- Watch Star Parker on C-SPAN's Washington Journal (August 4, 2008)
C-SPAN: Sen. Lindsey Graham on Fox News Sunday said Sen. Obama is injecting race into the Presidential campaign. The issue of race exploded on the campaign trail after Sen. Obama delivered a speech in which he said he's being attacked because he doesn't look like all the other president's on the dollar bills.
Juan Williams also writes about race in the campaign and he writes an op-ed in this morning's Wall Street Journal. "The issue of race is not going away. The key reason is, to be blunt, there's no telling how many white voters are lying to pollsters when that they say they plan to voter for a black man to be president. Still it's possible to look elsewhere in the polling numbers to see where white voters acknowledge their racial feelings and get a truer measure of racism." Is Senator McCain using race as a strategy in this presidential campaign?
STAR PARKER: Race is an inevitable subject right now. Not only did we see it play in the primaries with the Democrats with Hillary and Bill Clinton interjecting it, but Barack Obama himself has interjected it and he's black so there's no way to get around it.
I think what has happened, though, is that people are expecting new dialogue when it comes to race issues in this country; that perhaps they thought that Barack Obama would start to discuss it outside of what we heard for the last 40 years out of liberals and other Democrats to say that we have to focus on politicizing race as opposed to looking at policy issues that people really want to sort through.
So when I assess the polling dilemma in potential white voters, I don't know that they're saying they would never vote for a black man. I believe they're saying we need to look beyond race if we can, while at the same time sort through our own personal feelings about race and look beyond it and see what exactly is going to be better for myself and my community.
Where Barack Obama is running into difficulty with this particular voting block is that that voting block is relatively conservative. They come from traditional values,
they want a limited role of government, and these are not ideas that he represents.
C-SPAN: Do you think Sen. Obama has run away from the issue of race, has avoided the issue of race?
STAR PARKER: I think it's a dilemma. He can't run from it, nor can he embrace it. I think what has happened to Barack Obama in his presidential bid is what we know from his books or what happened to him when he went through college and high school, and what has happened to a lot of bi-racials. They have to sort through "who am I?" because, as I mentioned, race has become so politicized. You know, Barack Obama's presidency, for some, represent an extension of Lyndon Baines Johnson's war on poverty. What are we going to do now that we have moved 40 years past removing the barriers through the Civil Rights movement and we are still so conflicted when it comes to race politics in this country.
Barack Obama, some were hoping, would be able to open new dialogue because of his bi-racial heritage and perhaps say we should assess policy decisions and not politicize race and continue what we have been doing over the last 40 years.
C-SPAN: Juan Williams wrote in his op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal that "Jodie Allen, a senior editor at Pew, wrote recently that a poll Pew conducted last November showed clearly that "the black community is at least as traditional in its views as the larger American public." Blacks in the Pew poll were just as likely as whites to take a hard line opposing crime (as long as black neighborhoods are not unfairly targeted), to condemn the shocking number of children from out of wedlock and express disgust with the violence and misogyny in rap music."
Williams continues, "Mr. Obama needs to hammer home these conservative social values to capture undecided white voters. He might lose Mr. Jackson's vote. But he won't lose any black votes, and he will win the undecided white votes he needs to become America's first African-American president." What do you think?
STAR PARKER: I think that he will and also that hard Left that's in the black community, which is most of our leadership groups -- the traditional Civil Rights groups -- because the community itself is also trying to sort out who we want to be. Are we going to be a black voting block or am I going to start more personally about my family, my family decisions, my own economic well-being, my education of my children...because once you start saying, 'I'm going to be an individual', in this 21st century, you have to move away from the race politics of the past. You have to start thinking about areas of removing governmental barriers over education so you can have more options. You have to start thinking about what it really takes to protect your community. What excessive taxation has done to most of our urban centers. And you have to start thinking about our family choices. The black family is really in crisis right now.
C-SPAN: Who are you supporting in the campaign?
STAR PARKER: I have not made a decision that I'm going to support one particular candidate, but I'm absolutely conservative and I'm going to make sure I can do everything I can to make sure that the Left does not take over Washington, DC.
C-SPAN Caller 1: I wanted to comment to the young lady, one thing that I think harms where you're going is when you refer to yourself as African-Americans. You're not African. Like Bill Cosby said, you don't know anything about Africa, you weren't born there. Simply call yourselves Americans and I say that strictly as help. And the other thing is that the dialect that black teachers use, such as axe, instead of ask, needs weeded out. This is in Christian love.
