by Allen West
We went past the state capitol, with its dome gilded with gold mined from North Georgia, that remote part of the state where the US Army Ranger School conducts its grueling twenty-one-day Mountain Phase. Then we drove by my literal birthplace—little Hughes Spalding Hospital, dwarfed by the imposing Grady Memorial Hospital.
Then it hit me like a 105-millimeter artillery shell. As we passed the Edgewood Avenue exit off Interstate 75/85, I saw the empty shell of the community where I’d grown up. Auburn Avenue, once a haven for black entrepreneurs, doctors, and lawyers, now held only boarded-up and dilapidated buildings.
My ol’ neighborhood, filled with fond memories, seemingly lost for the next generation. What had happened since the time of my birth in 1961? How had a vibrant community of churches, families, and prominent leaders faded away?
These are the questions I ask myself every time I go back to my hometown, and I’m quite certain many folks who grew up in inner-city neighborhoods puzzle over the same issues when they return home … if they return at all. I wonder what people feel when they go back and see Detroit? What emotions arise when former residents return to the South Side of Chicago?
I remember street ball and the corner basketball courts. Nowadays, most parents are too afraid to allow their kids outside to play for fear of gang violence and shootings. What bothers me is that many people who come from similar backgrounds and neighborhoods know exactly what I’m talking about, yet they remain silent. Well, we cannot be silent any longer.
When Buck and Snooks moved up to Atlanta, it was a different neighborhood. Yes, there was a struggle for equal opportunity, but as Booker T. Washington said, “Those who think there is no opportunity for them to live grandly, yea, heroically, no matter how lowly their calling, no matter how humble their surroundings, make a common but very serious error.” My parents may have been on the lowest rung of the economic ladder, but they started a family—a unified black family—and made it strong and stable. They were surrounded by other black families. They went to church together. They possessed exceptional moral values that they passed down to us. Our role models weren’t found on television or in stadiums; they lived right in our homes. Maybe we kids coveted the athletic prowess of Hank Aaron, but we wanted to emulate our moms and dads.
So what happened?
Why is it that the majority of the prison population is black? How is it that only 28 percent of our children live with both a mom and dad in their homes? How is it that we have surrendered the powerful moral values that made us the envy of other groups in America and now find ourselves drawn into a culture of moral depravity, drugs, and crime?
You want an example of depravity from my home state? Consider the death of thirteen-month-old Antonio Angel Santiago in Brunswick, Georgia. He was shot in the face in his baby stroller as his mother watched—and she was shot as well—during a failed robbery attempt. The perpetrators, ages seventeen and fourteen, were both black. How many of you have examples from your own community, in the neighborhood where you grew up? But the real question is, are you angry about it?
I don’t mean feigned outrage directed at “Da Man.” I mean anger at the people who promoted the big lie that government will solve your problems. Because I am angry about the mammoth, out-of-control social welfare entitlement programs from Washington, DC, that were supposed to solve our problems. The obvious truth is these impractical, politically motivated programs have irreparably damaged the fabric of our black society and community.
The irony is, we were told these policies would help us most of all, and yet our community has ended up being the most grievously harmed. To those who fell victim to the welfare mentality, I am sorry to say, you were sold a horrific lie. You are shackled to the twenty-first-century economic plantation. And just so you know, those of us who have escaped are not your enemy. We want nothing more than for you to be liberated as well, because you cannot continue to live in bondage.
The Republican Party was established for one reason: the abolition of slavery through passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. Against the Democratic Party, the Republicans engaged in a fundamental philosophical fight for individual freedom from physical bondage. Today the fight for freedom continues with the same protagonists and antagonists, except now it is economic rather than physical bondage that must be defeated.
I find it especially ironic that Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt said in his 1935 State of the Union address, “The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.… The Federal Government must and shall quit this business of relief.” But three decades later, another Democratic president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, did the exact opposite, administering the social narcotic of the Great Society programs.
There may have been some short-term merit to President Johnson’s much-lauded Great Society and War on Poverty. But fifty years after these policies were enacted, all Americans must critically examine the residual effects. It troubles me greatly there exists such a sound bite mentality in America that we cannot ever dig beyond the superficial to determine the long-term effects of domestic and foreign policies. It appears that none of our elected officials take the time to analyze the unintended consequences of a particular policy decision, not only for the election cycle but for the next twenty, thirty, or forty years.
As I mentioned previously, President Jimmy Carter’s Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 is a perfect example of shortsighted policy. The 2008 financial meltdown in the mortgage industry—a disaster even FDR could have foreseen—was directly related to Carter’s policy of social engineering in the housing market under the guise of guaranteeing equality of achievement. Does anyone else get the feeling our current presidents don’t study history when it comes to formulating policy?
