A rchive Date
[ 23-05-2005 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
|
[Blacks are wrong to be so angry at Bush
By JANE ELY
Dec. 19, 2000, 6:48PM
SHOULD only the slightest percentage of the alleged voting-rights violations actually have occurred during the Florida presidential election, black political leaders have every right to be upset.
Indeed, they should be upset. And they should be hard at work to see no such thing ever happens again - to any voter.
But, why they're so mad at George W. Bush is somewhat beyond me.
If anyone wants to knee-jerk dislike - even loath - Bush because he's a Republican, that's for sure his or her right. (It's fair to say a number of Republicans have suffered the same sentiment about various Democrats.)
But, the president-elect didn't have a blooming thing to do with the way the Florida election was conducted.
So his brother Jeb is the governor of Florida. Name one time anyone actually has seen a governor out assigning voting machines to precincts. Is there really any present-day governor so incredibly stupid he would enlist state employees in an effort to thwart the black vote and still manage to keep his brother's election going down to the judicial wire for 36 days?
I don't think so.
Maybe I can understand why the Rev. Jesse Jackson always can be counted on to cry prejudice in about any situation involving a black person. After all, this sort of action is his life. It's all he's done since he was a young man and forgot where he actually was in relation to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. when the esteemed civil rights leader was shot down in cold blood.
Even as tired as he seems to be these days, we always can count on Jackson finding a white person to blame for the suffering of a black person. Too often he declares there were evil white feelings at work when clearly there were not.
Is this to suggest I don't think there are white bigots? Is this to insist there isn't still grief for many black people simply because they are black? No and no.
Nor is it to suggest I don't have anything but regret and care for those taken advantage of because of their color.
But, it also, dammit, is to say I think political leaders who wrongly - be it carelessly or willfully - use color for their own particular political purposes are pretty doggone reprehensible. I think it of whites. I think it of blacks. I think it of browns.
And, I still say I cannot for the life of me figure out what George W. Bush did to black voters in Florida - unless you count his being Republican.
Why else, for crying out loud, would there be a printed report saying, "many members of the Congressional Black Caucus said they plan to bypass all of the inaugural festivities because of the alleged voting-rights abuses"?
Why else would Rep. Donald Payne, a New Jersey Democrat, speaking of what he called the Bush campaign's "legal apparatus," declare he couldn't possibly attend the inauguration because that apparatus "disenfranchised my people to exercise their God-given right to vote."
Maybe Rep. Charlie Rangel of New York, who does political-speak with the best, is right when he contends the Florida election process resulted "in the greatest mass disenfranchisement of African-Americans since the Voting Rights Act of 1965."
But would this be true - much less would he have said it - if the Democrat had won?
No matter what anyone may think of the president-elect's political positions - I certainly can cite some with which I personally totally disagree - I genuinely don't believe anyone, in good conscience and/or with actual examples, can contend GWB is not an open-hearted and open-minded man who truly wants to be the president of all the people.
An awfully good indicator of how politics is so much more at play than color here can be seen in the fact the huge majority of black voters make up the only true ethnic voting bloc in this country. And that bloc most assuredly is Democratic.
If color alone were the issue, why would black leaders have so adamantly opposed the appointment (by the first President George Bush) of the mind-numbingly conservative Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court?
If it were color, not politics, why would several CBC members reportedly say they're unimpressed by the appointments of two black Americans, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, to two prominent policy-making positions?
We - all of us - need to learn that while it often is safe to equate black with Democrat, it is not inevitably true. And we - all of us - sure need to learn that while many do, it's sure not right to equate Republican with bigotry and wrong.
As a matter of fact, only a bigot - notably a political one - would do so.
Ely is a Houston Chronicle columnist. (jane.ely@chron.com)
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
|