The Birth of the Black Republican

Okay I will be the first to admit that among a vast majority of African Americans proclaiming oneself a Republican would be the 11th deadly sin. However, I think that this election cycle has created a unique set of circumstances which could prove to be fertile ground to nurture and give birth to the Black Republican. Now two things would have to happen for this to occur: first the Democratic Party would have to remain on the self destructive and divisive path that the campaign has taken in recent weeks and second, and much more difficult, the Republican Party would have actually have to take steps to encourage African Americans to join and convince African Americans that the Republican Party has found the desire to be a party of inclusion, while this may be difficult it is not impossible. They could start by actually have something other than old guys standing behind their canidate at press conferences. If an African American is too big of a leap, we could start with a few women, maybe even a few Hispanic men.
You might ask what the Republican Party and black people have in common. Well, African Americans are by nature conservative on most issues except social ones, this puts black voters on very common ground with moderate and liberal Republicans. I have quite of number of friends who I tease as being undercover Republicans. I will not mention there names here to in the interest of protecting the guilty. These are black people who will vote for a moderate Republican in a local or even statewide election but would never admit that to a pollster. I was even more surprised though to find that some of them were actually undercover Regan Democrats!!! I actually think that it would be a good thing for our country for both parties to become more diverse not only ethnically but ideologically. Who would have thought that you would see a day when the most heated competition was for the white male vote and we all understand that competiton for your vote means at least lipservice to your concerns. Many African Americans had already begun to feel that the Democratic Party took our vote for granted and that has been ramped up during the course of this election. Conversely, I believe that if the Democratic Party could find a way to really pay attention to the concerns of Latino voters and make real strides to addressing those concerns that we would see more Latino Democrats. If anything this race has shown us that you cannot paint any group of people with one paint brush. Latino's may not have had their agenda pushed forward as much as they would have liked by the attention that the primaries in California and Texas garnered. The one thing that country now knows is that the concerns of Latino's in Miami and Texas and California are not the same, moreover the young generation of Latino voters think differently than their parents. The same is true of African Americans, we may share a common ancestry but we have divergent concerns and issues. I would love for our vote to not be taken for granted and actually have issues that concerns us directly listened too. Maybe if a few more of those undercover Black Republicans came out of the closet, the DNC would do more to heal this race/gender divide that is opening up. I know that if I was a Democratic Party leader the fear of a mass migration of either women or African Americans to another party would keep me up at night. Lately, I have heard Libertarians making pitches which could definitely appeal to some of the people who may feel wounded after the DNC convention. Their first challenge is having someone other than Ralph Nader represent them. This is were I take a stroll down memory lane, in a movie this would be the memory flashback. Ralph spoke at my law school graduation from Tulane University. This is only memorable because he railed on for almost two hours about the over concentration of lawyers in the world and the evils of the legal system. There may in fact have been some good points in the midst of that mess of a speech but quite frankly on the biggest day of your life you don't want to hear that stuff (read****). So due to my personal post traumatic stress syndrome that I associate with Ralph I may not have the ability to be impartial.

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