The poll also revealed overwhelming opposition to Bush among African-Americans. Only two percent said they approved of his performance as president, the lowest level ever recorded in that category, NBC television reported.
How did it get to this point? For years, Republican leaders and cheerleaders have talked about how the Democratic Party doesn't really care about African-Americans. Sometimes, there were pretty solid examples of how Democrats have let down the black community, and it's been pointed out how the upper-echelon of the Democratic Party has very few black faces. So how is it that now only 2% of African-Americans in this country approve of a Republican president whose closest advisor on world affairs is herself a black woman?
When Kanye West made his infamous on-air statement that "George Bush doesn't care about black people," he foreshadowed, but certainly didn't cause, the poll results above. But after the city of New Orleans became a lake, the gap between the lofty ideals of George Bush's "ownership society" and the reality of the black community became too wide for anyone to ignore. People raising children in poverty without a car were chastised by rich white men in the government, on the radio, and on websites for their lack of responsibility. Our perceptions of looting became a lot more nuanced, and many of us saw elements of prejudice that have quietly existed about poor black communities for years.
For me, growing up in suburban Philadelphia, it was an accepted fact that the black neighborhoods in the city were too dangerous a place for us white suburbanites. Even my parents, who both grew up in inner cities and went to racially diverse high schools, would have never considered driving a car through West Philly after sunset. The fears in those days - the 70s and 80s - were not entirely unfounded, though. Crime was indeed much higher in those areas, and some in those communities considered themselves at war with white cops, and by extension, the greater white community.
Former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper, in his book "Breaking Rank", writes about investigating his fellow cops in the San Diego Police Department in the 70s:
By that point in the investigation I was no longer surprised by such frankness; most of the other cops had been equally forthright. And self-damning: thirty of the thirty-one personnel (including my lieutenant and two of his sergeants) admitted to using racial and ethnic slurs. African-Americans were niggers, boys, splibs, toads, coons, garboons, groids (from "negroid"), Sambos, Buckwheats, Rastuses, Remuses, jigaboos, jungle bunnies, and spooks.
The animosity between police and the black community throughout the past few decades was very real, but the conflict didn't devolve to the 1985 Move fire in Philadelphia and the 1992 riots in Los Angeles from racism alone. Crime statistics from the last few decades show that the homicide rate among black males is much higher than any other demographic. But it's how this statistic is misunderstood and misused by those on the right that makes it nearly impossible for many African-Americans to trust the Republican leadership any more.
To understand the reality of the numbers, see this study of crime from 1976 - 2002:
Black victims are greatly over represented in homicides involving drugs. Compared with the overall involvement of blacks as victims, blacks are less often the victims of sex-related homicides, workplace killings, and homicide by poison.
...
94% of black victims were killed by blacks
Here's a chart which shows the difference between drug crimes and other crimes.
For police forces like San Diego's, Richard Nixon's 1971 decision to escalate America's battle against the steady growth of illegal drug use in the 60s was a boon to those in uniform with a strong tendency to mistreat those in the black community. And naturally, as the risk involved with buying/selling drugs increased, it moved to parts of the city where those with the least to lose would get involved. In the poorest urban ghettos, drug markets were seen as a great (and sometimes only) opportunity to escape poverty.
Drug markets grew, and with the increase in profits came competition. Drug dealers fought each other over "turf," and black neighborhoods became the accepted venue for many who needed to score. This battle between the cops and the drug dealers, and the drug dealers and other drug dealers is what makes this statistic stand out so much. There are times when I wish I heard more from the leadership of the Democratic Party acknowledging this phenomenon when talking about the problems that the black communities in our countries face. But avoidance of the issue is not as bad as misinterpreting it.
Former drug czar Bill Bennett recently showed exactly how that's done when he said,
[I]f that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.
Bennett's role as drug czar was predicated on his ability to ignore that the black market for drugs is what causes most of the crime in those communities. And as a result, he has come to truly believe that black people are somehow genetically or culturally predisposed to shoot each other. There's no other explanation for him. He saw it with his own eyes shut.
In a recent column about the Million Man March, Mona Charen also throws her limited intellectual heft behind the right's campaign to be completely wrong about everything related to race in America:
The prisons are full of African-American youths. Some Farrakhan followers and others who are simply misinformed interpret this datum as evidence of racism in police departments and courts throughout the country.
Sadly, many in the black community don't need to be "informed" that there is still racism involved in law enforcement. They live it, they see it, and sometimes they even have to fight it. But the picture painted by those on the right is one where it's only crackpots in the black community who find racism in how they are dealt with by the police. For a good example of how far away they've drifted from reality, look at how some on the right view Chris Rock. Rock was praised in this Slate column for his conservative values:
Sub a few $10 words for some F bombs, and this material could almost have come out of the hallowed jowls of William F. Buckley Jr. Obviously not all of Rock's material has this bent--no decent comedian would limit himself to ribbing one side of the aisle. Rock has joked that joining a political party is like joining a gang; of his own political beliefs, he says on crime he's conservative, on prostitution he's liberal. But at bottom, there's no denying the right-leaning strain underlying his social commentary. Even his economic outlook is Republican: Black people, he says, would do well to take their money out of rims and put it into stocks.