In his book about President Johnson, Big Daddy from the Pedernales, author and historian Paul K. Conkin noted that Johnson’s administration “moved beyond a response to pressing constituency pressures, beyond crisis-induced legislative action, to a studied, carefully calculated effort to identify problems and to create the needed constituencies to help solve them.” Under Johnson the federal government greatly increased its intrusion into the economy and the lives of its citizens. According to Conkin, “In five years the American government approximately doubled its regulatory role and at least doubled the scope of transfer payments.” There was a philosophic shift in the country from faith in the individual to a belief that government technocrats had all the answers.
During the Johnson years, faith in the government’s almost magical ability to solve problems reached a new high. Regardless of the issue, whether it was racial antipathy, unemployment, illiteracy, poor nutrition, inadequate housing, workplace accidents, insufficient cultivation of the arts, or environmental pollution, the response was simple: the federal government should do something or take a larger role in acting. In other words, the government needed to spend more money.
Conkin said, “Each of [the] Great Society commitments promised benefits to a targeted and often an increasingly self-conscious interest group (blacks, the aged, the educationally deprived, the poor, the unemployed, urban ghetto dwellers, consumers, nature enthusiasts).”
Consider one of the programs of the Great Society, the Food Stamp Act of 1964. Its original intent was to give low-income families access to nutritional foods grown primarily by American farmers. In 2013 the number of Americans on food stamps stood at nearly forty-seven million, up from thirty-two million when Obama took office. Heck, you don’t need to use actual food stamps at the store anymore. Now the government sends money directly into an account that tops off the recipient’s Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) card. Our government even spends taxpayer dollars to advertise enrollment for benefits—and not just for Americans. The USDA partners with the Mexi
can government to ensure migrant workers and Mexican nationals living in the United States are aware of the benefits.
Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot?
Fifty years ago we waged a War on Poverty. Apparently we’re getting our butts kicked, because from January 2009 to May 2013 we went from 39.8 million Americans in poverty to 49.1 million. The number of Americans on food stamps and living in poverty is greater than the entire population of Spain. Is this the legacy of the Great Society?
Sadly, I believe it is. I believe these programs were never meant to rectify problems but to increase dependency on government, all for political gain. Through the Great Society, the government created this economic plantation where the only real “benefits” are the electoral votes keeping the subsistence providers in power.
The government and its policies are destroying individual industriousness in order to promote individual subjugation and subservience. As a conservative, I believe in providing a safety net because I know there are those who are not as fortunate. But it shouldn’t be a handout. It should be a hand up.
When I revisit my neighborhood in Atlanta, I see the blight facing most urban neighborhoods: Section 8 housing, food stamps, EBT card signs, and the breakdown of the family. Of all the consequences of the Great Society programs and the War on Poverty, intended or otherwise, the destruction of the black family has been the most disastrous. More than 70 percent of black children are born outside of marriage. That is an epidemic. And if you take into account the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s statistics that close to three hundred thousand black babies are aborted annually, are we looking at racial genocide?
The brilliant idea for this tragedy came from the progressive socialists of the Johnson administration who thought government should provide welfare payments to women who purposely had children out of wedlock and did not seek to get married or have a male living in the same home.
In other words, the Johnson administration was promoting the disintegration of the moral fiber of the black community. Furthermore, the government would send out social workers to inspect the households and ensure there were no males residing in the home, because if there were, the benefits would be cut off. As long as women remained single, they could stay on these programs and receive free health care, housing, and babysitting services for life.
The most dangerous consequence of President Johnson’s misguided policy is the abdication of individual responsibility in the black community. In 2010 the story of thirty-seven-year-old Angel Adams from Tampa, Florida, came to light. She has had fifteen children by three different men. Any sign of an adult male presence in her household? Of course not. Adams’s famous quote should reverberate across America: “Someone’s gonna pay for me and all my kids.” Her story reflects the loss of individual responsibility not just among black women in urban areas but clearly among black men as well.
Now 60 percent of black children grow up in fatherless homes. There are some eight hundred thousand black men behind bars, and black men as a group have a one-in-three chance of serving time in prison at some point in their lives. And almost half of young black men in America’s inner cities are neither working nor in school. As of April 2013, the reported black unemployment rate was nearing 14 percent; black teen unemployment was more than 30 percent. Black median family income is down, and approximately 32 percent of blacks live below the poverty line. Black businesses represent only 9 percent of start-ups in America.
This is social Armageddon.
Yet the so-called black leaders, nearly all of them Democrats, refuse to identify the true cause of these horrible statistics. And they give President Obama a pass. Even the former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, Emanuel Cleaver II, essentially admitted that African-American members of Congress hold Obama to a lower standard because the president is black. Regarding the disastrous level of African-American unemployment, Cleaver stated: “If we had a white president we’d be marching around the White House.” Cleaver said, “The president knows we are going to act in deference to him in a way we wouldn’t to someone white.”
How is that not racist? Should not the same standard be held for any leader? Has the black progressive leadership become so corrupt that it will sacrifice its own community for political gain?
And to think there are those who castigate Booker T. Washington as an Uncle Tom because he advocated self-reliance.
