Think123 has a great comment over at FSP.
The black middle class exists today only because of massive and liberal government intervention. The Great Society, bringing forth civil rights and affirmative action, ranks right up there with the Civil War as a liberating force for black people in America.
It created justice where there was none.
The urban riots of the 1960’s forced us to put aside our political ideologies and do what had to be done. I was a corporate manager at the time and was ordered to add a quota black person to our all white sales force and fill out a lot of paperwork regarding the racial mix in our Fortune 500 business- it seemed so draconian at the time.
Looking back, it was the only way it would have happened. Not because we were racists, but because we were interested in maximum sales and profits- social justice was not on our radar, just meeting our sales goals. We were white guys selling to a white businesss world. Thank God the Government broke up our little club.
The guiding force for the grand scheme of the New Society was not liberal/intellectual/noble/bleeding heart enlightenment, but rather the necessity of fulfilling the basic Constitutional duty to “insure domestic tranquility”. The cities were burning, and the people doing the burning had a legitimate beef.
That is why I get so frustrated when I hear Republicans badmouth the New Deal or the Great Society. It is so easy to forget the lessons of the past.
Many of our young conservative have been led astray into believing that which is good is bad, and vice versa.
So, as we celebrate Black History month, marvel at the black middleclass, luxuriate in domestic tranquility; just remember – everything that made that all possible is now at issue within the ranks of the Republican Party.
It has become fashionable to badmouth affirmative action- the concept that in a White World racial integration still needs to be mandated, or we fall back to the natural state of things where blacks are disadvantaged.
GOP leaders go to court seeking to put and end to racial favoritism. They want to return to the pure meritocracy we had prior to the riots. And we wonder why blacks don’t like the GOP.