[Johnny Stew]

The State Of Black American Politics

Despite more than two decades of rhetoric that Republican conservatism offers African Americans a viable avenue for inclusion, the GOP has yet to mount a substantive real-life effort to address what poll after poll shows African-Americans consider major core issues - such as racist practices in housing, job markets, income/wealth patterns, educational opportunities, health patterns, and the criminal justice system. Instead, the Republicans have seemed content to play appointive politics with the black electorate.

Bush Economics Bad News For African Americans

"Among those most negatively and disproportionately affected by Bush’s economic policies are African Americans. The 2001 Bush tax cuts, which provided relief for wealthy individuals and corporations, exacerbated the effects of the recession on middle- and lower-income African American families by forcing cuts in social programs such as job training, according to the National Urban League’s Institute for Opportunity and Equality."

"We have witnessed a wholesale retreat from the economic policies that benefited the many, including millions of people of color, to the narrow policies that benefit the rich and wealthy," CBTU (Coalition of Black Trade Unionists) President William Lucy said, citing the $330 billion tax cut recently passed by Congress.

Bush and Race: Policies Matter

While Bush's snubbing of the oldest civil rights organization may have offended the sensibilities of the members of the NAACP and others, a critical assessment of the conservative policies of the Bush administration illustrate a more serious assault on the interests of people of color.

Under the cloud of the Bush administration's recession and "jobless" recovery, much of the prosperity that communities of color experienced during the 1990s economic boom has all but evaporated in the past four years as poverty rates, on the decline at the end of the 90's, have risen. The unemployment rate for African-Americans has doubled that of whites – 10.1 percent for African-Americans and 5.0 percent for whites according to the June 2004 report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Further, President Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy have widened the racial and ethnic wealth and income divide by rewarding those who have investment income with lower taxes and penalizing those with wage income with higher taxes.

A similarly bleak picture exists in health care policy where the Bush administration has failed to put forward a reform plan to fix a troubled health care system and promises of expanded funding for HIV/AIDS treatment have largely gone unmet. As a result, the expanding ranks of individuals lacking health care coverage include a disproportionate number of African-Americans, Latinos and Native Americans, and racial disparities in a range of health outcomes – including mortality rates – continues to exist.

The Bush administration has provided the smallest increase for education funding since 1996, frozen funding for after-school programs, inadequately increased Title I funding for the nation's poorest schools, and failed to increase Pell Grant awards. While President Bush is fond of criticizing those in the education profession for "the soft bigotry of low expectations" that he argues undermines achievement for students of color, President Bush's own education policies have significantly undermined the public education system and exacerbated the problem of educational inequality.

In response to public criticism of the NAACP snubbing, the Bush administration has sought to emphasize the president's "proven record" in helping communities of color. And while nothing on the list was quite as amusing as HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson's reaching way back to President Abraham Lincoln's freeing the slaves to find Republican Party accomplishments for African-Americans, the "proven record" illustrates a tenuous connection between the rationales of the Bush administration and the realities of life for many people of color.

(T)he Bush administration is advancing a policy for funding Section 8 housing vouchers that will substantially cut housing assistance for many low-income families.

The administration's record on civil rights enforcement is equally undistinguished. Career lawyers in the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice have publicly complained that Attorney General John Ashcroft has allowed conservative politics to compromise key enforcement decisions. One such example was during the consideration of the 2002 Mississippi redistricting plan in which the Justice Department sat on its hands against the recommendation of its career lawyers, thus allowing a three-judge federal appeals court composed of three Republican-appointed judges to approve a plan that diluted the strength of the African-American vote and benefited the Republican candidate in a heavily contested district. And Ashcroft continues to stand by while the state of Florida purges alleged convicted felons from its voter roles based on inaccurate data and a flawed process.