African Americans must resist Bush's divide-and-conquer strategy
/- Originally published in The Courier-Journal February 3, 2005 Thursday metro Met Edition
By: BAYE BETTY WINSTON
President Bush's philosophy of "you're either with me or against me" may be a real problem for some black conservatives. Not even they can buy everything that the President and his administration are selling.
I don't know many African Americans who oppose a decent minimum wage or who support military pre-emption. I don't know many black preachers whose congregations don't include more than a few tithers who wouldn't be able to tap the plate were there no Head Start, no subsidized housing or no Medicaid.
While the President may cling to the notion that he's a uniter, his agenda for black America couldn't be more clear - divide and conquer. We saw it last week when Bush met separately with different groups of presumed African-American leaders.
To make absolutely sure there'd be no chance of these good colored people bumping into one another on the way in or out, the meetings were held on different days.
Bush met first with friendly African Americans, including certain preachers and business leaders.
The next day, he met with the Congressional Black Caucus, whose 43 members are all elected and all Democrats.
It's no secret that Bush deliberately put the CBC out to pasture. During his first term, he met with the elected black officials only twice, and once was in an unscheduled session that reportedly happened because CBC members refused to leave the building without seeing the President face to face.
So there's a lot of bitterness there, and CBC members haven't hesitated to criticize many of Bush's judicial nominees, his opposition to affirmative action and his budget cuts to many federally funded social programs.
This bitterness, which extends to the traditional civil rights community as well, has opened the door for other African Americans to slip in and gain favor with the President and the GOP.
Many are disenchanted with Democrats and the liberal policies that they believe have robbed African Americans of the boot-strap values that helped earlier generations rise despite serious obstacles.
Some blacks in Bush's coalition say they're just being strategic. It doesn't benefit black Americans to put all their political eggs in one basket.
The black preachers the President courts say that he shares their moral values; they also oppose gay marriage and abortion rights.
And there are also, I have no doubt, hustlers in the group - African Americans with no track record of helping their brothers and sisters and who are in politics just for the money.
In his meeting with the friendly African Americans, Bush said that their stake in helping him remake Social Security, including especially having younger workers divert some of their contributions to personal investment accounts, is that black people on average don't live as long as whites and so are short-changed by the current system. They put more in than they can expect to get out.
In other words, Bush expects that even 50 and 75 years from now black Americans will still be dying at unconscionably earlier ages than whites.
What that says to me is that rather than allowing themselves to be divided and conquered in separate meetings with Big Daddy in the White House, African Americans would get a lot more mileage out of meeting with one another and developing strategies that will prove the President wrong.
If the best that African Americans can look forward to in 50 or 75 years is more of the same, I say a pox on all our houses - black Republicans and black Democrats, black conservatives and black liberals. For all will be guilty of badly failing our people.
I'm crazy enough to hope that somewhere, serious African Americans are getting together quietly. If courageous slaves had enough sense to get together in secret to plot their freedom, surely all these African Americans strutting around today bragging about how they've made it - "Look Mom, I'm at the White House!" - ought to be able to do the same.
Betty Winston Baye's columns appear Thursdays. Read them online at www.courier-journal.com.
