Race, Party and Opportunity : Daniel Henninger
http://www.wsj.com/articles/race-party-and-opportunity-1437000489
Rick Perry’s race speech threw down the gauntlet on party loyalty and economic results.
Something in American politics seems to be moving in mysteriously positive ways. Especially in the nation’s tense racial politics.
Last month a racist fanatic shot nine people in a black church in Charleston, S.C. Instead of the city going up in flames, as in Ferguson or Baltimore, the surviving family members counseled forgiveness.
Then, on July 2, Rick Perry, the former Texas governor and now Republican presidential candidate, gave a speech on race in America at the National Press Club in Washington. That Donald Trump’s demagoguery on Mexicans sucks the oxygen out of the media universe while Rick Perry’s strong speech on race fades from the news is a commentary on, well, the news.
With his first words, Gov. Perry recounted the 1916 torture and lynching in Waco, Texas, of a 17-year-old black youth named Jesse Washington. His description of what a mob did to Jesse Washington before finally killing him is stunning and graphic. Mr. Perry called it “an episode in our history that we cannot ignore.”
This was not the stuff of a normal political speech. Nor was much else in the talk, such as criticizing Barry Goldwater’s opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act (he did so for constitutional reasons). Normally members of the church of High Conservatism don’t say that, at least not in public.
Mr. Perry said Southern states had used states’ rights as justification for segregation. And he said there was a role for government in addressing the effects of segregation because government had sanctioned it in the past.
Media coverage described the Perry speech as confessional, a long-overdue admission that the Republican Party has ignored the black vote. But since the subject has been raised, one may ask: Since when has the Democratic Party not taken the black vote for granted?
That the black vote in the U.S.’s northern cities will be Democratic is as automatic as anything gets in politics. Liberals say they deserve this vote because Democratic politics has done so much for black Americans—Medicaid, food stamps, energy payments and the like.
Arguably it is true that because of these anti-poverty programs, the black Americans who have lived for generations in virtually the same housing projects and attended the same public schools—in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Harlem, the Bronx, Watts, the South Side of Chicago, North City in St. Louis, Camden, North Philadelphia, Cleveland’s east side and in what’s left of Detroit—remain reliably Democratic voters.
Now Rick Perry has thrown down the gauntlet to Democrats over this landlocked slice of the electorate: “Democrats have long had the opportunity to govern the African-American communities. It is time for black families to hold them accountable for the results. I’m here to tell you it is Republicans, not Democrats, who are truly offering black Americans the hope for a better life for themselves and their children.”
Whatever else government attempts to do for the poor, Mr. Perry emphasized the centrality of having and holding a job. It may be taken as a sign of progress that Hillary Clinton in her speech on the economy Monday seemed to agree. She said the number of “young people of color” not in school or out of work is “staggering,” noting that a quarter of young black men can’t get a job.
What most residents of the country’s all-black neighborhoods know is that their economic and social prospects flatlined long before the financial meltdown of 2008. While Mr. Obama has given some speeches about this, the question remains: What, exactly, has been going on in these moribund urban neighborhoods? How can so many people have stayed poor and unemployed in the same years the Democratic Party earned their votes by spending so much money on anti-poverty programs?
“In too many parts of this country,” Mr. Perry said, “black students are trapped in failing schools.” This too is a good subject for the two parties to debate. If with the furling of the Confederate flag we finally closed the book on the greatest American moral tragedy of the 19th century, let’s now move on to inner-city public schools, the greatest moral tragedy of the last century.
It’s not really true that black Americans never leave the inner cities out of loyalty to Democratic politics. One of the most remarkable social movements of our time is known as the New Great Migration, a reversal of the historic 20th century migration of blacks from the South to northern cities to find work.
For years now, black Americans seeking better economic prospects have been leaving the North’s cities and migrating back to the South, notably Florida, Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina and yes, Texas, as Mr. Perry claimed in his speech. It’s called voting with your feet.
Rick Perry and his un-Trumped GOP colleagues should keep talking about race, party and policies that produce economic opportunity. Maybe 2016 is the year in which those ideas will get a fair hearing.
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