Stephen A. Smith Thinks Voting Republican Will Make Parties 'Compete' for Black Votes. He’s Wrong
Blind loyalty to a party has never been a defining feature of Black political activism, award-winning journalist and best-selling author Michael Harriot writes.
In 1940, Black people saved the world.
During the first eight years of his presidency, Franklin Roosevelt’s policy was to treat Black people like America had always treated Black people. He defended Jim Crow segregation and ignored pleas for an anti-lynching law. He put a Klansman on the Supreme Court. His redlining federal policy is still considered the gold standard of systemic racism. The New Deal didn’t just reserve its most impactful aid programs for white America; it excluded Black Americans from the most expensive, most progressive economic reform package in the history of the planet. And, while historians still rank Roosevelt as the most powerful president in American history, to win a third term, he had to confront an economic, political, and social crisis that had loomed over his entire presidency.
White supremacy.
In Roosevelt’s defense, he was a Democrat. In 1940, about 44% of Black registered voters identified as Democrats. That number didn’t include the Jim Crow South, where registering to vote was as dangerous for Black men as smiling at a white woman. In the former Confederate states, the Democratic Party was synonymous with white supremacy. And in a country where three out of four Black people lived in former Confederate states governed by fascist disenfranchisement laws, Roosevelt had never needed Black voters. He won his first two presidential campaigns in landslides. But when he heard that Black labor organizer A. Philip Randolph was planning a huge demonstration, Roosevelt understood what a “Negro March on Washington” meant for his reelection prospects.
The man most historians consider the most powerful president in U.S. history acquiesced. Summoning the members of his secret “Black Cabinet,” FDR tasked Howard University history professor Rayford Logan with writing Executive Order 8802. Meanwhile, the Pittsburgh Courier, a Black newspaper, launched the Double V campaign, urging the president to fight fascism at home and abroad. Soon, Black men flocked to the military.
Buoyed by their success, FDR’s Black Cabinet convinced the president to appoint another Howard University professor, Dr. Charles Drew, to build something called a “blood bank.” At their behest, he also included funds in the upcoming budget for a program called the Civilian Pilots Training Program (CPTP). Congress knew the country was preparing for war, so neither party opposed the unexplained line item in the military budget until the CPTP produced its first cohort of Tuskegee Airmen.
Before Executive Order 8802, America didn’t have the bombs, the tanks, planes, pilots, or the will necessary to face Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan’s plan for world domination. FDR knew it. While Black Americans played a large role in helping to extinguish this global threat to Democracy, they didn’t give their votes to FDR or the Democratic Party. They demanded something in return.
That’s only one reason Stephen A. Smith is wrong.
“I wish for one election that every Black person would vote Republican,” yelled world-renowned word-hollerer Stephen A. Smith on a recent episode of Cam Newton’s podcast. Smith acknowledged that he was quoting a speech he gave at Vanderbilt University when he said, “Black folks in America are telling one party: ‘We don’t give a damn about you.’ They’re telling the other party: 'You’ve got our vote.' Therefore, you have labeled yourself disenfranchised because one party knows they’ve got you under their thumb. The other party knows they’ll never get you, and nobody comes to address your interest.”
On Newton’s podcast, Smith added: “What I want is to put ourselves as a community in a position where both parties have to work to get our vote.”
I personally heard him deliver a version of his “I Have a Black Republican Dream” speech during a 2014 Black History Program at the University of Alabama-Birmingham. Even the local newspaper noted how Smith “chided black people for what he views as a blind allegiance to the Democratic party since the mid-1960s without engaging in even dialogue with leaders in both of the major parties.” He was wrong then; he is wrong now.
Aside from inspiring sports fans to turn down the volume when he is talking, the ESPN host is most known for being loud and wrong.
He was wrong when he blamed Trayvon Martin for making white people leery of Black men in hoodies, and not four centuries of racial propaganda. When he assumed his ESPN fame gave him enough clout to convince Black people to respect Donald Trump, he was wrong. He was wrong to suggest that some women deserved to be punched in the face. He was on the wrong side of “All Lives Matter” and Colin Kaepernick’s protest. When he called Rep. Jasmine Crockett “ghetto,” he was as wrong as the white people who used the same slur.
But when it comes to this political issue, Smith’s take isn’t just loud, wrong, historically inaccurate, and devoid of logic; his narcissistic contrarianism perpetuates an anti-Black narrative that launders racism as intellectual thought.
It’s white nonsense.
Parties Have Always Had to Earn Our Votes
Political parties exist for a reason. In the duopoly that defines mainstream American politics, the two parties represent two opposing methods of governing: one progressive, the other conservative. And while the Republican Party stands for very little, it represents a constituency dedicated to one proposition: All men are not created equal.
To be fair, when Stephen A. Smith and people who get their history from sixth-grade social studies textbooks regurgitate the ahistorical narrative that “the Democratic Party was the original racists,” they are partially correct. But here’s what Stephen A. Smith gets wrong:
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