There’s an old joke that goes thusly (excuse it in advance since it’s locker room-type humor): A man asks a woman he barely knows if she will consent to have sex with him for a million dollars. After a few moments of thought she says, “Well, yes.”
So then he asked her if she would have sex with him for fifty dollars. The female angrily responds, “What kind of woman do you think I am?”
To which the man replied, “We’ve already established what kind of woman you are, we’re just haggling over the price.”
Which leads me to the question of the Talladega marching band from the all-black college in Alabama. They shamed at least half the black race by agreeing to perform at Trump’s inauguration and — here’s the real sick part — they are trying to raise the $60,000 needed to make the trip to Washington.
Now I stated on my Facebook page that if I were the president of this institution that I would agree to allow the band to march — but only if Trump endowed 100 full-ride scholarships for students at Talladega. Now I knew that would never happen, but at least it would leave the door slightly open to perhaps playing politics at some point in the future on some other issue.
Of course some blacks (as well as whites) maintain that even attempting to enter into such negotiations with someone as detestable as Trump is scurrilously selling out. And while I’ll agree that Trump certainly is detestable and will stipulate that accepting the 100 scholarships (if that were to happen, which it won’t) could be considered by some as selling out, I, on the other hand, see it as playing politics, something we blacks had better get more skilled at or we’re really going to suffer over the next four years — maybe eight.
And let’s be honest: Other than lip service, blacks haven’t gotten all that much from Democrats, in spite of the fact we’ve had a black president for eight years. Considering how many Democrats there are in the U.S. Senate, the fact that only three African-Americans hold top staff positions in that body is scandalous. The one senator that has a black chief of staff is Republican Tim Scott of South Carolina, whose office is the most diverse in the entire Senate. That other supposedly liberal bastion in the country, Hollywood, is actually far worse in its treatment of blacks, especially at the executive level.
Make no mistake about how politics is played in Washington. You can bet that Planned Parenthood, which Republicans are unfairly targeting to defund, are trying to quietly reach out to Trump so they can stay alive as an organization. In the case of blacks, Trump is trying to find ways to reach out to us.
Is he going to attempt to use us to legitimize his administration? Of course he is. Should we allow him to do so? Well, that’s according to how much he’s willing to pay, how much good he’s willing to do in terms of using the government (which actually caused our problems) to solve our problems. Go back and read the joke at the top; we’re all whores, every damn last one of us, and the ones who protest that they are not are simply children — or fools.
In Chicago a few days ago four black animals (yes, they might as well been raised by timberwolves, but when white folks call our progeny “animals” we get all huffy, but in this case the word fits) were caught after they tortured a mentally disadvantaged white youth over a period of two days. They were so out of touch with reality they actually put the disgusting incident on Facebook!
Now something very wrong is going on in too many inner city communities of color, and has been for years. Black self-genocide is rising — just look at the number of gun deaths in Cleveland last year. And Democrats certainly haven’t done anything about it.
However, the surest way to stem this tide is to remove these youth from their inner city communities on a wholesale level, and yes, there actually is a way to do this. The idea of mandating that all youth perform two or three years of national service upon reaching age 18 has been in effect in other countries for decades and has been in place on a voluntary basis in America for years, but rarely involve black youth. Gee, I wonder why?
While it’s not a perfect solution, the benefits of taking a black kid from Cleveland and sending him or her to work on a cattle ranch in Wyoming could be spectacular. They’d have to grow up real fast. And the kid from Wyoming could learn a lot by spending a few years in an urban environment.
As much as I hate to admit it, this type of outside-the-box thinking is something that Trump might be better at than most, and since he can force Congress to do whatever he wants at this point, it may be a good time for Jim Brown and the other blacks that have Trump’s ear at present to start whispering into it.
Trump would just love nothing better than to come up with programs that work in black communities to stem the tide of violence, if for no other reason than he could then steal our loyalties away from the Democratic Party. So we need to ask him for what we want and need, and if he and doesn’t deliver we can then always go back to calling him a sack full of motherfuckers. But first, we do have to ask.
From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author at http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com