The Fear of a Black Republican
Written in 2006 — Revisited in 2025
Author’s Note 2025
I wrote The Fear of a Black Republican almost twenty years ago. The claim was simple. If Black voters walked away in meaningful numbers, the Democrat Party would face a crisis it could not manage. That was not a slogan. It was a reading of history. Black Americans had made significant advances on key measures before 1964, but the pace of progress did not match the narratives that emerged later. The story was more complicated than the posters.
Two patterns stood out then and still do now. First, the double standard. Public figures could say things about Black conservatives that would end careers if the targets were on the Left. The Clarence Thomas episode made that plain, and it was not an outlier. On November 4, 1994, Julianne Malveaux said this on PBS about Justice Thomas: “The man is on the Court. You know, I hope his wife feeds him lots of eggs and butter and he dies early like many black men do, of heart disease. Well, that’s how I feel. He is an absolutely reprehensible person.” The appetite for dehumanizing Republican figures is decades old. The wish for their silence, even their death, was spoken on air long before social media trained people to cheer for it. What happened to Charlie Kirk did not come from nowhere. It grew from a culture that licenses hatred of the opposition.
Second, the scapegoat. When policies fail, blame shifts to an enemy that cannot answer back. In the Middle East, it is often Jews. In our politics, it is often Republicans. The pattern repeats. Urban schools fail for years, yet the fault is pinned on tests and “structures,” not on unions and district rules that block choice and accountability. Crime rises after prosecutors decline to prosecute, and the story becomes “guns” and distant legislatures, not the local policies that emptied jails and cut bail. Homelessness spreads, and the villain is “greed,” while the same officials block treatment, disable enforcement, and inflate costs with permits and red tape. Prices surge, and it is “corporate greed,” not the spending and energy constraints that helped light the fire. The border breaks, and the target is Texas migrant buses, not the federal refusal to enforce the law. When courts reject a preferred policy, the line is “democracy is at risk,” not “we wrote a bad law.” Shift blame, demand loyalty, punish dissent. The faces change. The method does not.
Here is the part people like to erase. In the Jim Crow South, Democratic power networks enforced terror through the Klan and allied mobs. Black citizens were lynched. White Republicans who stood with them were lynched. Teachers, pastors, organizers, and officeholders who refused to bend were hunted and killed. That history did not vanish because the branding changed. It survives in the habit of policing which Black voices may speak and which are punished for independence.
In 2006, I was not predicting a replacement coalition. I assumed Democrats would keep Black voters through persuasion and pressure. With hindsight, the arithmetic shifted. The coalition leaned into immigrants, gays, and a large population of illegal immigrants, which still shapes power through census counts and apportionment. Illegal immigrants cannot vote (insert tongue in cheek here), but population moves representation and money. Population changes districts. Districts change outcomes.
I leave the 2006 version untouched. It is a document of its time, but the questions it asked still test our honesty.
What follows is the original essay as I wrote it in 2006. Read it against the last twenty years. Decide whether the fear I described was exaggerated or whether the political map adjusted to avoid the risk I warned about.
Note: The original 2006 essay did not include an image.
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You will hear it said with a ferocious repetition. Blacks Vote Democrat! Year after year, election after election, issue after issue, blacks are brainwashed into voting for democrats. Uncle Tom, house n*gger, sellout, race traitor are all epithets that are applied to blacks that stray from the democrat plantation.
Since the 1970s, democrats have promised every conceivable prize in return for black support. What have blacks received in return for their support of democrats? Not much according to the available statistics. Black Americans were experiencing substantial growth in most favorable categories before the Civil Rights Act of 1964. For example, from 1954 to 1964, the number of black professionals doubled. The steady rise toward middle class of Black Americans from the 1940s to 2006 actually slowed somewhat in the 1970s, a decade in which affirmative action was strongly embraced. It seems illogical to equate black progress with affirmative action, when the pattern of progress slowed during the time affirmative action was most widely implemented.
If only democrats can help minorities then why did black unemployment drop 9 percent from 1982 to 1989 under Republican President Ronald Reagan? Why have blacks experienced the highest level of home ownership in history under Republican President George W. Bush? The answer is clear: democrats expect mediocrity from blacks while pitying them and assuming that blacks need whitey’s help at every turn. On the other hand, republicans for the most part, enact colorblind policy that leads to prosperity for everyone including Black Americans. Republican policies tend to reward hard work and accomplishment as opposed to the democrat policies that reward failure and encourage hopelessness.
For the most part, democrats have hi-jacked the civil rights issue, claiming themselves as the only proponents of equal rights. This is in stark contrast to the reality of the issue. If not for overwhelming support from republicans the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would not have passed. This is a cold, hard fact that democrats have buried under their race-baiting attacks against republicans for decades. In the House, 61% of Democrats (152 to 96) voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 while 80% of Republicans (138 to 34) voted for the Act. In the Senate, 69% of Democrats (46 to 27) voted for the Civil Rights Act while 82% of Republicans (27 to 6) voted for the Act. After the Act was passed democrat President Lyndon Johnson praised republicans for their overwhelming support.
