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March 29th, 2024

Insight

Black Lives Do Matter But Not To Leftists

Alicia Colon

By Alicia Colon

Published May 25, 2016

Well, this conservative never thought I’d be quoting a rapper but Azealia Banks is one smart cookie. Even though she has tweeted insults about Donald Trump she now tweets that she will vote for him because Hillary "talks to black people as if we’re children or pets." She also tweeted that, "Right, black folk having been voting democrat for the last 70 years and we don't have s**t to show for it." Well, grammar aside, she makes a very valid point but it’s doubtful she learned that message from the mainstream media which has been in the tank for the left wing since the 60’s.

The indoctrination of the young black community has been highly successful. A black woman walks around my neighborhood Home Depot wearing a hat that reads "America was never that great.’ Krystal Lake, 22, attends college, is a Bernie Sanders supporter and is gainfully employed yet says Trump’s message is wrong, "I don't think it's a positive message to say, "Let's look to the past." But we absolutely must look to the past to understand what has happened to the black community and how it has been treated by left wing politicians for their own benefit.

Growing up in the late 1950’s in an increasingly dangerous Spanish Harlem neighborhood, I can draw comparisons between the blacks I knew then and the disenchanted masses in #BlackLivesMatter spurred on by the usual leftwing demagogues.

The few black neighbors in the largely Puerto Rican neighborhood of East 110th street were well educated and church goers. My sister married a black paratrooper and college graduate from South Carolina who drove a new Pontiac every year. With the influx of Puerto Ricans flying in from the Island on what we used to call, ‘the Shopping Bag Airline-Trans Caribbean’, our block was transformed into the mean streets, riddled with crime and all night bongo playing interrupted with sporadic screams.

I watched from my fire escape a stabbing and a gun man threatening another by shooting at his feet. In other words, these were the thugs that were ridiculed by the white community as ‘spics’ and lowlifes. The Burt Lancaster film, The Young Savages was filmed blocks away from my home and was a very authentic depiction of the neighborhood at the time. Ironically, Mr. Lancaster also grew up in the same neighborhood as did Ed Sullivan, another escapee of the mean streets of the barrio.

Most of us managed to survive these harsh beginnings thanks to the inner city parochial schools run by the Sisters of Mercy and the Irish Christian Brothers. Yet whenever I go back to Spanish Harlem, I see those who remain were sucked into the maelstrom of government assistance. The black community was especially targeted by leftwing politicians who viewed these citizens as the means for lifelong power in office. Their message became the same as it is demagogued today by the Democrats. "You need government help because America owes you for the past slavery of your ancestors. You can’t do it by yourself. America owes you reparations, blah, blah, blah."

What an insult. Before the government stepped in with its largesse, blacks were doing quite well in New York City. There is an area in Manhattan’s Harlem called Sugar Hill with townhouses and apartment buildings which once were as glamorous as Fifth Avenue. Wealthy blacks in the entertainment industry, medical, legal and other professions called it their home. Langston Hughes wrote about it in an essay:

"If you are white and are reading this vignette, don't take it for granted that all Harlem is a slum. It isn't. There are big apartment houses up on the hill, Sugar Hill, and up by City College -- nice high-rent-houses with elevators and doormen, where Canada Lee lives, and W.C. Handy, and the George S. Schuylers and the Walter Whites, where colored families send their babies to private kindergartens and their youngsters to Ethical Culture School."

He could also have mentioned prominent African Americans as W. E. B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Walter Francis White and Roy Wilkins.

All these individuals may have encountered racism at some point in their lives but succeeded without the help of riots, protests, affirmative action, food stamps, section 8 housing and other welfare programs. The current black community is the victim of institutional racism by a government that views it only as a controllable ticket to power through dependency. I once considered that those liberals who proposed all this programs were merely misguided and confused about their charitable endeavors but I’ve come to believe that they are deliberate in keeping minorities under their control and could not possibly care less about their interests.

No wonder academia is uninterested in teaching the past. How many millenials have been indoctrinated into denying that the holocaust even existed? How many have not been taught of the hardships endured by whites and blacks during the Great Depression? I’ll bet they’ve never heard of indentured servants? What they are hearing from the left-wingers like Bernie Sanders are what they can get for free. To the Democrat Party, learning about the past is dangerous because maybe the low-info voters may learn that there are others who’ve had harder lives and succeeded without government checks.

Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, a black man, accused the Democratic Party of "bigotry" because their programs have "decimated the black family." On a Fox News program he responded to a question about Hillary Clinton’s statement that a Trump presidency would put "more kids at risk of violence and bigotry." "If black kids are at risk from anybody, it's from other black kids in black-on-black crime. The bigotry that she's talking about stems from her party that has decimated the black family. It has kids shackled — black kids shackled — to failing K-12 public schools in urban centers. And it's where black men in these urban centers can't find meaningful work."

Why aren’t the leaders in the black community ranting about how the Obama Administration is spending millions to find summer jobs for refugees? Obama’s brought thousands of immigrants here who will take away the jobs from Americans of all colors. The racial hucksters have fomented race riots with lies like the ones in Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore that destroyed black neighborhoods and plunged them into further residential despair. Facts were ignored by a complicit media that did whatever it could to continue the blatant false reports that made victims out of the unworthy.

When will the black community recognize that their biggest enemies are the ones who treat it like Ms. Banks asserts-like children and pets?

This November, it’s time for the Black community and the whole country to grow up.

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