To start this off, let’s just bash Republicans a bit.
Republicans:
- are homophobic and bigoted towards gay people in most cases.
- have disturbing views against Muslims which rival a pre-Hitler Germany.
- are totally wrong on Hispanics who are hard-working people.
- would probably never be the guys to let a black guy date their daughter.
- probably dislike Asian people in some way I’m not aware of yet.
The Republican and conservative base is largely built on a subtle group of morons who think Donald & Melania Trump are married out of pure love, go to Church on Sundays, and dream of an all WASP America where the Beatles are considered risky business. The GOP totally has issues and has to go a long, long way until racism can be combated in full form.
But, the truth is, Democrats are also pretty racist as well.
I initially think of two guys I used to be friendly with. One was an activist out of Louisiana named Zack Kopplin and the other was named Lamar White Jr. Both were hardcore white leftists who ran around just talking about how racist the south was and how Republican racism is the root of all evil. Their arguments never really made any sense. If you talked about how African immigrants tend to have pretty high incomes over native African Americans, they’d ignore you. If you talked about income and crime statistics showing second generation Hispanics and Asians perform better over white people, they ignore it. If you showed them very basic logical points on racism regarding elections and success in business, and present a case that racism doesn’t seem to exist, they’d just rub it off and label conservative icons such as Herman Cain, Allen West or Ben Carson as false figures.
And when I would ask these two white guys, who were raised in higher income families, how they planned to fix the African American community, I got some bizarre answers.
The first thing they both oddly supported was imposing reparations. They held this strange desire to somehow pay people back for crimes committed over a century ago where not one person is alive to say they were an oppressor or a victim of it. I’d have been for reparations if it were currently post-civil war. If I was a politician or voter after the civil war, I’d have absolutely ran around saying that the plantation owners and the public have robbed these people of their labor and we need to have them compensated for the work and abuse they’ve endured in the form of cash and land. The problem is sadly this didn’t happen. Every victim of slavery is now dead. So essentially, they want white people to pay taxes to give money to people for a crime which wasn’t committed against them – a crime that was committed centuries ago. This begs many questions about how it would work. Do white people whose families came here after slavery have to pay? What happens if someone is interracial? Where do groups such as Hispanics and Asians stand? Do immigrant African Americans get taxed? This is an idea just so baffling and bizarre it belongs in Dennis Kucinich’s logic shop.
But that was just idea number one. Idea number two? They actually told me they won’t rest until black people are equally represented in government to their percentage of the population in both elected office and police. It’s a good on the surface idea, but an idea they didn’t think through very much. What makes me wonder about this plan is when I bring up the question of Jewish people. Jewish people currently are only a very small percent of the population, but make up about 10% of the House and 15% of the Senate. That’s about 4 to 7 times the representation compared to their real population size. But the Jewish people have been victim to multiple genocides, discrimination, and more. Asian people also represent a higher percentage of the state legislatures now to population in the states they are in. However, their real population size is also very small. This idea is so bizarre that it’s upsetting, because it’s the most anti-minority proposal ever.
Going on to the real issue of the left: They don’t tend to treat minorities and poor people like they believe in them. They tend to just treat them as victims who they must protect over actually working with as equals. The left doesn’t really want to consider African Americans intellectually equal, but just a group who can’t function without their support.
It’s why they tend to treat them differently in public schools. It’s why they tend to just associate them heavily with welfare spending. It’s why they don’t seem to want real criminal justice reform, but just a focus on things which tend to treat them as second-class people.
I’m a supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement. I made that choice because I believe the police and legal system were government-created burdens and anti-black from day one. We have poorly trained people who are heavily armed policing streets and arresting black people at higher rates whites for minor petty crimes, locking them up in jail much longer. Black people get arrested twice as often for drug crimes despite abuse being arguably higher in the upper middle income white community. Black people get sentenced 23% longer for the same exact crimes as white people. Black people are subject to higher minimum sentencing laws in states such as Louisiana or Georgia which have a history of being racist.
For the African American community, I have two sets of reforms I’d make if I could make them.
Legal:
- End all minimum sentencing laws
- Legalize all drugs
- Cap prison sentences to 18 years on people under 35 for any crime unless they have a proven mental illness
- Pardon all nonviolent drug offenders or offenders who have spent over five years in prison
- Implement prison reform where the model revolves around incentives for prisons to produce results such as real world trades, literacy, and more
Economic:
- Move to a negative income tax replacing welfare and food stamps which trap people within a system
- Implement school vouchers to end zip codes deciding how people go to school
- Create economic freedom zones where poorer areas get removed of a lot of state, local, and federal regulation
Those reforms will mitigate problems that set lower income communities back, and if African Americans still make less after these reforms, I’m not going to treat them like a victim any longer. This is just correcting previous wrongdoing.
Also, while I’ll admit the African American community has issues, I’m going to state some facts.
- Black men in the last eighty years seem to have a poor tendency to remain active as fathers
- Black people tend to value education less than other minority groups such as Asians or Hispanics which is largely why they make vastly more
- Black people, in some cases, tend focus more on stating the problems they have that they want politicians to address, instead of acting as individuals and focusing on commerce, education, or other ways to improve themselves
I view myself and most libertarians as the truly anti-racist movement. We aren’t the right, who seem to make blatantly anti-minority laws. We also aren’t the left, who make laws which treat minorities as lesser people – laws that do more to hurt than they do to help. Libertarianism is a movement which believes we should have a minimally taxed and regulated environment where all can move properly. This is a movement which supports criminal justice reform and eliminating those injustices, which is pro-immigrant and pro-easy immigration, which is pro-gay rights, and which supports the idea that a zip code shouldn’t decide a child’s education. It’s a movement which does favor some social safety protections, but not a net trapping people, which sees people as individuals who own themselves instead of playing into identity politics.
That’s the libertarian movement and that’s why Hispanics, Jews, Muslims, blacks, LGBT people, and every other minority group belongs in it.
Charles Peralo
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