Bette Midler Got it Oh So Wrong on Black Men Supporting Trump

There Exist a Deeper Conflict and Resentment with Black Conservatives and White Liberals

About a week or so ago, Bette Midler, the actress, and singer of movies and song felt embolden to make a comment about a photo she had seen that showed a couple of black men at a Donald Trump political campaign. She was taken aback by what she had seen and seen fit to comment on it. What she had said would have been seen as a cursory flippant comment but the vehicle she used was with Twitter. She tweeted out, “Look, there are African American men in this shot! How much did he pay them to be ‘blackground’?” What she was met with was a barrage of criticism that insinuated and labeled her as being racist.

I personally cannot speak on the claim that Bette Midler is or is not a racist. I’ve seen a few of her films and have listened to her music in the past. On the surface, she does not present as racist but she did show being comfortable referring to black men as “blackground”. Was this more of an insensitive comment? Yes. Was it racist? That’s debatable and depends on a few factors, one being the history of the person saying it. Still, this doesn’t address the real underlying issue here and that is black conservatism.

Bette Midler is a liberal white woman. She, like many of her liberal cohorts, has continually made the assumption that all black people are Democrats and liberals. It’s an honest mistake and she would be and is so wrong. At one point in our political history, there was this surge of black voter support during the administration of John F. Kennedy coupled with advancing strides in the Civil Rights Movement, the Voting Act and the dismantling of old Jim Crow laws. But like everything, there is context.

While it is true that black Americans, in large parts, have voted in the majority for the Democratic Party, there are shifts in the landscape that says this trend is eroding and nobody is paying attention. While it may be true that a majority of blacks do vote for the Democrats, their political stance is not liberal but conservative. I’ve been noticing this quiet transformation for over a decade now.

When Barack Obama became president for his first term, he was a more “palatable” president. He wasn’t threatening, he was an unknown and was comfortable to middle American housewives. Barack’s second term in office was mainly because he was already in that boat and the public saw no viable opposition to rock that boat. What he did as president was a mixed bag of issues that he either found the mark or missed the mark completely. For the most part, he was a scandal-free president.

And for the most part, blacks overwhelmingly voted for Obama. Trump came along and rewrote the rule book on campaigning. Nobody, including the access media, took him or his candidacy serious. He was a buffoon a clown with orange hair. He won the nomination and faced Hillary Clinton but what the access media didn’t count on that Hillary wasn’t the heir apparent. If they would have been paying attention, they would have felt the rumblings of discontent with Hillary. Hillary came with more baggage than a Princess cruise ship. She wasn’t trustworthy. Her views were left of center and she just was a holdover from the Clinton years who stayed too long on the political stage. The 2016 election showed that Hillary didn’t fare as well with minority voters compared to Obama while Trump did fare better with blacks and Hispanics than Mitt Romney did in his election bid.

Black conservatism isn’t new, it’s just widely under-reported. People have forgotten the history of black voters over time. American Blacks were heavily associated with the Republican party due in part with Abraham Lincoln freeing the slaves. During the Jim Crow years, it was the southern Democrats who placed opposing legislation to blacks at that time including opposing some civil rights measures.

When Condoleezza Rice and Gen. Colin Powell became a part of the George W. Bush administration, these high profile appointments became the role models of black conservatism. George W. Bush would appoint 18 more black conservatives to his administration during his first year in office.

Thanks to social media platforms like Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, etc. you can find plenty of black conservative spreading their point of view and commentaries on the days' event. We no longer have just one point of view or spin on a story now from the liberal sources. When you see the number of hits a black conservative gets on their platforms, you can see the influence they are having with the political discourse. It is these conservative voices, black, brown, Asian, white, that the liberal media is ignoring in the same manner in which Hillary ignored Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. I, myself, do not align with any political party. I’m an Independent who is conservative. I really didn’t call myself a conservative until I was speaking with a guy down at the City Building Permit offices when we got into a discussion on a variety of issues and after speaking with him, he pointed out that I was conservative even though I advocate First Amendments issues. Maybe I’m liberal conservative?

What changed? Maybe it was the usual suspects on the Democratic side where promises were made and nothing happened in those black communities for years. There were the same problems that existed in the black communities no matter who was in office but the Democrats laid it on thicker with the false hope. It had reached the point where these black communities felt like candidates were giving them lip service and that their votes were being taken for granted. It comes to the point where you become jaded by the rhetoric. Obama’s hope and change were really nope and pained.

No, Bette Midler, black people do not think in a monolithic manner. We are independent thinkers in varying degrees of positions. It was wrong for you to assume such outdated, outrageous, and illogical divisive thinking. You probably think you’ve done nothing wrong as I have yet to see any type of apology issued on your behalf. Maybe no apology is due and your hubris will definitively be on display. After all, it won’t be the first time blacks have been denied equal treatment of an apology since that first whip cracked on a slave back in Virginia.