The Black Informant

Derrick Z. Jackson for The Boston Globe is hitting against something that has been on my mind for days, but just did not know the best way to put it together. I’ll let him do the lead-off and then I will chime in later in the post.

Outrage comes too easy for the Democrats

(boston.com) THURSDAY NIGHT’S debate was too easy for the Democratic presidential candidates. Before a hugely black audience at Howard University, they bashed the Supreme Court decision ending voluntary desegregation. They lambasted the Bush administration’s bungling of Hurricane Katrina. Barack Obama said you can’t have No Child Left Behind if you leave the money behind. The biggest cheer of the night came when Hillary Clinton said, “If AIDS were the leading cause of death between the ages of 25 and 34, there would be an outraged outcry in this country.”

[...]

That is precisely the point. Playing to the outraged is child’s play for the Democrats, so easy that John Edwards, he of the $400 haircut, claimed with a straight face, “The issue of poverty is the cause of my life.” All the candidates said poverty, healthcare, and education were connected.

What they did not say is how they would make this connection with white, middle-class, and suburban voters. What they did not say is how they will convince them that these problems outweigh outrage and outcry over taxes.

What they did not say was how they would get the rest of the country outraged with empathy, not dismissal.

[...]

The last Democrat in the White House proved both how difficult it was to connect the haves and have-nots and his own unwillingness to expend political capital to do so. This week, for instance, it was announced that America’s prison and jail population had its largest increase since 2000 and now stands at more than 2.2 million.

But before you blame President Bush for this, remember that under President Clinton, the population skyrocketed from 1.4 million to more than 2 million.

For all the legend about Clinton’s connectivity to black people, the rate of incarceration during his administration went up to 3,620 prisoners for every 100,000 black men. It had been 2,800 per 100,000 black men at the end of the Reagan-Bush I era, according to the Justice Policy Institute in Washington. (more…)

Back in the early days of this website, I can remember how critics would slam me along with other Black Conservatives on how we tend to focus too much on the problem without providing any practical solutions (an accusation that I still pops up from time to time). I took these criticisms into consideration and decided for a time to amp up what I was already doing by making one day in the week a “Good news in Black America” day where nothing but “positive” news would be posted. I also featured stories of folks who overcame odds to find success. Two of the road blocks I kept running into were A. Finding good news in general is daunting task and B. Getting folks to participate was just as daunting–especially the folks who were throwing around these accusations. One of the immediate things that I noticed that on the days where only good news was talked about, my readership numbers went down. The other thing was that I did not receive NOT ONE E-MAIL from the thousands of readers to this site even when I placed a announcement on my sidebar.

What Jackson is bringing up here is quite frankly something that Black Liberals of all shades of ideology will not hold to themselves: the never ending whining over what’s wrong in Black America. The Democratic candidates at this last debate knew full well that whoever was best at playing the outrage card (mind you, a card that is shaded with accusations of racism) would come out on top. While this may play extremely well with a Black audience, it also alienates those within the Democratic party who are getting ‘too old’ for marches and are ready for some practical solutions with measured results.

And before some folks out there pepper me with random quotes and instances where Conservatives have used some of the same tactics to get the Black vote, let me beat you to the punch by agreeing with you. The point here is that I have yet to see an equal challenge being put out to Liberals regarding how they only play to our anger and not our intellect. In other words, instead of harping on the recent Supreme Court ruling and how it will affect Brown vs. Board of Education, why do they find it hard to address the growing drop out rates, low test scores and the growing number of inner-city parents who want to send their kids to either a charter or private school—ALL UNDER THEIR WATCH ON THE LOCAL LEVEL. Why do we not hear them owning up to some of the responsibility instead of relying on Bush bashing? Which one of their solutions has decreased the number of Black men entering into the prison system? Should we get into a full analysis of how raising the minimum wage has “helped” poor folks over the years? Maybe we should talk about how millions of tax payer’s money spent on AIDS education has benefited the Black community?

Hey, politics is politics and you can’t have politics unless you incorporate a certain level of emotionalism. While that may be true, emotionalism rarely provides long term and sustaining solutions. Yet, thanks to venues like the Internet, 24 hour cable news, blogs and podcasting, emotionalism is what sells these days.

>Can I get an A-men?