“Black Votes Matter”!!!! Can intelligent African Americans really interpret that to mean that to the leadership of the two major political parties that equates to “black lives matter”? One wouldn’t think so given the facts but the reality speaks louder. Robert L. Johnson, the founder of Black Entertainment Television, understands the facts and has urged Americans of color to unite in their own political party but in all likelihood he will be ignored and American blacks will continue chained to a political party that takes them for granted and, worse, is largely responsible in all respects for the impediments to which African Americans are and have always been subject. It was, after all, the two-for-the-price-of-one Clinton administration and its Senate ally, Joe Biden, that destroyed the nucleus of the black family with its two punch “criminal justice” and “welfare” reforms of the 1990s, and it is in Democratic Party led cities and states that African Americans are murdered and discriminated against in highest numbers.

Of course, it has not always been the Democratic Party that has “owned” the black vote, keeping it in chains all too reminiscent of slavery. The “Grand Old Party” responsible for freeing American slaves quickly used their votes to assemble the greatest kleptocracy known until then, the “gilded age” of robber barons that first gave rise to the American Empire which then went on to “subjugate” (think enslave) Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, et. al., and, after initially using the votes of the newly emancipated (freed would be the wrong verb) slaves to attain control of state governments in the former Confederacy, sold them out in a bargain to steal the presidential election of 1876.

The appellation “Uncle Tom” is ugly and disparaging and all too often undeserved. But the reality is that if anyone deserves it today, it is the leadership of most institutions claiming to represent African Americans but which instead, lead them blindly to the polls in order to vote for any Democrat at all (as they were once led to the polls to vote for any Republican at all). American blacks will never come close to really being free, politically, economically or culturally, until they attain their own political identity under black leadership on the front lines, not black leadership subservient to modern day carpetbaggers like Joe Biden and the rest of the Democratic Party leadership. The same is true of other minorities effectively blocked from upwardly mobile political leadership, other minorities relegated to roles as “tokens”, tokens even at the highest levels as occurred with former president Barack Obama, a man who sold out his principles the same way he sold out his former white girlfriend for political opportunities.

Today’s protests against the murder of a number of black men and women in police custody is a glaring example of the political opportunism to which black Americans are subject. Such protests have either quickly morphed into mere political opportunism or else, and more probably, were the subject of preplanned political opportunism merely seeking an appropriate spark. That the spark is worthy of legitimate anger is obvious but the real issue has been quickly obfuscated as opportunist, both political and criminal, have immediately availed themselves of the opportunity to loot and burn the property of relatively innocent people on the one hand, and launch electoral broadsides on the other, in each case ignoring the real plight of those historically discriminated against in favor of generating increased polarization by attacking historical symbols rather than real problems. Problems like the reasons for the lack of economic, educational and professional opportunities for members of the black community, the reasons that the current Democratic Party bears so much responsibility for creating and maintaining in order to maintain the black community in political servitude.

Robert L. Johnson has metaphorically issued the cry “Awake! We have nothing to lose but our chains!” but the response has been much more reminiscent of Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence”.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2020; all rights reserved. Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at http://www.guillermocalvo.com.