thinking for themselves, to break free from the shackles that white liberals have placed on them. It’s time to shake things up. The black vote has been the most reliably Democratic voting bloc for the past thirty years, so much so that the Democratic Party takes us for granted.

  Here are the rather shocking numbers. In 1976, 83 percent of black voters cast their vote for Jimmy Carter; in 1980, that percentage was repeated. In 1984, Walter Mondale got 91 percent of black voters’ ballots; in 1988, Michael Dukakis received 89 percent; in 1992, Clinton got 83 percent and then 84 percent four years later. Al Gore got 90 percent in 2000; John Kerry got 88 percent in 2004. Then, when blacks had the chance to vote for the first (actually) black candidate, they came out in droves. In 2008 and 2012, blacks voted for Barack Obama 95 percent and 93 percent, respectively.1

  What other demographic votes that way and higher every election cycle? None do. That means Democrat politicians no longer even have to try to win our votes. They had us as at hello, and they know it. ESPN personality Stephen A. Smith (who’s black) believes this high level of loyalty to Democrats is damaging to blacks. Here’s what he told a crowd at Vanderbilt University:

  What I dream is that for one election, just one, every black person in America vote Republican … Black folks in America are telling one party, “We don’t [care] about you.” They’re telling the other party, “You’ve got our vote.” Therefore, you have labeled yourself “disenfranchised” because one party knows they’ve got you under their thumb. The other party knows they’ll never get you and no
body comes to address your interest.2

  While I applaud Smith’s idea of shocking the Democratic Party by essentially shopping around politically, we need more than a one-election gimmick. We need to recognize that the destructive liberal ideology of Democrats has destroyed the black family, destroyed black motivation, destroyed the once strong black work ethic, and estranged black men from involvement in their children’s lives. We need to force the members of the Democratic Party to come to terms with what they’ve done—and continue to do—to their most loyal friends.

  Sadly, this damage was predicted and could’ve been prevented.

  Turns Out Families Do Matter

  Here’s what happened five decades ago that could’ve made the difference. In the mid-1960s, Lyndon B. Johnson declared an “unconditional war” on poverty. In his 1964 State of the Union, he said, “Our aim is not only to relieve the symptoms of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it.”

  Sounds good, right?

  Johnson asked Daniel Patrick Moynihan—who, at the time, was assistant secretary of labor—to help develop programs that could assist in poverty reduction in inner cities.

  Moynihan noticed a very unusual pattern as he sorted through the statistics relating to poor people. In the past, black male unemployment and welfare enrollment always went together in a predictable pattern. If unemployment went up, welfare enrollment went up. People assumed that if a black male had a job, the women and children in his household would reap the financial benefits as well. As Moynihan reviewed the charts, however, he realized this correlation no longer existed. Even as more and more black men landed jobs, more and more black women enrolled in welfare.

  That was a real head scratcher. Moynihan and his team dived headfirst into the numbers and learned, first, that the number of single-parent families was growing in the ghetto. No one could argue that. As more and more men left their families—creating matriarchal families—males became alienated.

  Moynihan reported that single moms frequently got pregnant by multiple partners and rarely managed to “shape their children’s character and ability” in ways that allowed them to become prosperous citizens.

  Families, he said, “shape their children’s character and ability. By and large, adult conduct in society is learned as a child.” When the family unit is broken, the children learn bad behavior from the adults: not to finish school, not to remain unemployed, not to take care of children they had fathered, and not to obey the law. By living with married parents, kids learn common beneficial virtues that encourage looking beyond just surviving the moment. Husbands and wives who were committed to each other planned for the future, saved money, and helped their children plan for their futures.

  In other words, families matter. It was a chilling realization as the family in the inner cities dwindled. Kay S. Hymowitz wrote about the Moynihan report, “Separate and unequal families, in other words, meant that blacks would have their liberty, but that they would be strangers to equality. Hence Moynihan’s conclusion: ‘a national effort towards the problems of Negro Americans must be directed towards the question of family structure.’”3

  Miraculously, President Johnson took to heart this research. In a speech to Howard University, he used language from Moynihan’s unpublished report by saying it was time for “the next and more profound stage of the battle for civil rights.” He said “the breakdown of the Negro family structure” was “the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice and present prejudice.” He added, “When the family collapses, it is the children that are usually damaged. When it happens on a massive scale, the community itself is crippled.”

  How did America respond?

  In August 1965, the Moynihan report was leaked to Newsweek. It just so happened that a few days after the magazine ran the story, the national conversation on race would change perhaps forever. On August 11, a Los Angeles black woman was pulled over by a white policeman for suspicion of driving while intoxicated. The crowds who’d gathered to watch the interaction broke into violence. Six days of riots resulted in thirty-four deaths, more than one thousand injured people, $40 million worth of property damage, and nearly four thousand arrests.

