Byron Donalds Entertains Trump Voters With Fractured Jim Crow Fairy Tales
Truly pathetic.
When filming the wonderful “Good Morning” number from Singin’ in the Rain, Debbie Reynolds tap-danced so hard her feet bled into her shoes (although Gene Kelly ultimately used the first take out of 40). Far less impressive is Republican House Rep. Byron Donalds’ endless shuffle ball change as he auditions for the thankless role of convicted felon Donald Trump’s vice president.
Tuesday, a Black voter outreach event was held for the convicted felon, where The Philadelphia Inquirer reports, Donalds raved about the good old days Black families enjoyed during the Jim Crow South.
“You see, during Jim Crow, during Jim Crow, the Black family was together. During Jim Crow, more Black people were not just conservative — Black people have always been conservative-minded — but more Black people voted conservatively,” Donalds said, while his ancestors shook their heads.
Black people have never voted “conservative” in significant numbers. They supported Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party, which was distinctly progressive. The 1860 Republican Party platform was aggressively anti-slavery. After the Civil War, the Republican Party advanced equal rights for the formerly enslaved through Reconstruction, which white Southern conservatives actively opposed and undermined. Even by 1934, the party’s platform declared:
For seventy years the Republican Party has been the friend of the American Negro. Vindication of the rights of the Negro citizen to enjoy the full benefits of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is traditional in the Republican Party, and our party stands pledged to maintain equal opportunity and rights for Negro citizens. We do not propose to depart from that tradition nor to alter the spirit or letter of that pledge.
If Donalds means that many Black people are “conservative-minded” about taxes or even criminal justice, that’s not entirely untrue. However, he’s probably watched enough Fox News to realize that the network’s programming isn’t devoted to lengthy discussions about free trade. “Conservative” has historically meant preserving white Christian male dominance. That either involves zealously defending the status quo or, whenever marginalized group make any measurable progress, regressively restoring the preferred norm. Conservatism is men in red shirts or red hats forcibly imposing their will.
Of course, you could argue that Black people “voted conservatively” during Jim Crow in the sense that they weren’t able to vote much at all. White conservatives collectively kept Black people from the ballot box through poll taxes, literacy tests, and violent intimidation. Sure, these racists were pretty sadistic and probably considered riding around in white hoods, setting crosses on fire, a good time, but that’s still a lot of effort if you believed Black people would willingly vote the “right” way.
Twisted racial history
Donalds went on to parrot the vile right-wing myth that President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society wrecked the Black family.
“And then H.E.W. [Health, Education, and Welfare], Lyndon Johnson — you go down that road, and now we are where we are.” Donalds willfully ignores the truly destructive impact Republican Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan would have on the growing Black middle class and Black families in general.
These are all lies, of course. Black families in the Jim Crow South lived under constant threat of white (and thus state-sanctioned) violence. Even on the best days, Black families endured Jim Crow’s constant dehumanizing oppression. Donalds should read these accounts from Black people who lived through Jim Crow … better yet, he should physically experience, on a deep visceral level, what they did before opening his mouth again.
A “white only” sign above the only bus or train depot entrance in a thunderstorm, with your mama getting soaked, holding a shoebox full of food because restaurants serve "white only” …
We could buy everything in the dimestore but a soda or a burger from the same dimestore's lunch counter. All hotel rooms were "white only". We watched movies from the segregated "colored" balcony of the theaters. People were beaten and killed or just disappeared because voting was for "whites only". A "white only" ambulance couldn't respond to a "colored" emergency, so local "colored" funeral homes provided this service to our community, though they had no medical training.
Most horrendous of all is the still unsolved murder of Wharlest Jackson, whose truck was bombed as he drove home from work, having been recently moved from custodial duties to "a white man's job" of painting tires at the plant. Oh, the murders, all over Mississippi.
Wharlest Jackson was born in 1929, the same year as my eldest aunt. This was not ancient history. Jackson was a Korean War veteran and dared imagine that the freedom he’d fought for could apply to him. He was married with five children. That all seems very “conservative-minded.” He’d worked at the Armstrong Rubber and Tire Company for 12 years when he was promoted to a position that white men believed belonged to them. His wife had even begged him not to accept the promotion because it was “understood” that Black people couldn’t have management jobs. However, the extra pay would allow his wife to stay home with their kids. That’s also something conservatives claim to support.
Jackson immediately started receiving death threats, and on February 27, 1967, when he used the turn blinker in his truck, he set off a car bomb. He died instantly. His eight-year-old son, who bears his name, found his body. “When I made it to him, he was lying in the street,” his son said. “His shoe was blown off and the truck was mangled.”
Wharlest Jackson tried to pursue what conservatives consider the “American dream,” but as Richard Pryor said, “Y’all killed dreams.” That’s what Byron Donalds wants us to believe was preferable to welfare, socialized medicine, and drag queens roaming free.
Fortunately, Democratic House Leader (and future House Speaker) Hakeem Jeffries didn’t let Donalds’ shameful shuck-and-jive stand.
