Racial Gerrymandering and Black Victimhood Profiteering

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Exploiting race for political and financial advantage has a long history. Black “leaders” like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton made their living by promoting black victimhood and white guilt. Jackson spent his career shaking down big-name corporations with threats and boycotts if they did not do his bidding in the name of “racial justice.” Rush Limbaugh described Jackson and Sharpton as the “Justice Brothers.” They were anything but in the business of justice. Patrisse Khan-Cullors, the co-founder of Black Lives Matter, “went on a real estate buying binge, snagging four high-end homes for $3.2 million in the US alone, according to property records.” (Source)

The new “everything is racist” mantra is being used to keep racial Gerrymandering alive. For decades, congressional districts have been drawn to ensure that mostly Democrat Black candidates would win elections because of their race. Now that’s racist! Consider this map from Louisiana:

The Louisiana v. Callais “case focused on a lawsuit led by the NAACP demanding Louisiana create a second majority-black congressional district. What they were really after was forcing the red state to draw up another Democrat seat. Lower courts helped them do just that. The plaintiffs argued that just one majority-black district was a violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. As The American Spectator described it, the section established ‘affirmative action for black Democrat politicians.’” (Source)

The American Spectator’s Scott McKay wrote. “The Congressional Black Caucus has been the repository of crooks, dopes, communists, and reprobates on a scale unmatched by any other, for the express reason that the districts producing the Star Wars cantina-scene cast of characters that make up that caucus are protected.”

Playing the race card is about keeping the Democrat Party in power by keeping Black people under the heel of the Party. The creation of welfare programs for Blacks and poor whites has kept these groups dependent on and empowered by the Democrat Party while the Party’s leaders get rich.

Thomas Sowell argues that the expansion of the welfare state in the 1960s significantly harmed Black families by undermining family structure and incentivizing single parenthood. He contends that before the Great Society programs, in the 1960s, 22% of Black children were raised by a single parent, but by 1985, that figure rose to 67%, which he attributes to welfare policies that financially discouraged marriage and father involvement.

Black victimhood is big business. It’s an old story. Booker T. Washington (1865-1915) warned of such people within the black community in his 1911 book My Larger Education. He described them as “problem profiteers”:

There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.

Washington could have had in view, although writing more than a hundred years ago, black people who rail against a black conservative like the late Herman Cain or any Black conservative. Cain didn’t present himself as a victim, and this disturbed people like Al Sharpton. Cain lived at a time when there were “colored” water fountains, segregated schools and neighborhoods, and racial discrimination that few people today can imagine. If anyone had a right to play the victim card, it was Cain. He didn’t feel sorry for himself. He stayed out of trouble, worked hard, and made something of himself without the help of a cadre of “poverty pimps.”

Black people are not immune from victimizing other Blacks people. Black-on-black crime is real, and so is white-on-white crime, but there is a distinct disproportionality of such crimes among Black people. In 2024, there were 8,158 Black murder victims and 6,753 white murder victims in the United States. African Americans experienced a homicide victimization rate of 28.4 per 100,000, which is nearly nine times higher than that of White Americans.

Washington continues with a story that encapsulates what is wrong with so many black “leaders” and their guilt-ridden white supporters, which shows up in other areas.

A story told me by a coloured man in South Carolina will illustrate how people sometimes get into situations where they do not like to part with their grievances. In a certain community there was a coloured doctor of the old school, who knew little about modern ideas of medicine, but who in some way had gained the confidence of the people and had made considerable money by his own peculiar methods of treatment. In this community there was an old lady who happened to be pretty well provided with this world’s goods and who thought that she had a cancer. For twenty years she had enjoyed the luxury of having this old doctor treat her for that cancer. As the old doctor became — thanks to the cancer and to other practice — pretty well-to-do, he decided to send one of his boys to a medical college. After graduating from the medical school, the young man returned home, and his father took a vacation. During this time the old lady who was afflicted with the “cancer” called in the young man, who treated her; within a few weeks the cancer (or what was supposed to be the cancer) disappeared, and the old lady declared herself well.

When the boy’s father returned and found the patient standing perfectly well, he was outraged. He called the young man before him and said the following.

“My son, I find that you have cured that cancer case of mine. Now, son, let me tell you something. I educated you on that cancer. I put you through high school, through college, and finally through the medical school on that cancer. And now you, with your new ideas of practicing medicine, have come here and cured that cancer. Let me tell you, son, you have started all wrong. How do you expect to make a living practicing medicine in that way?”

I am afraid that there is a certain class of race problem solvers who don’t want the patient to get well because, if the disease holds out, they not only have an easy means of making a living but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public.

If the patient gets well, an entire industry of victimhood will get cancer and die. This would be the best thing for Black communities. Until Black people throw off the shroud of victimhood, they will be at the mercy of “doctors” who treat a self-inflicted cancer that only makes the doctors rich. Of course, white victimhood is also real.

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Source: https://americanvision.org/posts/racial-gerrymandering-and-black-victimhood-profiteering/