The Voting Myth Exposed and Debunked ~ Racism In the Two-Party System

The Voting Myth Exposed and Debunked ~ Racism In the Two-Party System

One day, in a perfect world, people will conduct research before they post on social media and make personal declarations. They will take time to put what they read into proper context. But for now, you guys have me.

Stop posting that only 12 percent of Black voters turned out in Texas. The truth is that Black voter turnout was almost record-breaking — more than doubling the mid-term average for the last decade.

The 12 percent that everyone is talking about is actually the percentage representation of the Black vote in the total turn out, not the percentage of Blacks that turned out.

The estimation is that more than 61 percent of Blacks in Texas voted (remarkable).

What you will see in the pictures I have included is how the vote played out and the fact that when a people who make up only 12 percent of the population vote for their interests (at least based on what is being offered — The lesser of two evils), but those interests are in direct opposition to the interests of the people who make up close to 60 percent of the population, the chances of winning are… well, you do the math.

I would rather focus on a group like the Asians, who make up only six percent of the population, but now have the highest earning medium and are closing the wealth gap on whites.

Stop beating up on each other and turn that energy outward.

Over the past decade, there has been a noticeable pattern of blaming Blacks for the performance of Democrats at the voting poles. No one is willing to examine the fact Democrats have produced no new political strategies that would be conducive to producing political and social change. They have primarily run on a platform in which they point their fingers at Republicans and scream racists and hope for the best.

Support the work of The Odyssey Project!

Let’s examine the mathematics of the proposed equation in which Blacks who fail to vote are the reason Democrats are not performing well in recent years. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Blacks make up 14 percent of the U.S. Population, of that 14 percent approximately 12 percent are eligible to vote. Now explain to me how a national election is controlled by 12 percent of the vote.

In local elections, where redistricting has not diluted the Black vote, you can see more of an impact, but it is still highly localized to representatives that represent a particular district. Any elections in which all citizens are voting marginalizes the Black vote. It is simple mathematics.

Get your signed copy of Born in Captivity: Psychopathology as a Legacy of Slavery!

While there is no shortage of propaganda that over-exaggerates the power of the Black vote, the truth is — despite all the lies that have been told — Blacks did not put Barack Obama in office. They contributed, but without a strong White and Hispanic swing and turnout, it would not have been possible. The math simply does not add up.

The failure of Blacks to develop a lucid perspicacity of the current two-party system has led to us being immensely vulnerable to highly fallible philosophies that place the blame of the Black condition on the failure Blacks to vote. Most Blacks cannot even explain how we moved from being predominantly Republican at the end of slavery to being almost 90 percent Democrats now. To understand this system and how it works against us, you have to go all the way back to the immediate aftermath of the civil war, specifically the first 12 years, which is commonly referred to as the Reconstruction Era.

If I were to tell you that the South actually won the Civil War, you would likely tell me that I am crazy, but that is what Reconstruction was all about. While the Confederate military surrendered, the South kept fighting through clandestine groups like the Ku Klux Klan. These groups conducted relentless raids on Union military installations in the South — causing damages and even loss of life. Eventually, the Union withdrew from the South and things slowly returned to the way they were — with the exception of chattel slavery, which reemerged as slavery by another name over and over. This pattern of finding new ways to enslave Blacks, especially Black men, continued up to at least 1944 and reemerged in the 1990s — introducing a new era referred to as the New Jim Crow.

In essence, Reconstruction was the covert continuation of the Civil War — lasted an entire 12 years after the war supposedly ended.

While the Whites in the South were never able to completely restore the genteel antebellum society that had been destroyed during the war, they were able to reclaim their independence. Once White in the South had reclaimed their “honor” and independence, they determined that recently freed slaves did not possess the maturity to experience political and economic freedom, so the suppression of the rights of Blacks became common through local and state laws, as well as social practices. This was also the point in which White privilege emerged by way of these new laws and social policies.

