Book Review… Delivering harsh realities with no solutions

Jan 08, 2017 Book Review…, Features / Columnists

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Book: Con Job: How Democrats Gave us Crime, Sanctuary Cities, Abortion Profiteering and Racial Division
Author: Crystal Wright
Critic: Dr Glenville Ashby

Conservative writer and talk show host Crystal Wright launches a withering indictment on the US Democratic Party in her controversial, ‘Con Job: How Democrats have us crime, sanctuary cities, abortion profiteering and racial

division.’
On the heels of an overwhelming bicameral victory by the Republican Party and the unlikely presidency of its candidate, Donald Trump, democrats and political pundits are still grappling with the far-reaching question: What went wrong?
Wright’s ‘Con Job’ offers some clues. Written just a few months before the presidential elections, Wright indicts the democrats for courting racist peddlers and deliberately inflaming racial discord for political mileage. The ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement and Al Sharpton’s National Action Network are singled out. She accuses them of deliberately ignoring black on black crime, a national crisis she views as a plague that has turned the inner cities into wastelands.
She argues that police officers are not enemies of blacks nor are they occupiers of black neighbourhoods. She is alarmed that the media has fanned the flame of hatred by not challenging the vacuous charges against law enforcement.
Wright’s incendiary thesis emerges from personal tragedy; her grandfather, a thriving businessman was murdered by black thugs. Her searing pain has found a vent in the excoriating pages of Con Job.
She argues that the democratic elite has promoted black servitude, and rightfully states that it was the Democratic Party that fought against the dismantling of slavery. Somehow the elite have managed to convince blacks that they are better served under the democratic banner.
Creating a bloated welfare state to which blacks are beholden, democrats have pulled off a political sleight of hand. Despite inner cities that are nothing more than breeding grounds for violence, fatherlessness, lassitude and economic dependency, democratic politicians continue to woo and win black voters. As long as handouts are readily available the back vote is guaranteed. Every democrat running for president has won the black vote, but inner cities remain a festering wound. Interestingly, despite promising to overhaul the inner cities, president-elect Donald Trump won a mere 8% of the black vote.
Charging democrats with conning blacks, Wright echoes the enduring quote from Voltaire: “It’s difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.” Clearly, if we are to believe Wright, blacks have been hoodwinked – victims of yesterday and today.
Yet Wright is icy without understanding or a dose of mercy. This coldness is overpowering when she discusses the plight of hundreds of children – victims, no doubt, who made the perilous trek across the US border from Central America. Her acrimony has little patience for historiography and sociological narratives. She hastily invites us to see her world through her own prejudices. She cites statistics to salvage a presentation that is bloated with political smearing, yet her painful sensibilities are overpowering.
The result is an unapologetic and brutal testimony that falls short on multiple levels. She bends and ignores facts that challenge her position, and moreover, seems disinterested in finding veritable, workable solutions to a very real problem. She is unmoved by stop and frisk  procedures by law and enforcement that overwhelmingly targets blacks and in itself is a  violation of the 14th Amendment which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures. She fails to mention that deportation rose astronomically under the Obama administration, insisting that the 44th president deliberately encourages illegal immigration.
But short on reason Wright might have given comfort to a fifth column in American society that has existed long before the birth of black radicalism. Racial violence did not suddenly emerge in the 1960s as Wright states. The lot of black America, as any other demographic must be contextually addressed. Ironically, Con Job borders on verbal lynching, ironically bleeding the very hatred it purports to combat.
Moreover, it risks being used by racists to advance their perversion.
Con Job is potentially biblical to fascists and white supremacists – of which there is no shortage in the US. It is their evidence, their ‘told you so’ vindication. Unfortunately, under the guise of scholarly enquiry some black writers, such as Wright, have turned their pens against their own, and have unwittingly or wittingly turned back the hands of time.
In Wright’s ultra-conservative world there is no room for Michelle Alexander’s ‘The New Jim Crow’ that leans heavily on the historical thread that runs through a judicial system that she deems unjust. Would that Wright and Alexander – two disparate voices on the same issue could find common ground if only for the sake of a black America in sore need of real solutions.

Con Job: How the Democrats gave us crime, Sanctuary Cities, Abortion Profiteering, and Racial Division by Crystal Wright
Regnery Publishing, 2016
ISBN:9781621574293
Available at Amazon
Rating; recommended

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