STAR PARKER: Regarding the first part of his discussion, the dilemma that African-Americans are having in this country, or blacks, to identify, is a progression, it will continue. And there is a part of heritage that everyone wants to maintain. These are not new discussions the black community is having in this century because we saw it at the turn of the last century with the Italians, the Irish, and the Germans. They want to maintain some part of their identity while at the same time to mainstream it. Blacks are just behind in doing this because our movement, in moving into mainstream, was so politicized coming out of the 60s after the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The discussions we should have had internally then, we're having today. So I think that as we mature into mainstream, as we continue the economic gains that are occurring, as we continue now to see the new trends after welfare reform where family is started to rebuild and regain its focus, that debate will resolve.
C-SPAN Caller 2: The quote by Juan Williams is nothing new. Obama is not simply black, he is a man first. Look at the whisper campaigns of him being arrogant. He is an educated man from Harvard who carries himself well is somehow arrogant versus whatever connotations that make you non-arrogant.
STAR PARKER: There is an arrogance to elitism. This is where people get confused because this is where, when that same liberal thought comes from an African-American, we're supposed to change the discussion and pretend it's about their race instead of their positions. There is an arrogance about someone who thinks they should micromanage other people's lives. When you look at the policy-ideas of the Left, they are for redistribution of wealth and that they should make decisions about everyone else's lives regardless of whether those discussions are how and when you buy a home, whether it's about where you send your children to school, or developing the child that's growing in your womb. Left-wing liberalism in this country, in terms of how they perceive policy for the rest of us, is the same. What we have [different] today is hearing it through a black vessel. I am sure that this was in big discussion when they were determining whether Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton would be the Democrat candidate because they knew they could use race and start polarizing many of these discussions.
C-SPAN: The caller mentioned the word 'arrogance'. That issue came up with David Gergen, the former presidential advisor and long-time Republican consultant, he mentioned on This Week with George Stephanopolous, he took issue with a McCain ad that mocked Obama as "the one" and included a brief image of Charlton Heston playing Moses: "He may be the one," intones a voice in the ad. "But is he ready to lead? As a native of the South, I can tell you, when you see this Charlton Heston ad, "the One," that's code for, 'He's uppity, he ought to stay in his place'. Everybody gets that who is from a Southern background." Do you think the McCain campaign was trying to play towards that feeling?
STAR PARKER: I think the McCain campaign was trying to find a way to beat back the ideas of this particular party that they're up against and yet we have on the table race politics and the politicization of race for the last 45 years. So anytime, any discovery that there are problems with what Obama is talking about, they bring it back to race. I don't think there was a deliberate interjection or thought to say, 'let's discuss Charlton Heston'. I mean, they're talking about Moses. This is Moses, alright? And when you think about how Barack Obama is being perceived, or at least how some are positioning him, there is a stigma that is transcendent, and we saw that when he went to Berlin.
C-SPAN: That issue, you wrote last week about him being in Berlin. The headline says, "Kumbaya falls flat in Berlin". What did you mean by that?
STAR PARKER: There is an existence, that the persona around this man that he's untouchable. The people of Berlin came out to hear and to see, and I believe they left a little more confused than perhaps many on the Left that thought this is a good idea for him to speak to that group realized. When you think about the differences in the people of Europe as opposed to the people in America, we're mixing apples and oranges. There are common views of common people. For instance, Barack Obama wants to pretend that the differences between the French, the Germans, and the English are similar to the differences between the Christians and the Jews and the Muslims and this is absolutely not true. But when you talk about religion, in most areas of religion, it is choice. What religious people want, and what we embrace, is we want protections from government, not for government to insist we're all exactly the same.
C-SPAN Caller 3: First caller said that you are a nobody, that you are not African, that you're American, and a lot of white people think that about blacks, they are nobody. I see Obama as a visionary. He's talking about the future where McCain is not talking about what's happening ten years from now.
STAR PARKER: I don't believe the first caller saw me as a nobody, not that I know the first caller, but I do hear often the whites struggling with black identification and America and American principles and why it is that we are not embracing the type of patriotism that we will see in white communities. I don't know that he is directly calling me a no one, but saying, why aren't more blacks American and consider themselves American. Frankly, there is a challenge there. When you look at polling data, particularly Pew or Gallup, blacks do not identify and embrace the American ideals the way you see the white community embrace them. These are discussions you think that we would have with Barack Obama, being the top presidential nominee, but yet we're not having that discussion. We are moving into discussions that are pretty petty and are not getting into the critical problems that Americans are facing.
