Urban League's Declaration of Dependence

Star Parker

Star Parker (photo) is a brilliant columnist on, and the founder and President of, the Coalition for Urban Renewal & Education (CURE), a 501(c)(3) social policy think tank. She writes what she thinks, and she always thinks carefully about what she writes. 

This week, Parker thought a lot about the National Urban League and their shameful willingness to declare, in effect, that African-Americans are not able to make it on their own, and that Big Government is the only hope for them. Those are my words, not Parker's. She says it a whole lot better than I can: 

The National Urban League has just issued its annual State of Black America report. It provides a troubling statistical snapshot of where blacks stand today in our country. Like Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League, I'm concerned. But after concern, we part company. We have very different ideas of what it is we should be concerned about. Morial, I am sure, sees his organization as part of the solution. From what I see, it is a well-funded symptom of the problem. 

Note: If you want a copy of the State of Black America report, the National Urban League will gladly sell you a copy for $19.95. However, you can find a free Executive Summary and free abstracts at no charge on their website.

Parker jumps right into to her declaration that the National Urban League, a suck-up organization in the pocket of the Democrat National Committee, is not part of any solution. The National Urban League, she says, is a big part of the problem: Shouldn't it embarrass black Americans that one the nation's largest and most prestigious civil rights organizations offers a long list of proposals to improve black life in our country, and every single proposal is a government program? Government funded jobs as the answer to unemployment, more government money in public schools, government health care, government business loans, government money for retirement accounts, government programs for counseling homebuyers, government worker training programs, government money for building construction, and on and on. 

Indeed, it should embarrass not just black Americans but all Americans that, in the year 2009, so much of the failed policies of Lyndon Johnson's not-so-"Great Society" are still clung to by race-baiting opportunists. The National Urban League is such an opportunistic organization, eager to take the tax dollars of hard working men and women regardless of race and redistribute it to those who have not earned it. A main motivation of such immoral action: Power. He who controls the gold controls those to whom he doles it. Why do you think 90 percent of black voters, in a typical election, will vote for the Democrat? Because organizations like the Urban League are in a devil's pact with the Democrats and the redistributionists. 

Parker continues: There's not a single proposal that I could find in a several hundred-page report about improving black life that does not start with government. The civil rights movement once was about freedom and liberation. Now it's about government dependency. We should be ashamed. 

Ashamed, yes. Surprised, no, not with reflection and critical thought. One of the most disturbing nightmares for the Democrat Party leadership and groups such as the National Urban League is one in which black people and other minority groups begin to realize that freedom and liberty is killed by dependence. Whether that dependence is that of a child to parent or welfare recipient to government bureaucrat, freedom dies and the recipient is co-opted. Creativity is discouraged, enterprise muted, progress retarded. 

But, you may whimper, blacks and minorities need more help than, you know, the rest of us. That's liberal code for "white people." The Democrat Party and the Urban League don't mind that at all. The notion that one cannot make it with Uncle Sam's hand up one's rear end, as with a ventriloquist and his dummy, is just fine and dandy. The ventriloquist, after all, controls the dummy. What good would it do the ventriloquist if the dummy got off his lap, walked away, and booked his own act? 

Racism still exists, but it can no longer be blamed as a blanket reason for blacks to fail. Too many black Americans are succeeding, thank God, for that to be a valid reason any longer. It is now an shirker's excuse. As Parker writes, "Regarding discrimination, you have to wonder what it will take to get off this convenient excuse. Some 40 million white Americans voted for Barack Obama for president. That is two million more white Americans than voted for John Kerry in 2004." 

It is, perhaps, an ironic statement for Parker to make, considering that Kerry and Obama have been and continue to be part of the cabal that encourages groups like the National Urban League - and the myth that black Americans can't make it without them.