Bush’s Pandering Speech to the NAACP

George Bush has further degraded himself in his recent speech to the NAACP. While outreach efforts to black voters are reasonable ways of showing the Republican Party’s rejection of the deliberate disuniting of America by various ethnic lobbies, Bush betrays his party, the conservative movement, and the truth with his endorsement of the liberal view that black failure in the wake of the civil rights movement is chiefly explained by lingering racism rather than black social pathology.

As shown fairly rigorously in Jared Taylor’s Paved With Good Intentions and Dinesh D’Souza’s End of Racism, there are two glaring facts that cannot be explained by the “lingering racism” theory: (a) whites are less racist today than at any other time in American history, and (b) in spite of this trend, blacks continue to lag in every measure of social achievement and have, in some ways, declined further than the status quo ante of the 1960s. Explaining black failure by lingering racism is convenient for liberals, of course. This explanation demands increased government action, fits the liberal view of history, and absolves blacks and their civil rights leadership of any responsibility for continuing black failure. When the facts don’t fit the theory, we hear about “institutional” racism to explain gaps in black performance on standardized tests that are blind-graded and to explain gaps in arenas where minorities have been explicitly recruited under lower standards.

It is tragic and frustrating that blacks lag behind other Americans in so many areas of achievement. But it will not help either blacks or whites to respond to this situation by degrading whites in an orgy of self-criticism and revisionist history. For every well publicized murder in a place like Jasper, Texas, there are 100 more in Gary, Indiana or Harlem, New York. Bush knows this, and the leadership of a group like the NAACP know this too. Yet they sponsored an inflammatory ad in 2000 suggesting that Bush’s failure to sign a “hate crimes” bill after the murder of James Byrd made Bush somehow indifferent to and responsible for his murder. Yet, in spite of this calumny, Bush chose to speak to these people. And, worse still, he chose to blame the Republican Party for its failures to reach out to blacks, as if those failures were not chiefly due to the continued divisive rhetoric of black leaders and the gap between the traditional Republican values of independence, upward mobility, and limited government and the message of dependency, socialism, and “do gooder” government popular among blacks and other Democrats.

Bush has shown that any outreach to the NAACP will, by necessity, come at the expense of his own self respect, the truth, and the residue of conservative principles in the Republican Party. And, far from winning him support, these misguided outreach efforts will ignite greater and greater demands from this fundamentally alienated constituency.

• Share this:
• StumbleUpon
• Digg
• Reddit