What would be the sine qua non? Making sure blacks don’t fix their own problems themselves. This would be absolutely essential. How do you do that? You take two pronged approach: 1) you say their situation is not their fault; and 2) you say you will fix it for them.
With respect to number one, this is simple: if a problem is not your fault, then the solution is not in your power. If you can’t create a situation, then you can’t solve it. You are helpless.
You frame all black poverty and underachievement as the result of racism. Racism, being universal and insuperable by the sole efforts of individual blacks, makes progress impossible.
Secondly, you promise that THIS TIME, this election, you will fix everything. You do this every two years or so for fifty years, some 25 times at minimum. You also make sure that everyone understands that the Republicans are massive villains, out to stop this whole process of the rescue of blacks.
And of course you understand that smart blacks will see through this scam, so what do you also do? You make damn sure that no effective school reform ideas are introduced, and that black communities are rendered really, really ignorant, because even though schooling is offered to them, the teaching is poor, and the expectations low. It would not hurt, either, to teach them to value ignorance, by conflating it with “being real”. Because, you know, brilliant, accomplished people are not real, and people standing on the corner selling drugs ARE real. Obviously.
It is a source of amazement to me, in all honesty, that ordinary, rank and file Democrats were so fucking stupid that by and large they failed to complain when the Party as a whole opposed charter schools, which are the ONLY innovation in education shown to improve outcomes among poor blacks.
So I would ask: what would the Democrats do differently? They established low expectations, promised money from the sky, validated every excuse they ever heard, opposed every effort to make the schools better, and in a great many cases the streets safer, and overall did their best to play the role of codependent Sugar Daddies.
I don’t think they would have done ANYTHING differently. With friends like that, who needs enemies?
I would argue that the Democrats replaced the KKK somewhere between 1970 and 1975 as the single worst enemy ordinary blacks face.
To the extent I personally am racist, it is in response to this blindness. It is unfathomable to me.