The Black Community’s Self-Destructive Embrace of Liberalism, by Kevin Martin

By embracing liberalism, black America became a broken shell of its former greatness. Miseducation, black-on-black crime, economic injustice, abortion, and the curse of corrupt and self-serving community leaders – the unhealthy relationship between blacks and liberalism has caused these problems to fester and remain largely unaddressed.

Founders of racist groups like the Ku Klux Klan would surely marvel at how many in the black community now welcome inequity and virtual segregation, perhaps realizing that their violent intimidation tactics weren’t necessary after all. By contrast, our ancestors, who were brought here by force and toiled in bondage, undoubtedly would be beside themselves with grief over this betrayal of their suffering. Equally appalled would be those who worked hard, risked, and sometimes lost their lives to ensure that legal discrimination, also known as “Jim Crow,” was forever abolished.

Back then, the fight was for individual equality and bringing America together as a whole. Today, pursuing advancement and assimilation earns one the derogatory accusation of “acting white.”

Too many of us are now content to park our children in failing government schools, and we seem too self-absorbed chasing the high-life – “bling,” overpriced and outlandishly stocked cribs and Lexuses and other expensive cars and SUVs purchased with inequitable loans – to worry about them. All this time, the blood, sweat, and tears of our angry children flow nightly in the streets.

How can we claim to believe, as the long-used slogan of the United Negro College Fund goes, that “a mind is a terrible thing to waste,” when our children are shackled to schools that are often little more than a government-run babysitting service? While our kids fall further behind, we eagerly support the politicians and policies that only promise to throw money at the problem and demand no accountability.

Along the same lines, how have liberal law enforcement policies helped defeat the scourge of black-on-black crime? Our neighborhoods are becoming war zones, yet police are seen more as objects of scorn and ridicule than respect and order.

We also seem largely unable and sometimes even unwilling to put our financial affairs in order and do what it takes to start businesses and improve our economic health. As a result, we end up working for – and resenting – people of other races with ambition who come to our neighborhoods and set up shop.

While my father used to say that the “most dangerous place for a black man is on the street,” I now contend it is in the womb. Since 1973, an estimated 13 million black children have been aborted. Considering this butchery, how can we – in this enlightened era – support the willing destruction of innocent children? We allow liberal special interests such as the NAACP to claim the mantel of civil rights, even as they ignore the most basic freedom passed down from God – the right to life.

All this time, we never seem to hold liberal black leaders to any level of accountability. We go along with their antics and make excuses for their failures and immoral behavior. They often retain power through threats and smear those who disagree with their politics. They keep the majority of us in line by claiming to fight for social and economic justice but use their race as a tool to garner personal wealth through shakedowns, while leaving our community to wallow in the self-pity and anger they helped foster.

Liberalism is not just a problem for black America. Its failure can be seen by visiting any Martin Luther King Street, Avenue, or Boulevard. White America has the financial wherewithal and ambition to choose to escape it. Black Americans, due to long-term abuse by liberal policies, don’t always have that option. That’s why black America as a whole needs to wake up and shake off the liberal chains that bind us.

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Kevin Martin, a member of the African-American leadership network Project 21, is an environmental contractor in Maryland. Comments may be sent to [email protected].

Published by The National Center for Public Policy Research. Reprints permitted provided source is credited. New Visions Commentaries reflect the views of their author, and not necessarily those of Project 21 or the National Center for Public Policy Research.



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