Posted on 01/05/2002 5:24:58 AM PST by Check_Your_Premises
One of the columns holding up the left in this country and the democratic party as well is identity politics. The grandaddy of them all is the black "civil rights" movement.
Since the ideas from this movement provide the left with SUCH a strangle hold on our culture, not to mention a huge voting block for the democratic party, it obviously behooves us to kick out this crucial crutch of the left.
I think the a good way to do that is to go to the horses mouth and invite the black conservatives who frequent this site to tell us how you came to look past the mountain of leftist propaganda and to instead embrace conservatism.
I think such information would be useful, and could provide insight into how to attract other blacks home to the conservative philosophy.
Dec 18, 2001
Former Marine: A Minority of One Boosts the GOP's Majority
When the General Assembly convenes next month, it will be missing a family name that has been present for nearly a third of a century. William Robinson, Jr., who fol- lowed his father to the House of Delegates, will not return - a victim by his own hand and by the hand of a political neophyte and novelty, Winsome Sears. If her conduct as a legislator is anywhere near as interesting as her background, or the Davida-and-Goliath con- test she and Robinson fought for the 90th District seat, the Capitol press corps will not want for copy.
Ms. Sears will be not only the first black Republican woman lawmaker in the Assembly's history - a minority of one - she also will be the first foreign-born woman, and the only challenger to unseat a South Hampton Roads incumbent despite the 2000 redistricting, and the first black Republican to win in a black-majority district.
Born in Jamaica, Ms. Sears came with her parents to the U.S. at age 6. When she was 18 her grandmother, an instrumental part of her life, died. Recognizing then "that I needed discipline" - not an opinion one would expect from someone who had graduated early and with honors from Adlai Stevenson High School - she joined the Marines. ("You don't get respect there unless you dig your own ditch," she has said.) She became an electrician and a diesel mechanic. "You could smell me before you saw me," she said last month. "I'd be covered with diesel, but I always had my lipstick on."
After a three-year stint, she married a first lieutenant and they moved back to his hometown, Norfolk. In 1992 she earned an English degree from Old Dominion. She spent time in banking and as the director of a homeless shelter before moving on to Regent University for a graduate degree in organizational management. Somewhere in between she found time to raise three girls.
EXPERIENCE as a Leatherneck probably served her well in the contest against Robinson, which was not fought according to Marquess of Queensbury rules. She filed stalking charges against an outspoken Robinson supporter, Michael Muhammad, leader of the New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. A trial is pending. Muhammed thinks (a) that whites are devils (and has compared them to, um, excrement, which makes a heck of a combination) who are carrying out a genocidal conspiracy against blacks, and (b) that Jews are to blame for the state of affairs in government, the economy, and medical care, and the "jewspapers." (Pressed, Robinson disavowed Muhammad's views.)
Not that Ms. Sears played the shrinking violet. She hammered Robinson's record as a defense attorney in a leaflet calling attention to three cases in which he was accused of unethical or improper conduct. But she did not raise Robinson's other court problem, his chronic inability to manage his case schedule. In the words of a Times-Dispatch story:
Just weeks before the election a judge in Suffolk sentenced Robinson to five days in jail for contempt of court for failing to show up for a case because he had scheduled another case in another court. Robinson has appealed the sentence but spent one night in jail and still faces other contempt allegations in other courts.
The episode had to have hurt the Delegate, who ended up losing by 679 votes. And Ms. Sears surely benefitted from the $35,000 the Republican Party pumped into her campaign. But her own tenacity was a big factor. As John Cosgrove - GOP Party Chairman for the Fourth District and a fellow Delegate-elect - told another newspaper, "She was everywhere. I saw how hard she worked. She went house-to-house, talking to people and holding babies. She was out there in the housing projects campaigning. The Marine came out in Winsome Sears in this race."
THOUGH HER victory helps put the GOP within walking distance of a veto-proof majority, the leadership should not assume she is a partisan hack. Devoutly religious, she says she is a Christian first, a Republican second. She is open to exploring whether treatment serves drug addicts better than incarceration, and thinks school vouchers for poor children should pay the entire cost of tuition.
And she has not been a Republican forever. Conservatives might venerate Reagan; Ms. Sears found him disagreeable. It was Michael Dukakis' leviathan vision for government that caused the scales to fall from her eyes: "As I was listening to what he was saying, all the government programs he was proposing - I was thinking, 'I don't believe that.' And then it hit me: Oh my God, I'm a Republican. How am I going to tell my family?" She had been a "lazy Democrat," so she switched. "Black people always get the shaft when they back only one party."
Ms. Sears opposes abortion ("life comes from God"), believes "the first type of government is self-government," holds that public officials are servants first, thinks "money doesn't always solve the problem," and supports the right to bear arms. "There are over 2,000 gun laws on the books that need enforcing . . . .So if we enforce those laws, we [should] be ahead of the game." In answer to a candidate questionnaire about state spending she said schools, public safety, transportation, and health care should get more money because "everybody needs these." She would like to see agencies cooperate and pool their resources. And she would advise "giving tax incentives to businesses that engage in public-private partnerships."
With the state facing a revenue shortfall, spending more money in all those areas will prove a challenge even greater than the fight over the budget last session. Of that eyeball-to-eyeball battle, Delegate Robinson said the problem was "there is just too much testosterone."
Winsome Sears has done her part to fix that.
Only by demonstrating a committment to work within and on behalf of the black community instead of as token mouthpieces of it's perceived enemies, will Black Republicans develop some kind of authentic political base and lower the barrier of distrust.
