• Originally published in The South End,  Wayne State University

 By Vanessa Ward Hines

In an effort to get more votes from African Americans, President George W. Bush spoke Friday to a predominantly black audience at the National Urban League's conference in Detroit.

He had earlier turned down an invitation to address the NAACP during its national convention in Philadelphia in June, snubbing members of the country's oldest and largest civil rights organization. This decision raised the ire of black people everywhere, including NAACP Chairman Julian Bond, who condemns Bush's policies on education, health care, the economy and the war in Iraq. He is urging blacks to vote Bush out of office in November.

The president realized that his refusal to speak to the prominent civil rights organization wasn't a smart move. Apparently, he has had a change of heart and has decided to court prospective black voters after all.

In his speech to the NUL, he suggested that Democrats take the black vote for granted, and that blacks' interests have not been well served. "Does the Democrat Party take African-American voters for granted?" he asked.

The president told the lukewarm audience that he was there to ask for their vote -- but does he truly deserve our votes? What has the Republican Party done for black folks lately? Bush admitted that the GOP has "got a lot of work to do."

The president is probably right -- the Democratic Party invariably does take the black vote for granted. But what is the alternative?

Bush is duplicitous, meaning he says one thing but does another. He double-talks and he is no friend of black people. Sure, he has three high-level black appointees in his administration, namely Secretary of State Colin Powell; Condoleeza Rice, the national security adviser; and Rod Paige, U.S. education secretary.

These appointments are a half-hearted effort on Bush's part to reach out to blacks, but we're not fooled. Bush received less than one out of 10 black votes in 2000 -- a mere 8 percent. In Michigan, he fared even worse, garnering only 5 to 6 percent of the black vote. In 2000, 11 million registered black voters didn't bother to go to the polls at all. A million blacks were disenfranchised in the 2000 election. During the last election, I stood in line at the polls for over two-and-a-half hours to vote for Al Gore and I feel as if it didn't count. But that won't stop me from voting again.

From the moment he robbed Gore of the 2000 presidential election, I felt in my bones that Bush is a man who cannot be trusted. He was not an elected president, but a selected one, courtesy of the U.S. Supreme Court.

The man lies with impunity. He sent our military forces to Iraq -- supposedly to find weapons of mass destruction, to topple Saddam Hussein's regime and to bring democracy to war-torn Iraq. Well, as the entire world knows, the former Iraqi president has been captured and answered defiantly before his "peers" in an Iraqi court of law. Iraq's interim democratic government has taken shape but the violence has not quelled. And where are these so-called weapons of mass destruction?

President Bush, a born-again Christian, has blood on his hands and he will one day have to answer to his God for his continued misdeeds against humanity.

At last count, over 900 Americans have died needlessly -- not to mention the countless Iraqis. Maybe I am misinformed, but just what are we fighting for? The death toll continues to rise -- even as the end of major combat in this war on terror was declared over a year ago in May 2003. Too many people have died, most of them in their 20s -- and for what?

Bush had an ax to grind and justified his desire to deploy troops to Iraq very succinctly, saying of Hussein, "... this is the guy who tried to kill my dad." He was itching to go to war. But it's not him on the frontlines. On other important issues, Bush grandstands. He is indifferent to lower and middle-class people in this country -- average Americans. His urban agenda is non-existent. Unemployment, educational disparities and inadequate health care still plague residents of the nation's largest cities.

Our children are in trouble; many of them cannot even read at a third-grade level. Bush claims to be a proponent of public education. He speaks about the education gap in America and says that every child matters. His "No Child Left Behind" Act says that every child can learn and that every child is expected to learn. But is that the case? Is every child learning? Sadly, the answer is no. Here in cash-strapped Detroit, the dropout rate in the Detroit Public Schools hovers around 40 percent.

In the city of Detroit, 47 percent of adults are illiterate. These statistics stand in stark contrast to Bush's assertion that "education is the cornerstone of a hopeful tomorrow." It's sad, though, that many people are mired in a sense of hopelessness and will be doomed to a state of permanent unemployment or underemployment because they lack basic life skills -- the most important of which is reading.

Unemployment has increased among blacks by 30 percent since 2000. As of June, about 10 percent of blacks were unemployed, compared to five percent of whites, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nearly 45 percent of blacks under age 65 had no health care insurance for at least part of 2000 and 2003, according to Families USA, a health care consumer group based in Washington, D.C.

I won't rattle off a bunch of statistics, but black men are still being warehoused in federal and state prisons across this land at an alarming rate -- and increasingly, so are black women. Bottom line: black people are still hurting.

We'd all do well to remember that when we cast our votes in November. I say, "Anybody But Bush" because Bush is no friend of ours.

(C) 2003 The South End via U-WIRE