Blacks' Loyalty to First Black President Got Blacks Nothing

By Crystal Wright, CP Op-Ed Contributor Friday, February 20, 2015

Crystal Wright is a black conservative woman living in Washington, D.C. and is a communications consultant and editor and publisher of conservativeblackchick.com.

President Obama is proof that when blacks elected a black Democrat to the White House based only on his "blackness," blacks get ZERO! In the past six years Obama has been president blacks have lost economic ground. The unemployment rate remains in the double digits and since the black president came to town, black wealth came down. Way down!

Today the average black family has no liquid retirement savings. Nada, rien (as the French say), none. That's right. But the average white family has $5,000 in liquid retirement savings, which is an increase from $1,500 they had in1998. An analysis from the Urban Institute crunched data from the 2014 Federal Reserve and found black America is in bad shape financially. In 1983, whites accumulated eight times the wealth of blacks. The average white household had over $100,000 in wealth compared to a slim $13,000 for blacks.

"By 2013, the median white family had 12 times the wealth of the median African-American family," observed the Urban Institute.

But how can black Americans be expected to save, invest and create wealth under the first black president's leadership, when the jobless rate for blacks has been persistently stuck in neutral. As of February 2015, black unemployment was 10.3 percent almost twice the national average of 5.7 percent --and more than twice that of whites at 4.9 percent. In 2010, the black jobless rate soared to over 16 percent, the highest since 1984.

Over 90 percent of blacks voted for Obama during both the 2008 and 2012 elections, and what do they have to show for it? High unemployment while the overall unemployment rate declines. In the summer 2012, when black unemployment was 14 percent, then-chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, Emmanuel Cleaver, encouraged blacks to overlook that and vote for him again. Cleaver even joked that "if we had a white president we'd be marching around the White House." But he said the Congressional Black Caucus and its black Democrat members, who are supposed to advocate on behalf of blacks, give deference to Obama purely because he's black.

Apparently, the only benefit blacks received voting for the first black president twice is feeling good knowing they voted for a black man-- because "black America" isn't feeling any love from Obama. Obama should start proving "black lives matter" by showing blacks some a record of success instead of failure. Blacks have been-- without fail-- Obama's most loyal constituents and what have they gotten in return? Victimization speeches and lies from Obama on racial profiling and black crime. That narrative doesn't create black wealth but it does create phony race wars that only –in turn—create wealth for hustlers like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. For their loyalty, black checking accounts have low balances.

Black America has atrophied economically, as Obama appeases every liberal constituent under the sun, but blacks.

Crystal Wright is a black conservative woman living in Washington, D.C. Some would say she is a triple minority: woman, black and a Republican living in a Democrat dominated city. By day, Crystal is a communications consultant and editor and publisher of the new website, www.conservativeblackchick.com. Ms. Wright holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Georgetown University and a Masters of Fine Arts in Theatre from Virginia Commonwealth University.