I find it reprehensible that some are willing to lead my people down the road to perdition rather than the road to success. If my own community never rises to the level of exceptionalism that other groups have been able to achieve, our nation will never achieve its full potential. America can never be any better or greater than the sum of its parts, and the black community is an integral part.
When Booker T. Washington talked about education, self-reliance, and entrepreneurship, he was describing economic independence. But the Great Society has left a legacy of economic dependence, a new form of slavery, and to me, a far more dangerous one, because it destroys the will and determination to excel. As President Franklin Roosevelt said, welfare is “a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.” And that is what I see when I go back to the ol’ Fourth Ward and drive along Boulevard.
As historian Allen J. Matusow concluded, “The War on Poverty was destined to be one of the greatest failures of twentieth-century liberalism.”
Since the mid-1960s, this nation has spent some sixteen trillion American taxpayer dollars on means-tested government income redistribution programs—in other words, welfare. Yet we have seen an increase in Americans on food stamps and in poverty, and the workforce participation rate is at its lowest since the Carter administration. The Great Society has turned out to be a big lie, and sadly, those in my community who bought into it are stuck on the twenty-first-century plantation.
Yet those of us in the black community who speak out are attacked. We are not just American ronin, but black ronin, lonely warriors who are shunned. Regardless, we remain the true guardians of our community and its conservative roots. We are the descendants of Booker T. Washington and will relentlessly defend his honor, vision, and belief in the self-reliance of our black community. We are proud and determined, and we shall not be silenced.
Chapter 10
THE HUNT FOR BLACK CONSERVATIVES
I always knew it would have to be a black president who was approved by the elites and the media, because anybody that they didn’t agree with, they would take apart.
—SUPREME COURT JUSTICE CLARENCE THOMAS
On February 25, 2012, the headline read: “West: I’m Black by Birth Not by Choice” and it was front and center on a blog called Freewoodpost.com. The story covered an interview I supposedly gave John King on CNN. It featured quotes in which I appeared to reject my black identity and admit shame about who I was. It included a really oddball photo of me as well.
You can imagine the outrage and hate e-mails sent my way. Old friends still serving in the military called in disbelief. Even my own relatives picked up the phone to ask, “How could you?”
The only problem is, it never happened. There was never an interview with John King on CNN, and the so-called quotes had no quotation marks. But way, way, way at the end of the “story,” there was a little disclaimer indicating that this website’s content was purely satire. Now, how many people do you think noticed the disclaimer, let alone read it? And do you think either CNN or John King took the time to step forward and dispute the story or call out Freewoodpost.com?
Nah! Of course not.
The point of the Freewoodpost.com piece was to attack my character and, in the words of Justice Thomas, take me apart. I’ve lost count of the stories attacking my honorable service in the military and characterizing me as a war criminal—despite my honorable discharge. Because I like to ride a motorcycle and I occasionally wrote columns for an enthusiasts’ magazine, I’ve been called a misogynist. It’s frankly appalling. But if you read Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, you’ll see this is ta
ctic number twelve: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Tactic twelve has been enthusiastically employed by the white liberal media and their black gatekeepers. The sad thing is, these shenanigans really seem to work—and what does that say about the general population?
I remember how in the film The Hunt for Red October, the US and Soviet Atlantic submarine fleets were seeking a state-of-the-art submarine. Now it’s “the Hunt for Black Conservatives.” We are relentlessly pursued by the entire fleet of liberal progressive media and elites. And their target is not limited to modern conservatives. For generations liberal historians have tried to destroy the legacy of Booker T. Washington. Why is it that any philosophy in the black community that differs from the established liberal canon is viciously attacked?
In 2013 a plainspoken yet astonishing man by the name of Benjamin Carson dared to break a taboo at the National Prayer Breakfast. In the presence of His Majesty President Barack Hussein Obama (and with cameras rolling), this brilliant pediatric neurosurgeon had the guts to challenge the dogma of the “community organizer” and question his brand of progressive socialism. Not surprisingly, after Dr. Carson’s comments were broadcast across the nation, the hunt was on. Carson was immediately attacked and scrutinized for simply exercising his right to free speech.
However, what I find most disconcerting about this and other attacks on black conservatives is the manner in which the black community itself stands by and does nothing when white liberal progressives demean conservative blacks. In fact, some black folks even promote it.
During my reelection campaign in 2012, the opposition ran an advertisement depicting me with a gold tooth and boxing gloves punching white women, including a senior citizen, and stealing money from black families. Now, imagine if conservatives had run an advertisement like that against a black Democratic member of Congress? You wouldn’t hear the end of it. In my case, however, there was no outcry from the usual suspects, such as Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, or Ben Jealous. As a matter of fact, when NAACP Senior Vice President for Advocacy and Washington Bureau Chief Hilary O. Shelton was asked about the advertisement in a TV interview, he replied, “I thought they made him look rather nice in a suit.” Excuse me?