There were laws known as Black Codes. “Black codes were restrictive laws designed to limit the freedom of African Americans and ensure their availability as a cheap labor force after slavery was abolished during the Civil War. Though the Union victory had given some 4 million slaves their freedom, the question of freed blacks’ status in the postwar South was still very much unresolved. Under black codes, many states required blacks to sign yearly labor contracts; if they refused, they risked being arrested, fined and forced into unpaid labor.”

Get your signed copy of The Mis-Education of Black Youth in America!

There was also convict leasing, which was a system of penal labor practiced in the Southern United States. Convict leasing provided prisoner labor to private parties, such as plantation owners and corporations (e.g. Tennessee Coal and Iron Company). The lessee was responsible for feeding, clothing, and housing the prisoners. Convict leasing was the predecessor to the current Private Prison Industrial Complex that drives current-day mass incarceration, in which Black males are disproportionately affected.

There would be other machinations levied against the Blacks, including redlining, urban renewal, benign neglect, and gentrification — all forms of serial forced displacement. The negative repercussions of serial forced displacement are still being felt by the Black collective.

What Blacks fail to see is that the system was never created for us to win. In fact, it was created to protect White wealth and White power after its source, free Black labor, ended in its current form. While we are told that we are in the position we are in because we fail to vote, that simply is not true. It is a mathematical impossibility to vote ourselves into a position of power when those who oppose that position outnumber us a minimum of five to one.

The truth is that Blacks have not fared well under any party. We have suffered under Democrats as well as Republicans. We are intent on asking and begging others to do for us what only we can do for ourselves.

Asians make up only six percent of the national population, but they have the highest earning median (even higher than Whites). Additionally, they are rapidly closing the median wealth gap between them and Whites. The truth is that while the reality surrounding these facts is more complex than it appears on the surface, it is still a reality.

In my book, Born in Captivity: Psychopathology as a Legacy of Slavery, I go to great lengths to touch on the cultural dysfunction that lends itself to the ease at which the Black collective is misled. Despite no improvement over the last 50 years, Blacks still believe that voting is the answer. The truth is that our condition has worsened since the Voting Rights Act passed — to the point in which it is projected that the median wealth for Blacks will fall to zero by 2053 — rendering us completely irrelevant. That means that the majority of us will likely experience this as it progresses.

The economic condition of Black America is something well within our control and does not require front-end participation in the political process (voting). It requires the development of a spending and economic agenda that supports Black business development, Black education, and Black health, physically and mentally. We are in need of a Black Code of Conduct and a highly specific Strategic Blueprint facilitated by specific protocols that govern our responses to adverse action by others.

There are some who erroneously postulate that Jim Crow Segregation was ended by Black voting. The fall of Jim Crow is what actually created a softer environment for the Black civil rights movement. The fall of Jim Crow began before the voting rights act was passed. It was not voting that toppled Jim Crow, it was Blacks fighting back by hurting the pockets or racists.

Actually, desegregation and the end of Jim Crow didn’t come from the Black vote, because Blacks in much of the south weren’t being allowed to vote when Jim Crow began to crumble. It came from physical agitation that was seen on television around the world — sullying the image of superior morality that the U.S.  presented to the world. Basically, the U.S. was embarrassed into moving away from those laws and social behaviors.

The answer is actually a simple mathematical equation when it comes to the vote.

This is what I can tell you based on actual evidence and not feelings or emotions: Since the voting rights act was passed over 50 years ago, the condition of the Black collective has consistently worsened. The wealth gap is still widening. Mass incarceration reached an all-time high a couple of years ago, and the public education system failed us and is currently falling apart. Gentrification has produced a consistent force of serial forced displacement across the country — disproportionately impacting Blacks. Harlem isn’t even Black anymore. This is despite Blacks voting in record numbers in 2008 and the election of a two-term Black president.

I can go on. While the talented 10th have fared well, the other 90 percent has sunken deeper, all while rocking the vote.