Yet Rock has also said in an interview that he was once pulled over by cops for "being black on a sunny day." So long as conservatives stick their heads in the sand over this reality, few in the black community will buy their sales pitch about being the party of economic responsibility, even if George Bush hasn't already blown that in other ways.
But no discussion of the prevailing conservative view of the black community would be complete without looking at the O.J. trial. Only three years after the riots in L.A. where the Rodney King episode put the reality of inner city police work into living rooms across the country, it solidified the divide we have today. When the O.J. verdict was read, I was a junior at college, standing in the student union building. The black students gathered around the TV were jubilant. Depending on how one previously felt about issues like Rodney King and racial profiling in general, this reaction was either a vindication of past grievances or a clear message that homicide is not taken as seriously in the black community. And it did a lot to solidify the view among many that the statistics showing that homicide is more common among blacks comes from genetic or cultural differences. Even I was disappointed that I saw very little sympathy among the black community for the victims, and their families, of a crime that few could rationally say that O.J. Simpson wasn't responsible for.
Regardless, it's still only a distraction from the real issue that continues to create the genuine racial disparity in law enforcement. In Seattle, only 9 percent of the city's population is black, but blacks make up 64 percent of the drug arrests in the city. At a recent symposium on the drug war I attended, an official from the city's Public Defender's Office detailed a recent study that showed that open-air drug markets in white neighborhoods are mostly ignored by the police while those in black neighborhoods are targeted. This is the reality.
Going back to Mona Charen's column, she talks about what she sees as the real problem.
Among those who make up the 24.7 percent in poverty, the overwhelming majority are unmarried women and their children. Family structure is the alpha and omega of poverty in America. You can slice the statistical pie in a thousand ways and still come to the same conclusion. For example: In 1995, the poverty rate for married couple black families was about 8 percent. In the same year, the poverty rate for families headed by white single women was about 27 percent.
However, a significant part of those absentee dads are not just deadbeats, they are individuals in jail for drug possession, and other victims of a violent drug war that is also not waged as fervently against whites. Considering that children from single-parent homes are more likely to get involved with drugs, the problem compounds itself - even moreso when those on the right stay blind to its real causes, demanding that the black community pipe down about problems that make people in positions of authority look like they actually have work to do.
Finally, when it comes to the right going off the deep end with arguments not based in reality, we have to talk about Ann Coulter. Recently, Ann has been busy defending Bill Bennett's statement on aborting black babies. In doing so, she uses Steven Levitt's book Freakonomics as an example of how liberals are actually the ones who want to abort black babies. She hinted at this again at a recent appearance on Bill Maher. However, Steven Levitt is not a political partisan, and he makes it very clear in his book that he doesn't advocate abortion. He is instead just analyzing data, and he never says anything about race either. Ann shows exactly how far the wingnut mindset has devolved on this issue by implying that he does. In their world, if someone is talking about reducing crime, it can be assumed they are focused on reducing the number of black people. No other method would be quite as effective. The level of racism involved there is stunning.
I won't say that everyone on the right is as racist as Ann, even if she is serious about what she says, and not just pandering to a racist audience. Nor do I think that President Bush is racist or most of the members of his administration. But the right, in general, has a very serious problem with earning the trust of the black community right now and that is reflected in Bush's popularity among a group that he has had more support from in the past. The problem starts with the right-wing punditocracy's inability to recognize that, even though the problem of racism in American policing has gotten much better over the years, drug laws still allow for the bad apples to do a lot of damage. And this is a very real problem leading to the kinds of heavy disparities like the arrest statistics that we've seen here in Seattle.
A few weeks ago, a relative of mine who has a penchant for parroting the nonsense broadcast on right-wing talk radio was criticizing New Orleans residents who were "fourth-generation welfare recipients." Despite the fact that welfare has only been around since 1935, and therefore there are practically no "fourth-generation welfare recipients" anywhere, it is doubly worrying that anybody would be critical of anyone in the black community with a history of poverty going back that far. The right would do well to understand that George Bush and Mike Brown, had they been born as African-Americans in New Orleans, would likely have been among those waiting for food in the Superdome. Our position in life still depends very much on our economic starting points. It's not just radicals like Louis Farrakhan who believe this, and unless the right-wing talking heads start to figure it out, they're bound to drop the number of African-Americans who support their beloved president from 2% to just Condi Rice and Don King.