Gavin Newsom, California’s golden-boy governor and likely 2028 White House hopeful, recently decided to “bond” with a black audience in Georgia.
Newsom proclaimed, “I’m not trying to impress you. I’m just trying to impress upon you, I’m like you. I’m no better than you. You know, I’m a 960 SAT guy. And I’m not trying to offend anyone, trying to act all there if you got 940. But literally, a 960 SAT guy. I cannot — you’ve never seen me read a speech because I cannot read a speech. Maybe the wrong business to be in.”
Nothing says “I get you” like assuming your audience bombed the SATs and cannot read particularly well.
This, of course, is only the most recent example from the standard left-wing playbook on how to relate to black people.
Take Joe Biden’s exchange in 2020 with the radio host Charlamagne tha God [Lenard Larry McKelvey], “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”
This was vintage Biden, the self-proclaimed arbiter of blackness, gatekeeping racial identity like a bouncer at a nightclub.
Or how about Biden’s gem in Iowa: “Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids”?
Or Biden’s explanation in 2007 about Barack Obama, whom he called “the first mainstream African- American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”
There’s Bill Clinton, the “first black president.” In an interview with Black Entertainment Television, Clinton said, “African-Americans watch the same news at night that ordinary Americans do.”
According to the book “Game Change,” about the 2008 presidential race, Clinton attacked Sen. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton’s rival, by telling Sen. Ted Kennedy, “A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee.”
For decades, Biden fabricated his narrative as a civil rights hero. He claimed he desegregated movie theaters and restaurants in Wilmington, Del.; that he was arrested trying to visit the imprisoned Nelson Mandela in apartheid South Africa; and that he was “raised in the black church.”
None of this true, but was offered up as street cred to black voters.
Never mind how he based his opposition to court-ordered busing on his fear his children would attend school in a “racial jungle.”
During the 2020 presidential campaign, Biden bragged that as a young senator, he got along well with the anti-segregationists in his party: “At least there was some civility, we got things done.”
He elaborated, “I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland. He never called me ‘boy,’ he always called me ‘son’.” (Biden finally apologized.)
This “we feel your pain” hypocrisy peaks with school choice. Liberals preach equity, yet oppose vouchers that could lift urban black kids out of failing public schools.
Meanwhile, D.C. politicians send their own children to private schools at rates far higher than average Americans. Biden sent his kids to elite private schools, as did Pelosi, Harris and Obama.
Democrat politicians lecture blacks about “systemic racism,” while keeping them trapped in a system that determines the quality of their kids’ education based upon their ZIP codes.
White and black liberal politicians often dumb down their language when addressing blacks by dropping “g”s and sprinkling in some y’alls for effect. Hillary Clinton imitating the voice of Harriet Tubman is a classic.
In the end, this benevolent bigotry isn’t about uplift — it’s about control.
Liberals “relate” by lowering the bar, and pat themselves on the back for their embrace of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). They promote policies like the welfare state, which induces women to marry the government, and men to abandon their financial and moral obligations.
As mentioned, they oppose school choice, despite National Assessment of Educational Progress test results showing over 80% of black eighth-graders can neither read nor do math at grade level.
Then there’s Gavin Newsom, whose draconian COVID policies caused kids in the Los Angeles public school district to lose in-school education across two years. That will translate into lifetime earnings losses.
Newsom offers a black audience a warm hug, while suggesting that they cannot measure up — and while pushing policies to keep it that way.
Larry Elder is a nationally syndicated talk radio host and author of seven books, including “As Goes California: My Mission to Rescue the Golden State.“
