Slow-Motion Awakening

Little by little, inch by frustrating inch, "black America" is beginning to figure out just how badly the Democrat Party has been buggering them over the past two generations:

[Executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Wade] Henderson told a room full of black folks at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical University that Maryland’s Republican governor was trying to take over Baltimore schools. Then he told them about how teachers in predominantly-white Baltimore County schools are better than those in predominantly-black Baltimore schools and about disparities in the availability of advanced placement courses between the two systems.

Here’s what Henderson failed to mention: schools in Baltimore County and in Baltimore are run by Democrats. Maryland’s legislature, which funds both systems, has been a Democratic body for decades.

Any failures of Baltimore’s school system - which, according to a Manhattan Institute study, graduates only 48% of its students and only 39% of its black male students - have to be blamed on the political party that’s run the system for years.

That would be Democrats.

It's taken forty years, but the scales are starting to fall from some African-American eyes. And what they're seeing is that not only does the Donk emperor, as it were, have no clothes, but he looks awful in the buff:

[T]oday’s black Democrats in places like Baltimore and Detroit seem to have their lips permanently sutured to the rump of the Democratic Party jackass. If there is a clash between, say, the Democrats’ commitment to teachers’ unions and educational improvement for black folks, Democrats will choose teachers’ unions.

Black Democrats seem powerless to stop them.

When they aren't actively shilling for them, that is:

Remember what happened to Dave Bing several years ago?

Bing is a former National Basketball Association All-Star who now owns an automobile supply company in Detroit. He teamed with a white businessman named Robert Thompson, who wanted to donate $200 million to the city of Detroit to establish charter schools. Two things happened.

A black member of Detroit’s city council gave Bing a “Sambo” award and called him a sell-out. Detroit’s political leaders turned down Thompson’s offer.

The irony of that remark must have Dr. Martin Luther King spinning in his grave. But then, remember Bill Cosby's recent series of rebukes against "his own people"? Look at the heat he took for leveling with them on the need to reintroduce the concept of personal responsibility and [*ahem*] educational achievement to rebuild the black family. And, speaking of Maryland, look at the Senate contest raging there right now, in which both major party candidates may be African-American and the Republican (Lieutenant-Governor Michael Steele) - who is a big educational innovator, which makes him an enemy of the NEA by definition - is being doused in racist attacks from "his own people". Or, to be sardonically synonymical, the Uncle Toms of the Left.

This is what makes the race to succeed Paul Sarbanes such a barometer of racial progress and reconciliation. If black voters in so "blue" a state as Maryland evince with their ballots the realization that the Democrat Party, far from representing, much less fighting for, their interests, is in practice a slicker version of the same bunch of exploiters and oppressors that welcomed a klansman into their Senate ranks half a century ago and fought the civil rights movement bitterly every step of the way, it will mark the beginning of the end of modern left-wing plantation politics.

Small wonder that the prospect of Senator Steele is so terrifying to them. But however that election turns out, it will prove far more educational to their heretofore most, um, "slavish" constituency than al Donka would ever have imagined.