The Tom Joyner morning show: Black, liberal and (anti-black) racist

The Tom Joyner Morning Show is carried on over 100 stations. It caters to a black audience. Sometimes I listen to it on the way to work. The show is similar to Imus In The Morning, rather formulaic of that type.

Like Imus, Joyner has a studio crew that he jabbers with. They review various matters that are supposed to be funny. On cue, they all go into forced hysterics. This version of canned laughter is stock in trade for morning ensemble talk shows. Just like live broadcast TV, they have tell the audience when to laugh, sigh and applaud. Any relation to humor is tenuous, so they have to let us know we‘ re supposed to laugh. What‘ s most remarkable about it, is that it even has an audience.

The men have some of the most God-awful speaking voices that have ever come over the air. They could make the skin of an iguana crawl.

It really gets interesting when they get into political matters. They‘ re reliably Democratic. But what‘ s really interesting is how they view black conservatives and libertarians. Some guy that Joyner calls Player leads the way in this part.

One time, they were reviewing some of W‘ s judicial nominees. When it came to Janice Rogers Brown, he acted like The Thirteenth Amendment was about to be repealed. He raised the alarm that she might be another (can you imagine!), Clarence Thomas. My God! I clutch my chest and collapse to the floor.

Then there is The New York Times Book Review of Sunday, November 27 wherein David Oshinsky reviews John Hope Franklin‘ s autobiography, ‘ Mirror To America‘ . Franklin thoroughly despises Clarence Thomas as having ‘bleached white‘ Thurgood Marshall‘ s Supreme Court seat.

There is a racism at work here and it is an anti-black racism. You see, blacks aren‘ t supposed to have an opinion different from that ‘approved‘ by the Tom Joyners and John Hope Franklins of the world, not to mention Ted, Jesse and Barbara. They are not permitted to have an opinion that the liberals don‘ t approve of.

Joyner also has PBS‘ s Tavis Smiley on for commentary on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Smiley is black and with a background like PBS, he is establishment liberal. His latest cause is, along with a lot of other celebrities, gaining clemency for quadruple murderer Stanley ‘Tookie‘ Williams.

To be fair, Joyner has Gregory Kane and Joseph C. Phillips as commentators at his website who seem to be open minded but I never hear them interviewed. They voice opinions grounded in reality but, overall, the entire Joyner experience is, just like Tavis Smiley, establishment liberal.

There are some very interesting aspects in this whole issue. Why do blacks overwhelmingly vote Democratic, especially liberal Democratic? That wing of the Democratic Party is the very antithesis of what most blacks stand for.

Some while back, an article in National Review cited an attitudinal survey that showed issue by issue, blacks were by a huge margin, far more conservative than any other in the country. I confirmed this with a now deceased black friend of mine.

The issues covered in the survey were abortion, church orientation, belief in God, and law and order. Blacks were on the conservative side of every issue by much greater margins than whites, including crime. They went to church more frequently, were more pro-life, had a far greater professed belief in a Creator and wanted to see street corner punks thrown in jail and the key melted. The author concluded that Republicans were missing a huge opportunity.

As a libertarian who has left the Republicans, what astonishes me is that so many blacks don‘ t see that it‘ s traditionally been the Democratic Party that resisted most of their progress, especially in the South, but it happened everywhere. Most of the civil rights acts were opposed primarily by southern Democrats.

It gets worse, much worse for the Democrats when you look at the historical record. Woodrow Wilson, a Virginia Democrat and a beacon of liberal enlightenment, issued the executive order that established Jim Crow for the federal government and 1924 Democratic Presidential nominee, John Davis, argued the case for segregation in 1954 before the Supreme Court in Brown vs. Board of Education.

But the Democrats helped with other roadblocks. The labor unions of the northeast were overwhelmingly Democratic, and it was the labor unions that resolutely prevented blacks from entering the work force and competing with union members for decades. They did it through union shop laws that were passed under Democratic machines, congresses and presidents. This was a major economic obstacle for black unskilled workers who were entering the labor force just as the sharecropper system was breaking up. In short, it was the Democrats, far more than the Republicans, who participated in obstruction to black economic, as well as political, progress in this country.

In 1964, Barry Goldwater voted against that year‘ s Civil Rights bill. I think his reasons for doing it were correct. He demonstrated in a speech on the floor of the Senate, how it would result in a quota system. Sen. Hubert Humphrey coordinated the drive to get it through the Senate for Lyndon Johnson who needed to burnish his credentials with blacks. Just four years before, Johnson had been an arch-segregationist in the Senate.

Barry Goldwater was one of the most decent and least bigoted people to ever run for president. He had helped found the Arizona NAACP. He personally led the effort to desegregate the Arizona National Guard and when he helped found the Arizona Air Guard, insisted on no segregation. The NAACP publicly thanked him for his efforts. If ever a man was a friend of equality before the law, it was Barry Goldwater.

But Barry voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Bill for principled reasons and he paid the price. The Keepers of Our Conscience howled. The trickle of blacks switching from Republican to Democrat that had begun under Franklin D. Roosevelt became a flood. Since then, blacks have become the most uniformly reliably Democratic group in America.

And so it goes but today but no one dares to discuss it. Certainly not Tom Joyner nor Tavis Smiley. And the losers are the blacks themselves. They are sentencing themselves to be afterthoughts in the political process.

“Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact.”