“It has come to my attention that a so-called leader has made the factually inaccurate statement that Black folks were better off during Jim Crow,” Jeffries said. “That’s an outlandish, outrageous and out-of-pocket observation."
“We were not better off when a young boy named Emmett Till could be brutally murdered without consequence because of Jim Crow,” he added. “We were not better off when Black women could be sexually assaulted without consequence, because of Jim Crow. We were not better off when people could be denied the right to vote without consequence because of Jim Crow. How dare you make such an ignorant observation? You better check yourself before you wreck yourself.”
Donalds has predictably backtracked and claimed in full remarks you can find elsewhere that he never said what he actually said.
“They are lying ... What I said was that you had more Black families under Jim Crow and it was the Democrat policies under H.E.W., under the welfare state, that did help to destroy the Black family.”
He doesn’t call out mass incarceration or crack in the neighborhoods. Instead, he blames milk for hungry children. He ignores that white conservatives had smeared and disparaged the Black family throughout Jim Crow. He insists that the Black family is “broken,” when our families have long been our strength. That’s all deliberate. As Biden-Harris campaign spokesperson Sarafina Chitika pointed out, Donalds’ “Black voter outreach” took place in one of Philadelphia’s white neighborhoods. Byron Donalds would eagerly dishonor Wharlest Jackson’s memory if it advanced his political career. He’s just gonna keep shuffling along to the same tired tune.
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When Donalds is talking about black families and "LBJ's H.E.W." he's indirectly citing Daniel Patrick Moynihan's famous/infamous white paper, written for the LBJ admin. on "The Negro Family." He's also mangling it. It's true that Moynihan attributed Black poverty to unstable/female headed families - that accounts for its fame and its infamy. But everything else in the paper contradicts Donalds' thesis.
First, HEW was formed in 1953 - the Eisenhower administration - not during LBJ's. Second, Donalds is obliquely referring to the "Welfare" part of HEW, meaning Aid to Families with Dependent Children, which was established in 1935. (The date of its establishment is a clue as to who the primary beneficiaries of AFDC were; White folks, who've always outnumbered Blacks on the "welfare" rolls.) Moynihan does not say "welfare" is a cause of unstable Black families. In Part III of the paper, titled "The Roots of the Problem" the root is
Slavery. (I set this apart just the way Moynihan's paper did, a one word "paragraph" under the chapter heading.)
The first full paragraph states: "The most perplexing question abut American slavery, which has never been altogether explained, and which indeed most Americans hardly know exists, has been stated by Nathan Glazer as follows: 'Why was American slavery the most awful the world has ever known?' The only thing that can be said with certainty is that this is true: it was.'" Moynihan goes on to show a lot of reasons American slavery was the worst that ever existed - much worse, for example, than Brazilian slavery.
Of course, one of the main horrors of enslavement was that the children of enslaved people were also enslaved. Another horror is that Black families were routinely broken up when enslaved spouses and children were sold to different slave-drivers. This, and the astounding lack of human dignity accorded to the enslaved (astounding even compared to slavery in other countries, like Brazil) - an indignity compounded by almost 100 years of segregation - is basically why Moynihan said Black families were unstable.
Today, this is part of what we mean by "systemic racism." For centuries Blacks have lacked the ability to acquire generational wealth, and generate the social capital that Whites can. There's more to systemic racism than this, but to me, anyway, this is the undeniable core of Black inequality today, also known as "the lingering effects of slavery and segregation."
Finally, I note that Moynihan's paper came out in 1965, when LBJ had been president for just over a year, and before any of his Great Society programs, so Moynihan was clearly not blaming LBJ, or even Democratic policies in general, for Black poverty.
Sorry this is so long, but though I'm a White guy, I've been thinking about this longer than Donalds has been alive. (I can even recite conservative claptrap better than Donalds, an unfortunate by-product of caring about the issue.)
Isn't Donalds himself a convicted felon (with an expunged record)? Is the GOP really going to wind up with two felons on the ticket?
I guess Donalds is saying that our welfare policies have disincentives for keeping families intact--e.g., a higher payout if there are two earning spouses in the household compared to a single parent--so I guess we should all eagerly anticipate the slate of welfare reforms he is proposing to ensure that families on welfare can still receive adequate assistance without any disincentives towards keeping two spouses in the household. I'm not holding my breath, though....
And it might surprise Donalds to know but most black Americans are not on welfare, and are definitely better off than they were under Jim Crow, and that the end of Jim Crow and the creation of laws that opened up a lot of jobs to black people that they couldn't get before is due to liberals passing such laws, that were opposed by conservative heroes like Reagan and Goldwater (while Nixon was no prize on racial issues as POTUS, he did at least support the civil rights act, unlike his parties dipshit nominee in '64). But I guess Donalds cannot credit liberals for anything, so he has to engage in this absurd fiction that black families were better off in Jim Crow times. You know, when they weren't caught in sundown towns, or accidentally made eye contact with a white person on the sidewalk, or forgot their place and sat in the wrong part of the bus even after coming home from fighting for this country in WWII.