Hey, Howard, my Kumbaya compadre.  Suggestion: have the baristas scribble this on cups: “Democrats oppress blacks.” Now, before you race away in your natural-gas powered limo, race together with me a bit. Let’s explore why this three-word inscription is sure to spark discussions, debates, and a few brawls at your coffee joints across the nation.  Because, Howard, it’s the truth, the whole truth, and nothin’ but the truth. And the truth, sir, has a tendency to ruffle, to disrupt. It may not set poor and disadvantaged blacks free just yet, but it’s a start. 

We’ll begin here and then backfill: Modern Democrats are causing injury and worse to millions of black folk. Daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, generationally. Millions, Howard, from the 1960s on. That’s, specifically, the white liberal Democratic Party in league with legions of race hustlers, exemplified by the Honorable Reverend Al Sharpton and the Venerable Honorable Reverend Jesse Jackson. That’s race hustlers who’ve found their way into pulpits in too many black churches. Throw in the already legendary community agitator president Barack Obama and race-stirrer Eric Holder.

Let’s skip a long recitation of the historic wrongs committed by Democrats against blacks. Let’s just top line the offenses. It’s good for your baristas, who, I’m betting, learned about black history and race relations from public school textbooks, which mute facts and slant things.  (Come on, just a tad, right?)         

The Democratic Party wasn’t merely the protector of slavery, it was the promoter. Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholder and so was the bilious Andrew Jackson, both of whom are considered the fathers of the Democratic Party. (Quite right: Democrats have two dads.) The South had a vested -- as in economic -- interest in safeguarding slavery. The South was the party’s stronghold. 

But here’s the grabber -- and it’s as terribly germane today as it was antebellum. Pre-war Democrats, north and south, had a stake in not just preserving slavery but pushing it into U.S. territories for political gain. Sounds tawdry, doesn’t it? Political power, wealth, and spoils as motivators to keep blacks in bondage. Well, it happened, and still happens today among Democrats, though more artfully.

Today, under the guise of fairness and compassion, Democrats use the welfare state as an instrument of black captivity. Captivity, meaning stuck – mostly -- in wretched inner cities, sucking the welfare teat. Poor black families, in particular, have imploded. Illegitimacy rates are nearly off the charts. Abortions among blacks are ridiculously -- tragically -- high. Too many black kids grow up without dads; some without moms. And those welfare moms? Many are kids themselves. Public schools don’t much educate; they mainly warehouse (if poor black kids even show up). Gang and drug-related crime and violence are endemic.

Then there was the post-Civil War oppression of blacks. Those white-hooded nightriders who terrorized blacks across the south were the “KKK,” not the “RRR” (Ronald Reagan Republicans), as revisionists might suggest. Democrats were under those sheets.  Jim Crow -- a form of apartheid -- was a Democrat invention. It lasted into the 1960s. 

De facto apartheid exists today. Poor blacks live in their hoods, while white, better-educated, upwardly mobile, affluent liberals (the Democratic Party core) live very separate lives from poor -- add working class -- blacks whom they claim to champion. Their families are intact, for the most part. Their kids go to good schools and secure higher educations. They live well and retire to easier lives. You see, these Democrats are glad to patronize blacks, but not to live among them.      

Some liberals assuage their consciences, claiming that throwing huge amounts of government largess at blacks over the decades is just and compassionate. Others – the cynics, the cold, hard calculating men and women among liberals – are pretenders, who appreciate that the Democratic Party’s fortunes – and theirs – are advanced by keeping blacks dependent on government… who know that without a near-monolithic black vote, Democratic Party fortunes would suffer. (Democrats are working hard to transfer the black solution to Latinos, thereby heaping unfathomable tragedy on yet another people.)          

Gosh, I know this is hard to digest, Howard, but hold tight to your Venti and keep racing together with me.

As American Thinker contributor Colin Flaherty wrote:

The kabuki theater of racial denial was on full display on St. Patrick’s Day: Hundreds of “troublesome teens” rampaged through downtown Minneapolis, punching white people, firing guns, destroying property, defying police, stopping traffic and menacing parade-goers. Some of it on video.

The “white racism” propaganda that’s fed to black teens (blacks, period) by white liberals and race hustlers certainly nurses grievances and stokes anger and violence. The propaganda of white societal racism against blacks is diversionary. Diversionary in that it pulls the focus off what the welfare state -- the entire corrosive culture of government dependency -- has done to blacks. Democrats, politically, can’t afford blacks to grasp the magnitude of destruction done to them by the very party that claims to be their benefactor. 

At a deeper -- a much deeper -- level, there’s legitimate -- even though the source is vaguely understood -- grievance and anger by blacks over the wrecked lives too many of them lead; over the meagerness of opportunities afforded for advancement; over their inability to achieve the American Dream. Woe unto liberaldom and its principle vehicle of power, the Democratic Party, if blacks ever awaken to the injustices done them by liberals and black elites. And if Latinos catch on -- muchos problemas! 

I suspect this isn’t where you want your “Race Together” campaign to go, Howard, but going it is.      

Knowing the mindset of big organizations -- and Starbucks is -- Race Together is supposed to be a feel-good exercise… to help unburden and cleanse so-called progressives who suffer any vestige of guilt about being white and privileged… or raise the consciousness of us whites who don’t buy the white guilt spin… or to let progressives vent their spleens about how “other” whites are racists who instigate black unrest and violence. 

Oh, well, we can stop racing together and you can peel off, Howard – or I will. This race is over… for now.