ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith: ‘I Dream… Every Black Person in America Vote Republican’

by Warner Todd Huston | March 18, 2015 6:16 pm

ESPN regular Stephen A. Smith has a dream. Only it isn’t one most public African Americans have. He wishes that for “just one” election every black person in America would vote for the Republican Party.

He made his comments[1] at the Impact Symposium at Vanderbilt University during a discussion of inequality.

“What I dream is that for one election, just one, every black person in America vote Republican,” he said. “Because from what I’ve read, and I’m open to correction, but from what I’ve read, Barry Goldwater is going against Lyndon B. Johnson. He’s your Republican candidate. He is completely against the Civil Rights Movement. Lyndon B. Johnson was in favor of it. What happens is, he wins office, Barry Goldwater loses office, but there was a senate, a Republican senate, that pushed the votes to the president’s desk. It was the Democrats who were against Civil Rights legislation. So because President Lyndon B. Johnson was a Democrat, black America assumed the Democrats were for it.”

He also added, “Black folks in America are telling one party, ‘We don’t give a damn about you.’ They’re telling the other party ‘You’ve got our vote.’ Therefore, you have labeled yourself ‘disenfranchised’ because one party knows they’ve got you under their thumb. The other party knows they’ll never get you and nobody comes to address your interest.”

Now, notice that he doesn’t mean that he thinks that blacks should believe in every last thing in the GOP agenda. Only that blacks need to pay attention to the GOP so that the two groups can interact and better work together, better understand each other. After all, as it is now neither party has much reason to pay attention to blacks. The Democrats take them for granted because they know they’ll get their vote, and the GOP won’t much bother to listen because they know they won’t get their vote at all. Blacks have put themselves in a no win situation.

But he did point out that Democrats are NOT the black man’s fast friend like Democrats pretend. That is a sentient point.