C-SPAN Caller 4: As a white, many white independent voters can't understand how a man who has a white mother and a black father can be a true black. Does this mean that he could say he is white? I don't understand how someone with 19-months of experience can do things to better people which would cost hundreds of billions of people. There are many questions people don't want to address.
STAR PARKER: Regarding the first part of the question, one of the dilemmas and the challenges that we have
in this country, and one of the differences between how the parties view race is that of affirmative action and racial preferences. The reason you find more blacks, and even bi-racials, identifying with the predominant racial part of their lives is because of politics, not because we as society look at someone and say well, I'm going to make a decision about you and then base a lot of other things that will impact your life on those decisions. What happens is that it breaks down when we start discussing, should we have special preferences for people that are a certain ethnicity in this country. The Republican Party is saying, no we should not. What we should do is, we are going to start helping those who have limited means and reassess race politics in this country, remove barriers like affirmative action policies, and get on discussing how we are going to help people who perhaps cannot get into school or cannot get into other opportunities before them because they have limited resources. On the other hand, you have the Democrat party that insists we're going to continue race politics, that we're going to continue affirmative action and racial preferences, so people use their identity to gain.
C-SPAN: What does Senator Obama have to do to get your vote?
STAR PARKER: I am not going to vote for Barack Obama. I'm going to vote with my Party. For the independent voter who is undecided. What are the issues important to them? I run a social policy think-tank. We work in reform ideas, assess America's urban policy, and we want to make significant changes in what we've done over the last 40 years in terms of how do we empower the lives of the poor. Well, I certainly would not support a party who thinks we should not let parents choose what school their children go to. I would not support a party who believes that some children are unplanned and unwanted. When you look at the abortion rates in the black community, one in two pregnancies end in abortion. We're talking about 400,000 black babies being killed in the womb. These are issues that should be discussed on the top levels. We look at the family in crisis rather than the discussions of the Left moving toward how to put traditional norms back in the family life and marriage being between a male and a female, a husband loving his wife and raising their children. They want to expand the brokenness of family life and include homosexuals. These are not hard choices for me personally and I think for independent voters, the best thing for them to do is to make a decision on which candidate they choose by looking at the platform of that candidate. The politics of Washington DC is not run by one. I listen with interest to the discussions about George W. Bush and people wanting to impeach him or get on him as a person and yet we're talking about are ideas. There are fundamental differences between the two [parties]. The one I support is for a limited role of government and traditional values.
C-SPAN Caller 5: Why does Obama throw the race card when someone challenges his views?
STAR PARKER: I think the race card has been played by Barack Obama and most on the Left because it works well for them. It intimidates middle Americans to believe that they are still doing something wrong when it come to race issues, that the reason that blacks have problems in this country is because of something someone else has not done. And it has worked for them over the last 45 years but I'm not sure that in this election it will work for them again because when you think about the top issues of the day that are confronting this country for most Americans, we've already seen what this Congress will do for them, which is expand the role of government and I don't think too many are comfortable with that.
C-SPAN Caller 6: It is sad to see a black woman be so negative. My problem is the same issues that she says that the government should not have such a role in, well look at the face of black American on CNN, we're still where we were 40 years ago. I have a problem with the person who looks most like you, you have such a bad rep with a black American, my husband who is a very good father and we're not on government and so are many other black Americans. It's sad to see you would not support your own cause and your own people and to think that a black man would not want other black families, because he is a family man and a man of intelligence, that he would not want the rest of black America to do well and not because he's asking for handouts. As for affirmative action, it is not to give them a hands-up because they're under-qualified, but to give those people who were qualified but looked because of their race.
STAR PARKER: It's interesting because I've delta with this. Sometimes you can be so far ahead of a parade that people don't know you're in it. That's what happens to black conservatives. We have thought very deeply, many of us, on these issues of what would make a viable community for ourselves, for our family, and for those we care about. Perhaps we are a little bit ahead of the community itself and rather than he community think about our ideas, they try to personally attack us. There are tax problems in most urban centers that have created this environment for dilapidation. In St. Louis, they have an additional tax on top of your earnings for redevelopment. Therefore, if the property owner lets the property stays vacant for a tax write-off instead of putting someone in there to pay additional income tax, this is a challenge yet we cannot have a discussion about this to say maybe we should rethink that tax. In No Child Left Behind, we constantly hear from the Left that this is bad policy. Well, this is their policy. No Child Left Behind is a reauthorization of existing education law that was developed in the 60s. What this president said is, why don't we try to make it work. If we are going to try to close the educational gap between black and white students, maybe we should look very seriously of where the dilemma is and try to fix it. They say they're just teaching to the test. Well, perhaps teaching to the test has worked for blacks because now we're starting to see African-American young kids, the nine-year-olds in particular, increase their learning skills when it comes to English, science, math. It's also working for Hispanic kids. We have this insistence where we're going to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Anytime anyone decides that they're going to discuss some changes to current policy, this happened in the 90s when many people like myself supported welfare reform, and people before me such as Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell, and it happened again to Bill Cosby who said we should think about family life. We should think about black family life. Seven out of 10 black babies are now born outside of marriage. This is something that we can fix. This is not something that's policy-driven. When you think about 65 percent of black kids being raised in single-headed households, this is something we should have a discussion about and what has not only created this environment but what we need to do to get out of it because anyone that would insist that these kids are on a level equal playing field when they come from a broken family structure are lying to themselves.
