Could Trump Trade Latinos for Blacks? Don't Count On It
With that, Bartlett repeats a line of argument that conservatives often give, that black voters lose leverage by having been captives on one or the other party.
My counterargument is that solidarity can improve leverage, too. Like any other voting bloc, we African-Americans vote our interests. When Republicans like Dwight Eisenhower, who won more than 35 percent of the black vote in 1956, appeal directly to black voters, we tend to respond.
Unfortunately Bartlett bases his argument on a Trumpian approach: He chronicles how black leaders and editorialists as far back as Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington have complained about job competition by immigrants -- and called for strict quotas on how many new ones are to be admitted.
Omitted from Bartlett's argument as important details of context, such as the formal and informal Jim Crow segregation regimes that openly preferred immigrants, who were almost all white Europeans until President Lyndon B. Johnson's 1965 Immigration Act lifted racial and ethnic quotas.
Today's immigration debate pits dueling studies against each other. Some studies show immigration suppresses wages for blacks and others in the bottom income brackets. Others show more vigorous job creation in areas that have high immigration than in those that don't.
Despite efforts by some to exploit ethnic and racial rivalries for political gain, today's black political and community leaders tend to believe that their constituents have more to gain from the politics of addition, not Trumpian subtraction and division.
For example, Trump, despite his professions that "I love the blacks," gains few black friends by constantly denying Obama's birth certificate. As a result, Trump's disapprovals about equally bad -- more than 80 percent -- among both groups, according to a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll.
Ultimately, we're all better off remembering the unifying words of civil rights leader Whitney Young Jr., who said, "We may have come over on different ships, but we're all in the same boat now." Right. Let's not sink it.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)
(c) 2015 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