I'm not black. I don't notice or care about skin color. I do notice if you are a decent human being or not. I judge people by their character, and I promise that's the honest to God truth.
What really bothers me is when I see blacks disown conservative blacks. They say, "They aren't really black". Or "They are token blacks". A conservative black person has no value as a human being unless they are "liberal blacks". This attitude infuriates me.
Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. The way I see it, conservatives care about human beings because they are human beings. Liberals care about blacks because they are black and need their vote. Do they really care about them, or are Liberals the modern day slave owners?
I'm very interested in reading the responses on this thread. I need an education on this topic.
Probably intelligence and a sense of values. Just like all the Purple, Orange and Green conservatives.
Great question. I hope I can answer it in a way that makes sense.
In my late teens, I heard someone say once that you can only get what you never had by doing what you have never done. Of course, this was referring to legal endeavors, not crime or anything like that.
For whatever reason, that statement stuck with me.
When I served in the military, I used to stay up late and watch Rush Limbaugh's TV program. I used it then as comic relief. I just thought the guy was funny as all get out. But after a month or so of just laughing, the things which he said began to make sense. But I wasn't ready to embrace conservatism, much less any Republican whatsoever. I was still in my Malcolm X, Jr. mode of thinking. Yeah, that's right. I blamed whitey for everything. If it rained during PT, it was whitey's fault. If my Frosted Flakes were stale or if I didn't have enough milk to eat them, it was whitey's fault.
I didn't know if I was mad because I was black, or if I was black because I was mad. So goes the mind of a 20 year old.
After I left the Army, I moved to Dallas with my sister. I met a wonderful woman who three years later would become my wife (and she still is). Her brother-in-law owned a limousine service, and I began working for him on a part-time basis.
It was on this job that I had a revelation of sorts. I was picking up someone at Dallas' Love Field. While I was waiting, I looked around the airport terminal at all of the shops therein. Roughly 95% of the business people coming off and going on the planes were whites. Yet, as I perused the terminal, all of the restaurants, newsstands, and shoe shine/barber shops employed blacks and Mexicans. Something about this picture didn't sit right with me. It became irritating to my psyche when I thought about it.
My next trip was to Dallas/Ft. Worth International. There I witnessed the same thing; white business people getting off and getting on the airplanes, and blacks and Mexicans in the service industry. For whatever reason, whenever I thought about this I became sad. Then it hit me. The people working in the service industries were healthy, had their faculties in order, and were capable. Why weren't they engaged in business instead of low-wage labor? The answer that came to me cut me like a knife: They, and you, chose the positions in life you find yourselves.
There was no denying it. The answer was true. From that moment on, listening to Jesse Jackson, Kweisi Mfume, Tavis Smiley, Al Sharpton, and Maxine Waters was not the same. Their words rang hollow. Once I realized that I was more responsible for my lot in life than anyone else, life changed dramatically. I didn't view myself as a victim anymore. I believed and knew that I was just as capable of doing what my heart desired as anyone else of whatever hue.
It was this that forced me to wholeheartedly reject the Democrat way of viewing the world. It wasn't easy. Always falling back on the excuse of the white man holding me back was difficult to give up because it provided a catch-all excuse for every failure of my life.
Later, as I defended my stance of being a Republican at my family reunions (you could have sworn that I had a Klansman hood on my head by the way I was treated by my own relatives), I became more bold and began to state my conservative views unapologetically.
Now, at the ripe old age of 30, my conservative reformation (if you will) has paid tremendous dividends. I am now a belligerent, cocky, self-confident individual in love with God, my wife and stepson, and the United States. I tell life that I'm real, raw, and will switch up and box it southpaw. Confidence is exhilarating when it comes from within, and not some sense of victimhood.
Ya heard? Good. Ya dig? Even better.
There's a ton more to this, but you have the Cliff's Notes version, and it should give you an accurate, although abbreviated version of my switch.
Love, peace, and chicken grease my people.
I had the same question.
Tokhtamish, you used the word "token" too. Could you explain the use of that word within your post please?
Do you like Tony Evans? I don't care how he votes. He atleast preaches Biblical conservative values and responsibility. I love that man. I can't wait to go down and visit his church. I was just curious about your opinion of him. It's ok if your opinion differs from mine. LOL
You can read the post that way, but I think it misses the intent of the poster. I would chalk it up to bad phrasing, however. I believe his (her?), intent was to repudiate the civil rights movement for the way in which it has been corrupted and diverted from its original, legitimate aims.
Originally, by the way, blacks were a staunch Republican voting bloc, which is one of the reasons why they were so thoroughly disenfranchised in areas under Democrat control. It wasn't until the Great Depression that blacks became a Democrat bloc.
So what exactly do you consider "working in and on behalf of the black community"? That to me still sounds like a demoncrat view since it paints blacks(and other minorities) as hapless victims who need saving. The black conservatives I have had the pleasure of dealing with have been outspoken, bright, and clear about thier positions on things. I think it's the "black community" that has thier ears closed and writes off thier conservative blacks as some kind of traitors. The sad thing is the people I know in the "black community" are probably more conservative on issues than many whites I know, yet they play traitor to thier own values by voting for the democratic party.
I moved cross country recently, leaving a close black friend behind. She was staunchly anti republican and conservative supposedly, but yet she was a homeschooler, strict Christian, hard working, etc. Yet she voted for a party(democrats) that would seek to restrict and even try to ban her right to educate her own children and who mock her strict religious values and her Savior incessantly. She voted out of some sense that this is how she was supposed to vote. I wish a mass reeducation would happen in this vibrant community who really deserve much better than the democrats have to offer.
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