Despite a record turnout at the polls by Blacks in this key election, all key state and national races in which Blacks thought a new “Black” face or White friend would overtake the White Republican incumbent, the opposite happened. I have studied this political system for three decades going all the way back to before slavery ended and it has never favored Blacks. Everything we thought we have gained has been eventually taken back through the reworking and renaming of the rules and policies.

Politicians have never delivered on any promise to facilitate Black progression, or we would not be regressing. Also, Democrats have reached a point in which they take the Black vote for granted because we never demand anything in return for our vote. For a race of people who are constantly talking about how valuable our vote is and how the blood of our ancestors rests on our vote, it amazes me that we still give it away for free during every election. We never demand anything in return. The Republicans are learning from the strategy that Trump used to gain office and they have decided that they no longer even need the Black vote. This is how Ted Cruz won his election battle in Texas. Republicans (right-wing) and Democrats (left-wing) belong to the same bird (Elitism & Classism) being guarded by racism.

Another fallible idea is that Democrats are, somehow, not racist and have the best interest of Blacks in hand. The truth is that the disintegration of the Black family was facilitated through the Johnson Administration despite the president, his staff, and Democrats in the house being warned by Daniel Patrick Moynihan that social programs would destroy and disenfranchise the Black family. I would suggest reading The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, more affectionately referred to as the Moynihan Report. The Democrats had the opportunity to underwrite the Black family by creating government jobs to hire Black men — empowering them to take care of their families. This is doing a time when Black male unemployment was approaching 50 percent. Despite the warning of how destructive social programs like housing and welfare would be to the Black family, Democrats chose to take on the role of the Black male, alienating him in the Black home.

In the 1990s, the Democrats struck again with weighted sentencing that disproportionately impacted Black males and serving as the catalyst for the mass incarceration epidemic. The reverberations of this move by Bill Clinton are still being felt. When you study the plight and condition of Blacks from 1865 to now, you will find that we have made no significant progress. This will continue to be the case until we take ownership of our problems and stop asking others to fix them for us, especially when fixing our problems doesn’t serve their interest.

In simple, we don’t understand how things work, and this lacking a lucid perspicacity of our reality has led to the constant mishandling of our people.

The hostility that I have observed between my people on the topic of whether or not to vote is problematic. We have to learn to be disagreeable without being harsh in our disagreements. The question is what are we doing between votes? What paths are we creating to facilitate growth and progression in building an economic center that will provide the political clout we so desperately need?

Our issue is not with who is in office, it is with what we are not doing to improve our own condition. We are not preparing our youth. I created the Black Men Lead rite of passage initiative to help prepare young Black males to perform in the best interest of our people across the board, beginning in the home and community. Yet, the program is almost completely self-funded because Blacks don’t support Blacks. I work with a network of activists who collect and disseminate vital information, but we cannot get consistent support to build our own media outlet. In my book, The Mis-education of Black Youth in America, I point to our failure to holistically educate our youth in a way that prepares and empowers them to go out into a world that is inherently hostile toward them and not only compete but win. Yet, we are dragging our feet in taking the holistic education of our youth seriously.

Question: Would you go to the mall looking for a specific item and find that no store has it, subsequently deciding to buy something that not only works for you but will likely be harmful? Well, that is exactly what you do when you cast your vote for the lesser of two evils.

I could go on and on, but my hope is that this article will entice you to dig deeper and develop and a better understanding of how things work, to look beyond the surface. I have linked to numerous sources to get you started.

There is an old African proverb that states, “If there is no enemy within, the enemy on the outside can do us no harm.” It is the enemy on the inside that most concern me about the Black condition. ~ Rick Wallace, Ph.D., Psy.D.

---

Support the Black Men Lead rite of passage program for young Black males at https://www.theodysseyproject21.top/black-men-lead or you can contribute directly through the Cash app at $TheOdysseyProject21