It is amazing to me, after forty years of brainwashing by democrats, that so many young Black Americans have such a blurred view of history and of reality. As an example, consider the Three-fifths compromise. Many young people, black and white, assume that this compromise was implying that a slave was three-fifths of a human being. It is often overlooked that the main premise of this compromise was to lessen the representation of the pro-slavery south in the House of Representatives as well as giving states an incentive to free their slaves thus increasing their representation in the House. In other words, a newly freed slave, for representational purposes, would count as one as opposed to three-fifths, when electing officials to the House therefore weakening the south and their pro-slavery position.
Fortunately, things are turning around for Black Americans. Over the last decade, there has been a decrease in the percentage of blacks willing to vote democrat. Although the democrat party still receives the majority of the “African-American” vote, many young Black Americans are becoming independents or gasp, republicans.
As with every liberal myth, lie, or attack, the democrats and their cohorts in the media are relentless when falsely perpetuating that black republicans are not really black. This is strictly out of the fear of potentially losing more power. Observe the way democrats have treated Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Clarence Thomas, Michael Steele, J.C. Watts, and Ward Connerly. These individuals have all had hateful racist comments directed toward them at one time or another. The media, which normally “comes unglued” when the slightest critique is rendered against minority democrats, has little to say when the attack is on a black conservative or minority working for a republican. Think about this quote from liberal USA Today columnist Julianne Malveaux. On November 4, 1994 during To the Contrary on PBS, she said the following regarding Justice Clarence Thomas: “The man is on the Court. You know, I hope his wife feeds him lots of eggs and butter and he dies early like many black men do, of heart disease. Well, that’s how I feel. He is an absolutely reprehensible person.” Where was the outcry regarding this outburst? This columnist said openly, on a publicly funded network, that she hopes a Justice on the Supreme Court dies. There was no major outcry from the left. She was never banished, never to be heard from again, as is the case for almost any republican that might have said something similar.
A blend of hypocrisy and fear allow democrats to overlook, ignore, and suppress outrageous statements by people in their own party and their supporters. During Black History Month, Democrat Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante said n*gger instead of Negro at a speech in California before the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists. There was a brief outcry but it quickly faded and all was forgiven. How many republicans would have received the same pass on this? What about the fact that democrat Senator Robert Byrd was a recruiter in the Ku Klux Klan? Senator Byrd has used the word n*gger on a national news show as recently as 2001. Again, no major outcry from the “supposed” party of civil rights. Then there was Senate Minority Whip Wendell Ford, a democrat, who said, on the Jane Norris Show in 1995, “Well, I’m not n*gger rich, either.” in response to the statement from a caller, that he obviously misunderstood, saying “I’m not near as rich as you, Senator.” The fear of losing the black vote keeps liberals in the media, government, and colleges on a path that includes rewriting history, covering up outlandish statements by liberals, and most importantly, painting republicans as evil, minority hating, religious nuts.
This fear is not unwarranted. If the democrats were to lose the black vote, then they would be finished as a party. This is exactly why they fight and kick at every turn, when a minority runs as a republican. It is a ticking time bomb for democrats. They will continue to lose black voters because their policies are hollow. They sound good, feel good, smell good but after decades of liberal social programs geared toward blacks, one might expect some kind of, well, positive results. Instead, many blacks are feeling a sense of hopelessness similar to many young men in the Middle East. You see, just like many impoverished people in the Middle East, when a group is told year after year that they “deserve to have”, “should have”, and “will have” a better life and this does not materialize, then somebody has to be blamed. The controlling power does not wish to feel the wrath of the people that it has wronged so as in the Middle East, it is “The Jews” and in America, it is “The Republicans”. The difference between these two groups is that what blacks have achieved is nothing less than phenomenal. Rising from slavery to highly educated, prosperous, successful people in a very short time compared to other similar examples from history around the world. The Middle East, much of which is ruled by tyrants and religious zealots, offers little when it pertains to free speech, freedom of religion, and escape from poverty.
Democrats have a vested interest in keeping blacks down thus keeping them dependent on meager handouts from democrats. These handouts translate to votes. Democrats need to portray life for blacks in America as bleak and dismal. All this is in direct conflict to the reality of the majority of Blacks Americans. There are serious problems in the black community but there are also many positives. More blacks are in college, starting small businesses, serving in political office, running large companies. As stated earlier, black homeownership is up and the more balance that is achieved between democrats, republicans, and independents will result in more opportunities for all minorities. Maybe if we all lived a little more by the words of Booker T. Washington and a little less by the words of Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and Louis Farrakhan, all of us could be doing a little better.
“You can’t hold a man down without staying down with him.”
“I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.”
“If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.”
“No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.”
“Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome.”
“There are two ways of exerting one’s strength: one is pushing down, the other is pulling up.”
Quotes from Booker T. Washington
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The Fear of a Black Republican
Filed on 10/30/06 by Chris Arnell
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