The Patriot Post - Alexander's Column 10-17-2018

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The Patriot Post - Alexander's Column 10-17-2018
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The Patriot Post® · Kanye v Kaepernick — Breaking Ranks
By Mark Alexander · Oct. 17, 2018 · https://patriotpost.us/alexander/58917-kanye-v-kaepernick-breaking-ranks

“We are either a United people, or we are not. If the former, let us, in all matters of general concern act as a nation, which have national objects to promote, and a national character to support. If we are not, let us no longer act a farce by pretending to it.” —George Washington (1785)
There was a revealing contrast between how the Democrat Party1 and its mainstream media public relations team2 handled the activities of two black men in recent days. Kanye West was labeled a “token negro” for visiting the White House, and Colin Kaepernick was hailed as a cultural hero by Harvard. It provided a stark case study in the Left’s politics of division3. Any black man who threatens that racial divide becomes an immediate target for scorn and ridicule.

Why? Because any break from this orthodoxy poses an existential threat to the electability of Democrats.

Kaepernick was the celebrated leader of the NFL’s national anthem kneelers4 while he was still employed. He received Harvard’s “prestigious” W.E.B. Du Bois medal for, well, kneeling. The award was presented by Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, with Afrocentric professor Cornel West presiding. West teaches courses on W.E.B. Du Bois.

Kaepernick is the mediocre former San Francisco 49ers quarterback who was receiving an annual salary of $19,000,0005. In 2016, he bought into the faux Black Lives Matter6 movement and declared, “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color.” He set off a racially charged “protest” across the nation — kneelers of all ages!

For the record, Kaepernick was abandoned by his black biological father before he was born and put up for adoption by his 19-year-old white mother. He was then adopted and raised by a loving white couple in an upper-middle-class suburb.

It is no small irony that he has become a celebrated critic of so-called “white oppression,” especially by “racist” police targeting young black men — but that’s a lie based on a myth7.

Kaepernick’s anger is likely rooted in a deep sense of abandonment by his black father8, and his protest is wholly misdirected.

Most recently, he was rewarded for his “hate America” crusade with a lucrative contract for a Nike advertising campaign9.

According to Harvard, “The Du Bois medal honors those who have made significant contributions to African and African American history and culture, and more broadly, individuals who advocate for intercultural understanding and human rights in an increasingly global and interconnected world.” Right. This from an institution that has most recently been practicing systematic discrimination against students with Asian heritage10.

On receipt of the award, Kaepernick said, “I feel like it’s not only my responsibility, but all our responsibilities as people that are in positions of privilege, in positions of power, to continue to fight for them and uplift them, empower [young black people], because if we don’t, we become complicit in the problem.”

Kaepernick is definitely “complicit in the problem.”

It’s a fitting irony that he’d receive an award in the name of an avowed communist sympathizer. At the height of Soviet oppression worldwide, Du Bois wrote, “Stalin was a great man; few other men of the 20th century approach his stature. … The highest proof of his greatness [was that] he knew the common man, felt his problems, followed his fate.”

Du Bois, who received a Ph.D. from Harvard and cofounded the NAACP11, also said that Adolf Hitler’s socialist Nazi party reign of evil was “absolutely necessary to get the state in order.”

One of Du Bois’s much better known contemporaries, Booker T. Washington, was a critic of Du Bois’s fomenting of racial division — the same division for which Kaepernick has been honored. In his book, My Larger Education, Washington wrote of Du Bois and other racial agitators with words that are even more applicable to present-day race agitators: “There is [a] class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. … Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays.”

Washington continued: “Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs. … There is a certain class of race-problem solvers who do not want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public.”

That describes most of today’s leftist race hustlers12, who have destroyed Martin Luther King’s dream13 of a unified and color-blind nation.

Years ago, before the current billionaire-backed14 Democrat Party’s advocacy for socialism15 emerged, my friend Walter E. Williams, a brilliant black economist who long ago broke with the Left’s divisive orthodoxy, offered this summary of why Democrats are soft on socialism16: “The reason leftists give communists, the world’s most horrible murderers, a pass is that they sympathize with the chief goal of communism: restricting personal liberty. In the U.S., the call is for government control over our lives through regulations and taxation.”

And on that note, a few words about Kanye West’s visit17 with Donald Trump18.

When it comes to the Democrats’ most loyal constituency, black voters — 90% of whom have been lulled into political servitude by the Left — there’s little tolerance for those who venture off the urban poverty plantation6 and dare to challenge the identity groupthink19 that Demos have crafted for black folks. But that’s exactly what rapper-entrepreneur-promoter Kanye West did when he went to the White House for a meeting with Trump, another master promoter. No mystery why these two relate to each other well — they both speak the same language20!

West is a 41-year-old Atlanta native who grew up in Barack Obama’s21 backyard, Chicago. His father was a Black Panther who later became a Christian counselor, and his mother was chair of the English Department at Chicago State University before retiring to serve as her son’s manager. As a teenager, he was intrigued by the brash style of the leading rap stars and set his sights on becoming one of them. He received college scholarships, but furthering his education became an obstacle to his rapidly developing entertainment career. One of his popular albums was “College Dropout,” which was about embracing who he was rather than adhering to the social and cultural path he was expected to travel.