  The riots, which took place in a poor black neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles called Watts, perplexed Americans. Why would black people burn down their own community? As the violence unfolded on their television screens, Americans were less ready to accept Moynihan’s explanation of life in the ghetto. They wondered whether President Johnson was trying to explain away the riots with this report. The civil rights leaders weren’t buying the results of the report either. They wanted to portray the riots as the result of white injustice and prejudice, not the systematic breakdown of the family.

  The executive director of the National Urban League strongly spoke out against Moynihan’s report. Family is a “peripheral issue. The problem is discrimination,” he said. The NAACP published criticism of the report, saying it was a “highly sophomoric treatment of illegitimacy.” Blacks were no more “promiscuous” than their wealthier white counterparts, who had greater access to contraception, abortion, and adoption. But the biggest criticism, the one that stuck, was this: Moynihan’s report “blamed the victim.”

  No one, of course, wants to “blame the victim.”

  After the poor reception of the Moynihan report, Johnson changed course, creating government programs to help subsidize the lives of poor Americans at great cost. Even though he created welfare, Medicaid, and food stamp programs to help eradicate poverty, his programs had the opposite effect.

  Here’s why.

  Imagine that you were a single mom getting benefits from the federal government. You’d get more money by being single than by having a husband who managed to hold down a job. If you got married, the need-based benefits would go down drastically. Single moms received fewer services if their family’s income rose, so they (quite rationally) made the decision to keep the federal government’s provisions. That marginalized black unwed fathers, making them feel less than useless. Also, it separated marriage from children. In the past, the old playground taunt was more or less sequentially true: First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes so-and-so with a baby carriage. With the new programs, mothers were less likely to marry the fathers of their children so they could keep the federal benefits.

  The Heritage Foundation put it this way:

  The War on Poverty crippled marriage in low-income communities. As means-tested benefits were expanded, welfare began to serve as a substitute for a husband in the home, eroding marriage among lower-income Americans. In addition, the welfare system actively penalized low-income couples who did marry by eliminating or substantially reducing benefits. As husbands left the home, the need for more welfare to support single mothers increased. The War on Poverty created a destructive feedback loop: Welfare promoted the decline of marriage, which generated the need for more welfare.

  Today, unwed childbearing and the resulting growth of single-parent homes is the most important cause of official child poverty. If poor women who give birth outside of marriage were married to the fathers of their children, two-thirds would immediately be lifted out of official poverty and into self-sufficiency.4

  The liberal War on Poverty turned out to be basically a declaration of war on the black family. As the government expanded, it gave handouts that discouraged self-improvement, employment, and marriage.

  Even though Johnson described his War on Poverty as an “investment” that would make “taxpayers out of taxeaters”5 and “return its cost manifold to the entire economy,” it didn’t turn out that way.

  Project 21’s Derryck Green wrote about the effect of Johnson’s War on Poverty on black Americans:

  The disastrous effects of the government’s management of anti-poverty initiatives are recognizable across racial lines, but the destruction is particularly evident in the black community. It effectively subsidized the dissolution of the black family by rendering the black m
an’s role as a husband and a father irrelevant, invisible and—more specifically—disposable. The result has been several generations of blacks born into broken homes and broken communities experiencing social, moral and economic chaos. It fosters an inescapable dependency that primarily, and oftentimes solely, relies on government to sustain livelihoods.6

  Robert Rector, writing in the Wall Street Journal, called Johnson’s War on Poverty a catastrophe:

  The federal government currently runs more than 80 means-tested welfare programs that provide cash, food, housing, medical care and targeted social services to poor and low-income Americans. Government spent $916 billion on these programs in 2012 alone, and roughly 100 million Americans received aid from at least one of them, at an average cost of $9,000 per recipient. (That figure doesn’t include Social Security or Medicare benefits.) Federal and state welfare spending, adjusted for inflation, is 16 times greater than it was in 1964. If converted to cash, current means-tested spending is five times the amount needed to eliminate all official poverty in the U.S.

  LBJ promised that the war on poverty would be an “investment” that would “return its cost manifold to the entire economy.” But the country has invested $20.7 trillion in 2011 dollars over the past 50 years. What does America have to show for its investment? Apparently, almost nothing: The official poverty rate persists with little improvement.7

  Twenty-eight months after the report was published, Moynihan could see that LBJ had missed an opportunity to really address the underlying issues. He stated, “It appears that the nation may be in the process of reproducing the tragic events of the Reconstruction, giving to Negroes the forms of legal equality, but withholding the economic and political resources which are the bases of social equality.”8