C-SPAN Caller 6: African is our race. Our nationality is American. The issue to race, everybody knows this woman has no agenda that is embraced by black communities. African-Americans are by nature conservatives.
STAR PARKER: My race is not African. I deal with many Africans at my church who come from different nations that are unique and I cannot identify with their unique cultures because I identify with American principles. Regarding the second part of blacks embracing conservatives. There's a difference between polling about conservativism and producing policies that enhance conservatism through a world-view that looks at traditional values and limited government so that people can flourish. I do have an agenda. I moved my life to Washington DC to develop a think-tank. We have to talk about urban policy. In terms of the black conservative community, there are about 25 percent. 19 percent, twice what polls show in white America, say they're not only evangelical and conservative, but that they're part of the Religious Right. There are about 24 percent of blacks in this country who do not believe the Left and the Congressional Black Caucus support their world-view. The black community is diverse. Is it diverse as we would like? No. One of the challenges with it not being as diverse as we would like it, is the challenge confronting Barack Obama today. That's why race is so important in this issue. Blacks have politicized race to the point that all of their eggs are in one basket that when white voters look at Barack Obama, they wonder are they getting the ideas of the leadership of black America that we saw exemplified in Jeremiah Wright.
C-SPAN Caller 7: The labeling has got to stop. The minute we stop, we can start talking about other important issues.
STAR PARKER: In three states, voters have an opportunity to remove the barriers of race politics because they have Civil Rights initiatives that will move over the affirmative action, racial preference categories. Regarding moving beyond those challenges, what makes the black experience unique is that unlike other ethnicities that left oppression to come to freedom, blacks did the opposite. They left what would have been considered freedom in Africa and were dragged into oppression. This is a big challenge. The struggle in black life is unique and yet there's a lot more focus on that problem and blaming others on that problem than focusing on embracing the pain and the struggling and saying, okay these are my set of circumstances and now what do I do with them? We have not spent enough time and attention on that.
C-SPAN: Newsweek looks more deeply into the race issue in the South. Christopher Dickey writes about the end of the South and how McCain v. Obama is unsettling the old Confederacy. He says a generation is growing up with traumas more immediate of those than the 1860s or the 1960s. He writes, "Shana Sprouse, 21 and white, and born and raised in Spartanburg, S.C. says she's going to vote for Obama because her 26-year-old boyfriend is racked with cancer and she and he have spent the last two years trying to find ways to pay for his treatment. Jobs are disappearing to places that are truly foreign, not mock-strange states like California. New immigrants are introducing brown into a color map that has long been dominated by black and white. There is a sense that the world is ending. Maybe not this year, but inevitably." Sen. Obama has talked about similar economic issues that blacks and whites are facing. Is that resonating with blacks and whites?
STAR PARKER: It is for those who are in that economic dilemma. When you look at what's happening in rural communities, they are deeply touched by the economic concerns of the rest of the country. They hit them more uniquely because they're already struggling in their lives. These struggles transcend race. There's no difference between black poverty and white poverty when no one has a job. What we need to do as a nation is say how do we look at poverty issues and help people regardless of their ethnicity to tap into the opportunities. How you do that is limit government in Washington and allow for local communities to embrace policies and changes that could help them. The challenge that we run into, particularly in the South, is that it still breaks down racially. I've had black leaders tell me, anything rich, white Republicans are for, then I'm against. There's this insistence that we're going to embrace Socialism instead of Capitalism. Yet, the free market has components built within it that will revolutionize a community regardless of the ethnicity.
C-SPAN Caller 8: Please get off of Barack's back for using the race card. White America used the race card to institute slavery, to oppress black people, so please get off of his back.
