This is obviously a propagandistic tactic designed, specifically, as Agitation Propaganda, in order to rile up rank and file Democrats against the Great Evil they are opposing, and to continue to place fear in the hearts of rank and file blacks that they are not good enough to survive on their own.
Republicans, in turn–and I will reiterate most of the people in this discussion are white on both sides–are saying, in effect: blacks have their own voices, their own souls, their own consciences. Blacks are people just like us. Just like the Irish. Just like the Jews. Just like the Italians and Polish. They deserve equal rights and equal privileges. And you cannot reason backwards from the fact that someone is more successful, that they must have done something wrong, or enjoyed some unique benefit.
In fact, I think most more thoughtful Republicans would argue that the single worst thing that ever happened to the black folks in this country, outside of slavery itself, was being talked into handing over their personal power, and sense of purpose and control, to the Democrat Party. Why do the ghettoes remain ghettoes? Because rank and file blacks continue to assume that the Democrats will fix everything, because they promise to every two years.
As I’ve said before, my own racism, such that it is, consists in looking at the stupidity inherent in continuing to believe liars across many decades. It’s always easier to let someone else take care of you. But if they aren’t DOING IT, at what point do you call bullshit and start picking yourself up by your own bootstraps?
It seems likely that as internet access becomes more widely available, more and more blacks will reach this same conclusion. I think a great many didn’t even realize how much time white people were spending talking about what to do with them.
But as in 1850, I would frame the divide thus: on the one side–then as now, the Democrat side–you have people arguing in effect that black people cannot be expected to care for themselves without help from white people. On the other side, you have–then as now–Republicans saying the opposite, by and large. I will just quote Frederick Douglass here:
What I ask for the Negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice. [Applause.] The American people have always been anxious to know what they shall do with us. Gen. Banks was distressed with solicitude as to what he should do with the Negro. Everybody has asked the question, and they learned to ask it early of the abolitionists, “What shall we do with the Negro?” I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are wormeaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! I am not for tying or fastening them on the tree in any way, except by nature’s plan, and if they will not stay there, let them fall. And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone! If you see him on his way to school, let him alone, don’t disturb him! If you see him going to the dinner table at a hotel, let him go! If you see him going to the ballot- box, let him alone, don’t disturb him! [Applause.] If you see him going into a work-shop, just let him alone,–your interference is doing him a positive injury. Gen. Banks’ “preparation” is of a piece with this attempt to prop up the Negro. Let him fall if he cannot stand alone! If the Negro cannot live by the line of eternal justice, so beautifully pictured to you in the illustration used by Mr. Phillips, the fault will not be yours, it will be his who made the Negro, and established that line for his government. [Applause.] Let him live or die by that. If you will only untie his hands, and give him a chance, I think he will live.
Do black people need the government to survive? This is the question. I would ask: did the Irish? The Italians? The Jews? Most of those people came from places where they were themselves for all intents and purposes enslaved. It’s arguable, in fact, that even in the modern era more Irish were subjected to slavery than African blacks.
How, put another way, is the question “are blacks genuinely more needy than every other race and ethnic group”, not racist to its core?
This is why Leftists abuse language. It allows them to abuse logic, and the abuse of logic enables the most ludicrous things to come to seem obvious to the point that violence is allowable to enforce them. This describes every totalitarian regime in the 20th century, with the possible exception of Franco’s Spain, which did, as it seems to me, look backward to a past that actually existed, although I cannot claim to have studied it in depth. It certainly describes Fascism, National Socialism, and all the variants of the Communist disease, from Lenin to Pol Pot and Fidel Castro.