Red State, blue state
I hate, you hate....

Will Chief Justice Rehnquist retire? Will President Bush fire Karl Rove? Will Lex Luthor/ Brainiac achieve his plans of global domination on Justice League Unlimited?

These, and other pressing questions dominate today's political blogosphere, since we're so afraid of domestic terrorism that Desperate Housewives and Lance Armstrong are all that soothes the American beast. Hell, we're so angry these days, with the war, the Supreme Court, with abortion, with people who want to end legal abortion, that we could just spit. Or split, as it were.

Secession is always a bad idea.

Ann Coulter, speaking at our alma mater Cornell University, once expressed her support for modern succession; it never ceases to surprise me how eager the modern Left is to echo her sentiments. The Civil War decided the succession question: with more domestic American blood and sacrifice than has ever spilled since, our forefathers made the answer clear. No one just runs away from being an American just because they don't agree with the tyranny of the majority.

Further, the post-Election 2004 tongue-in-cheek Blue State departure complex always 'forgets' an important point: most African Americans live in the Red states of the American South. According to Census 2000 data, out of a total population of roughly two hundred eighty-one million Americans, 34,658,190 consider themselves Black or African American alone. Out of that thirty-four million, 18,981,692 reside in the South. That's 54.8% of Black America. Quoting the Census 2000 brief: "The South had the largest Black population, as well as the highest proportion of Blacks in its total population: 20 percent of all respondents in the South reported Black compared with 12 percent in the Northeast, 11 percent in the Midwest, and 6 percent in the West." Sixty-four percent of U.S. Counties (3,141 in all) are fewer than six percent Black, but ninety-six mostly Southern counties have populations that are more than 50% Black, St. Louis City, MO being the one non-Southern exception. The South is Black America; just look for yourself at this Census 2000 population map showing percentage of African Americans by county. Seeing is beliving, and Black is beautiful.



Since the obese, fundamentalist Christian, warmongering, poverty-stricken, unhealthy, tax revenue draining, uneducated, chickenhawk South contains the vast majority of Black people (many of whom oppose abortion, feminism, gay marriage, and most other current tenets of Northeastern liberalism while fanatically supporting the Democratic Party), it's kind of hard for me to understand why so many leftists are so eager to simply discard the very group that have been the most consistent and stalwart supporters of the Democratic Party. We know what we stand for; the equal opportunity and welfare state policies of FDR's New Deal and LBJ's Great Society, along with modern day support for affirmative action in education and employment, ally African Americans to the Democratic Party in droves. African Americans are socially conservative and economically liberal; they don't so much oppose Adam and Steve as they want Adam Smith to work for them. That's not to say that Black folk aren't homophobic: generally speaking, of course they are. But I believe Black homophobia operates much the same way as the 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' policy of the Clinton Administration's Armed Forces - it offers no possibility of publicly recognized humanity or individualism, but allows one to do their job for the most part by shuffling along with head bowed and mouth shut.

The point? Even oppressed Black people never followed Marcus Garvey back to Africa en masse; what makes Northeastern liberals so hellbent on leaving? The mainstream African American community is too concerned with economic inequalities, voting rights violations, untenable internal crime rates, and astronomical STD infection to concern itself with physical political separation. Election 2004 was not a national divorce based on irreconcilable culture war differences. Legalized marijuana and socialized Starbucks do not replace the American Republic. Even polarized pseudo-pluralism is preferable to Vegan America. Latte liberalism does not convince the Democratic Party to embrace hybrid cars and sustainable living environmentalism; hell, Environmental Action can't convince the average person to dismember President Bush's Clear Skies Initiative (especially it's relaxed prohibitions against mercury pollution) without begging for money like homeless hobos hopped up on Thunderbird. Given this, why must my fellow liberals embrace despair and escape North in yet another paleface imitation of African American history?

Every leftist fringe philosophy or oppressed minority these days appropriates the Civil Rights Movement to justify its current gripes with the American system in ways that horrify African Americans, still locked out in 2005 of the institutions of power of our nation in large numbers. Token Blackness emerges all over, from the advanced placement classroom to the corporate boardroom to the White House Situation Room, but African Americans have no more increased their political clout today than during the Kennedy Administration. What has African American support for the Left benefited African Americans? Al Gore failed miserably to publicly discuss open and systematic elimination of African American voters from their constitutional rights during Election 2000, when it could have helped him. The Democratic Party rallies it's Black base during every election, but crime and poverty still ravage Black neighborhoods. Hell, every time the Democratic Party rolls over to support another savaging of the New Deal welfare state to appear conciliatory to conservative Republican voters, fewer tax dollars go to support failing public schools, Social Security, and properly equipped (and overseen) police departments.

Now the Left wants to leave Black people stuck in the Southern hellhole they've never cared for and helped create?

This 'letter', however sarcastic and humorous, is a perfect example of Northeastern liberalism run amuck. Moby's similar post-Election 2004 depression prompted a similar flirtation with secession, and the public face of the always antagonistic Move-On.org was just as incorrect. Maybe I just don't get the joke; I see nothing funny about the idea of trapping roughly nineteen million Black people in the poverty-stricken, faith-based bondage of President Bush's Holy Texan Empire. I suppose that the United Blue States of America will be some sort of leftist utopia: practically no race problem since most of the yellow, brown, and black people won't be there, where everything's all right, 'cause it's all White. Can you imagine the road signs?

"Welcome to the United States of Canada! Where everyone's White as the driven snow!"



Thanks to Sheldiz for posting the Craigslist letter on her blog.

Addendum: It just occurred to me that I missed a major point in this post. Real quick, the useful point expressed by the Craigslist letter is not satirical. The Democratic party has abandoned the South for the last twenty odd years of presidential elections. This "pseudo-Southern strategy", more than any other paternalistic liberal factor cements African Americans' political impotence within the Democratic party. What the Rev. Al Sharpton, Rev. Jesse Jackson, and Julien Bond need to do is convince Democratic strategists of a workable Southern strategy that could make use of the 34 million Black people who suffer through their lives with no political clout in either major party. Sure, many people have made these points more eloquently than I am now, but I took another look at the numbers and it really scared me.