STAR PARKER: The challenge with the hostility that will develop from blacks that will say you guys need to stay out of this discussion is that we're talking about an election of the voters, that will change the dynamics of this country forever and I think race is a part of that discussion. What we want is healthy discussion about race, not tit-for-tat, you brought up the card first. What we need to do is look and reassess policies. Americans have invested, in terms of tax dollars, trillions in this war on poverty for someone to say are we getting a return on investment is a legitimate question. The question to a black candidate has even more merit because this person should be able to explain to the American people what has happened with their trillions of dollars and what needs to be done to make sure we're getting the right return on investment. When you look at the surface, nothing has changed. When you walk around a major city such as our nation's capital, and there's a homeless person on every metro station, you look at education and the gap is becoming wider. We're not seeing a lot focus on what happens to build family life in any discussion on how people can recover themselves educationally, for their own children, not for some micro-management out of Washington, DC. There are many areas of discussion that could take place but as long as we've got people on one side saying you can't talk about that issue because you have no legitimacy, your views are different than mine, because as the caller insisted that I'm conservative or no longer black or whether I wear braids or not. And on the other hand you have whites that are intimidated by the race card so they're not going to have these discussions in public but then we could suspect that much of the polling data is not accurate. I want people to remove the questions about race when they go into the polling booth and say which candidate is best for this great country of ours. But I want them to also understand what the candidates represent when it comes to their world-view and their philosophy about the role of government.
C-SPAN Caller 9: I'm from Detroit and the cities are a disaster. I'm sure you see it everywhere.
STAR PARKER: We see it in many of our urban cities. The difficulty in urban life is because race has been politicized and we cannot get to clear discussions about why our communities are dismantling. In Oklahoma, for example, as the result of No Child Left Behind, they were able to focus on what was broken educationally, they identified only 7,000 children. Out of 90,000 public schools, how many are in crisis. There are 2,300. 11,000 are serious at risk. Those that need fixing should have all options for the parents. In Oklahoma they gave scholarships to those who were trapped in the failing schools. But the Democrat machine and the teacher's union shut it down. The Bill that was being promoted was promoted by Democrats and blocked by Democrats because it was out of the normal structure. The challenge in Detroit is that family life is broken. When family life is broken you see other social pathologies. Young men and women lose their way when marriage does not occur, that commitment is not important and family commitment is not important in their community, and you see a lot of despair in the harder-hit areas. What do we need to do to repair them? We need to remove the excessiveness of government so we can build family life again. Welfare reform, as a national agenda system, began to dismantle that life's problems are someone else's to fix and let people rebuild their lives and focus in urban communities. It will take a long time for people to rebuild to see their own way. But at least we should have the discussion and at least we should think about policy ideas that will help people recover their own personal lives.
C-SPAN Caller 10: Blacks are the most monolithic voting block, they vote for candidates that give special rights for homosexuals, open borders, and the most liberal candidates.
STAR PARKER: He's right, not just on social concerns, but on economic concerns. Polling data shows there are a majority of blacks who are conservative, but we do not see this in the electorate. We see blacks voting against personal retirement accounts, for instance, in Social Security. We couldn't even have the discussion. And yet you want to tap in and break the cycle of poverty. Allow for you investments we're making now in Social Security go into Mutuals and Markets. We begin to see the breaking of the cycle of poverty in one generation when you can transfer wealth. You couldn't even have the discussion. Look in healthcare. The Left want the same old broken ideas, what we already see in healthcare and health distribution of care in urban centers, they want for the rest of the nation. As allowing for the market to interject itself and say, if we have healthcare dollars are looking at $7k per person, what is wrong with allowing that person to go into the marketplace and buying some insurance and allow for Medical Savings Accounts and for when there is a great need, because you have an insurance policy that goes with that, you will have the resources to take care of your own individual health concerns. We can't even have the discussion. Blacks, even though they say one thing, anytime someone starts talking about principles that are too conservative or might be of the Republicans, they immediately reject those ideas, even if those ideas are best for themselves, their family, and their community.
C-SPAN: So your sense is that African-Americans as a whole are conservative in their personal values but vote more Democrat?
STAR PARKER: They polled more conservative, but we don't see evidence of that in the way that blacks live. Let's face it, now with the AIDS epidemic hitting black communities, the brokenness of families, when you see the abortion rates in black America, there are some concerns that although blacks says they're conservative, it's not reflected in the way their lives are being lived. The top three social crises are rooted in sexual immorality, sexually transmitted diseases, abortion, and the welfare state. These are things that blacks have not addressed publicly, nor privately.
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