Allen West: I don't normally play the race card - but! from the files of Colonel Allen B. West
The great thing about having this website is that it’s my personal blog and shared with occasional commentary from two people – my wife Angela, with whom I will celebrate 25 years on Christmas Eve, and my editor.
Here you’ll find my personal thoughts, perspectives, and insights as a private free American citizen with a singular First Amendment right of free speech.
Of course there are those of the progressive socialist left persuasion, who feel individuals shouldn’t have completely free speech unless it freely agrees with their ideology.
I offer my assessments and analyses of current events, and readers are kindly welcomed to comment, but generally, the response emanating from those on the left isn’t debate — but rather abject disdain and personal assault.
But may I remind detractors of your simple choice of free will. You don’t have to visit my website if you don’t like my thoughts.
With that being said, many on the left say we need to have a conversation about racism in America. So let’s have one.
Let me start by saying it will have nothing to with how the white man has kept me down. As a matter of fact, what I have achieved could only have happened in America.
I was born and raised in the inner city of Atlanta, Georgia, in the same 4th Ward neighborhood that claimed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a favored son. My own elementary school, Our Lady of Lourdes, is located at the corner of Boulevard and the historic Auburn Avenue – near Ebenezer Baptist Church and Dr. King’s familial home just around the corner.
I grew up quite proud of my American black heritage and still am. I recall days walking down Auburn Ave. past the offices of black professionals — doctors, lawyers, and such — as well as black-owned small businesses on my way to the historic Butler Street YMCA where I learned to swim, play basketball, and box. Funny thing — when Dr. King was assassinated, I don’t remember anyone rioting and setting fire to businesses in my neighborhood.
I grew up in a simple two-parent home at 651 Kennesaw Avenue NE — I tell the story of Buck and Snooks West in my book, Guardian of the Republic. As it happens, Buck and Snooks were registered Democrats, and I had a blast telling Rep. John Lewis how I remembered as a boy my folks talking about him and voting for him.
My memories of the black community growing up were centered on faith, family, education, personal responsibility, self-reliance, and for my family — service to the nation in uniform. Those ladies and gents are conservative principles and values — or as I was wrote here — classical liberal principles.
My parents stressed not just to me and my brothers, but to our larger family and relations, that you should never allow yourself to be dependent upon someone else. As Mom would say, “self-esteem comes from doing ‘esteemable’ things.” She also drilled into my head that, “a man must stand for something or else he will fall for anything.”
Sadly enough today, if you are a black American standing for conservative principles and values — which are the foundation of the black community and what were once its strength — you are a target.
It’s white liberals who find themselves abhorring the existence of any minority that rejects their progressive socialist collective ideology and seeks to “think for themselves.”
You become the “uppity negro” and are derided with such loving terms of endearment as “House Ni!@er,” “Sellout,” “Uncle Tom,” and “Oreo.” Even worse, white liberals have co-opted other blacks to join in the mob-like attacks against those of us who just — well, embody those old school values in which parents (when there were a preponderance of two-parent homes) in the black community instructed us.
Then again, it was the Great Society policies of a progressive socialist big government Democrat president from Texas named Lyndon Baines Johnson that began the decimation of the black family. It resulting in today’s out of wedlock birth rate of nearly 72 percent — all because it was believed that rewarding a woman for having a child out of wedlock with a government check — as long as she kept the man out of the home — was a good thing.
So, in my black community, the venerable and strong black man who survived slavery, Jim Crow, the KKK, segregation, poll taxes, literacy tests (all from the same Democrat party) was finally killed off virtually — and literally in some cases through inner city gang violence — by Democrat policy.
And so it goes that the plantation has been restored, but this time it is a 21st century economic plantation of servitude and submission to the welfare nanny-state.
The real racism comes from the new plantation masters who have riled up the masses and mob to ensure this is not lost. And therefore, woe, despair, degradation, denigration, and derision upon those who are living up to their parents’ dream — Dr. King’s dream — and have escaped the progressive socialist inner city plantation because we fought through the “pursuit of happiness” to develop the “content of our character” and not await a government granted “guarantee of happiness” due to the “color of our skin.”
And that ladies and gents truly angers those on the left — just ask the likes of Justice Clarence Thomas, Star Parker, my fellow Atlantan Herman Cain, Condoleeza Rice, Senator Tim Scott, Rep-Elect Mia Love, Shelby Steele, Jason Riley, Harry Alford, Raffi Williams, Chloe Valdary, Harris Faulkner, Deneen Borelli, AlfonZo Rachel, Janice Rogers Brown, James Golden, Amy Holmes, Niger Innis, Kevin Jackson, Armstrong Williams, Deroy Murdock, JC Watts, Jesse Lee Peterson, Ken Blackwell, Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Larry Elder, Angela McGlowan, and Mychal Massie.
What have we all done to so anger the white progressive socialist left that we constantly draw their ire? We succeeded.
And therein lies the real racism about which the liberal media doesn’t want a conversation — black success based on fundamental American liberty and freedom enshrined in conservative principles such as individual sovereignty and free market entrepreneurship.
So someone like myself is regularly assaulted by left wing media outlets for the most insidious accusations. I remember while running for Congress in the 2010 cycle, the day my oldest daughter picked up the mail, and in it was a piece from the Florida Democrat Party which boldly displayed my social security number and my wife’s employment identification number — she is a financial broker.
Why? It’s not far off from finding a burning cross in your front yard — my daughter screamed and began to cry and my wife was hysterical. And when we revealed this, the local Palm Beach Post newspaper ran a survey asking if I was making too big of a deal of this nefarious action.
Or how about a San Francisco-based far left progressive group called CREDO that showed up in the 2012 election cycle and ran a shadow campaign which included phone calls to homes stating that “did you know that Allen West beats his wife” — y’all know the typical progressive socialist attacks against black men — characterize them as violent. The truth doesn’t matter — actually the lie and deceit are the strongest tactics.
Could you imagine if a prominent black conservative owed $4 million to the IRS? Heaven knows what the liberal progressive media would say. But if you’re a progressive socialist overseer of the black community, not only do you get a national TV show, you get to visit the White House 82 times. And when was the last time a black conservative was invited into the Oval Office to sit with the “first black president?”
The real conversation about race in America needs to be about why the progressive socialist left despises black success not wedded to its ideology? Even former NBA great, Charles Barkley has come under attack for speaking his mind about certain matters on race — the real conversation that needs to be had.
What sense does it make for the black community to enslave itself to one political ideology and invest all of its political capital there? It has only led to abject disregard.
And so I conclude this essay of my thoughts — the real racism has always come from one party in America: the Democrat party. And their 21st century ” lynching” tactics and techniques are just the same but with better use of modern technology.
Unfortunately for them just as men like Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington and women like Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman took a stand, a new generation of freedom-minded blacks are stepping out of the shadows — even Dr. King’s alma mater of Morehouse College now has a Republican Club. Our voices will not be silenced, regardless of the new tactics of the same old gang.
All black lives matter, not just the ones progressive socialists use “prosecutorial discretion” to care about through the policies of economic enslavement as opposed to those black conservatives embrace — economic empowerment.
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