Tim Scott & the Chocolate City Thesis

Tim Scott (Image source: Wikimedia Commons)

1,743 words

Black United States Senator Tim Scott placed a $14 million bet against Spencer J. Quinn’s theory about black voting patterns in the United States earlier this month. The former presidential candidate and current vice-presidential hopeful revealed that his Great Opportunity Super PAC will dedicate the above gaudy sum on minority outreach in battleground states during the run-up to the 2024 election. The money will especially go toward canvassing, paid advertising, digital marketing, and research and analytics. Efforts will be made to convince black men in particular to vote for Donald Trump and the Republicans in November.

According to AP News, Scott stated that “[m]uch to the chagrin of many folks, there’s no doubt that African American men are wide open for a political shift of partisanship.” When fielding questions from Politico, Scott estimated that there are approximately “45 to 50 percent of African American men who are open” to voting Republican in 2024.

Here we go again: Republicans reaching out to blacks. But this time maybe it won’t be so bad. Stick with me on this . . .

Yes, as repeated experience has shown, if there ever was an effort doomed to fail, this is it. Approximately nine out of ten blacks vote Democrat, and despite historic Republican efforts to woo them, that number has not significantly changed. Below is a handy chart from the Pew Research Center which demonstrates exactly how loyal blacks have been to the Democratic Party for the past 30 years:

The reasons why remain murky for most, unfortunately. If you ask colorblind, civic-nationalist Republicans, blacks vote Democrat either because Democrats bribe them with free goodies, rile them up with racial rhetoric, or because Republicans simply don’t try hard enough to win them over. The real reason, however, is that the Democrat Party better serves the racial interests of blacks and therefore deserves their support. Given that most blacks don’t have the IQ for niche ideologies such as libertarianism or altruistic causes such as environmentalism — or the moral perversity to vote against their own interests, as many whites do — they tend to vote as a racial block. They will vote for what is best for them as a group, regardless of whether they’re voting for what’s best for them as individuals. Have you noticed how the day-to-day quality of black life in America remains as lamentable as ever, yet black cultural and political status is at an all-time high? You can thank the Democratic Party and its understanding of racial realities for that.

As I have stated several times before, Democrats above all indulge blacks in their bad behavior. This allows blacks to occupy and control large portions of cities, since the crime, homelessness, drug addiction, and chaos they typically engender keeps most non-blacks away. In an almost ecological sense, the symbiotic relationship between Democrats and blacks provides the latter with territory which they then leverage into prestige on the national level. This, along with whatever free stuff the Democrats offer, means far more to the average black than tax cuts, low unemployment, abortion bans, gun rights, and whatever else Republicans like to bleat on about. This also explains why most blacks oppose gentrification. Unchecked gentrification leads to nicer neighborhoods, which invariably leads to more non-blacks moving into formerly black neighborhoods, which in turn will result in less territorial control for blacks.

I call this the Chocolate City Thesis, and it explains why blacks consistently vote Democrat.

What Tim Scott and the Republicans are offering, on the other hand, is the opposite of chocolate cities. They offer cultural assimilation and all the wealth and prosperity that goes along with the American Dream. Given Donald Trump’s pre-COVID track record being far superior to both Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s, this is no idle promise. Say what you want about Trump, but there is no reason to believe that the American economy won’t be in better shape under him than it is now. And this sounds nice until one realizes that the ultimate manifestation of such a plan — widespread prosperity and the un-ghettoization of American blacks — will relegate them as a group down to the political B-leagues, sort of what it was like before the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

You can buy Spencer J. Quinn’s young adult novel The No College Club here.

There is no way the black political elites will willingly let this happen — and certainly not for an ethnocentric outlier; indeed, some would say race traitor – such as Tim Scott, who places his American and Christian identity before his racial one. Thus, what Tim Scott is offering is poison for the black North American diaspora, and they will be right to reject it.

In spite of this, however, I guardedly welcome his ill-advised initiative. First, if there is going to be any minority outreach by the GOP, black on black is the way to go. The Trump campaign is not officially involved, and according to the Daily Beast has “shuttered minority outreach centers across the country.” If true, this is great news. Trump needs to adhere to the Sailer strategy as much as possible while deemphasizing red herrings such as the platinum plan, prison reform, and black unemployment. Nobody cares, especially blacks. Whites make up Trump’s highly enthusiastic base, and he needs to cater to their urgent demands first and foremost if he wants to win. Yes, the juice probably won’t be worth the squeeze for Scott, but as long as Trump is not doing the squeezing himself, who’s going to complain?

Secondly, there is the obvious strategic gain of forcing the Democrats to expend resources defending a front that until recently it had less need to defend. According to AP News, this seems to be what’s happening:

Trump has held a number of events in recent weeks aimed at those groups, including a rally in the New York’s South Bronx and a dinner Wednesday evening with students and alumni from historically Black [sic] colleges and universities at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.

At the same time, national Democrats are investing heavily in stopping Trump from making inroads with a core constituency. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the first Black vice president, last week launched a Black voter outreach campaign by pointing to their efforts to boost funding for those schools, forgive federal student loan debt and pardon those sentenced for simple marijuana possession.

So win-win, right? Well, maybe. But there is an additional wrinkle that might — might! — give more credence to Tim Scott’s efforts than they would typically deserve: illegal immigration. I predict that black support for the Democratic Party will start to crater once the Democrats begin abandoning the Chocolate City Thesis. And with millions of illegal immigrants having to live somewhere in America, it stands to reason that many blacks are facing a territorial threat much more dire than that of gentrification — all thanks to their own political party. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, thousands of migrants have recently been resettled in black neighborhoods in Chicago, and the residents are not happy about it:

Now, the migrant issue has been placed right in the laps of these same Black folks. Thousands of migrants have been resettled in Black neighborhoods, and the city, county and state developed a plan to support them.

As part of that plan, City Council members were asked last month to support a new $70 million investment in our migrant mission that, coupled with money from the state and county, will equal $300 million. This investment felt like a strong-arm robbery when you consider the meager investments Black leaders have asked for and been denied. To many, it was offensive . . .

The Los Angeles Times provides a history lesson about immigrants coming to Chicago and notes the irony of today’s blacks becoming the new whites:

Hundreds of thousands of Black Southerners moved to Chicago in the early 20th century in search of greater freedoms and economic opportunities. White Chicagoans at the time accused them of receiving disproportionate resources from the city, and in 1919 tensions boiled over.

In a surge of racist attacks in cities across the U.S. that came to be known as “Red Summer,” white residents burned large swaths of Chicago’s Black neighborhoods and killed 38 Black people, including by lynching.

“Those white folks were, like, ‘Hell no, they’re coming here, they’re taking our jobs,’’’ said Richard Wallace, founder of Equity and Transformation, a majority-Black community group that co-hosted a forum in March to improve dialogue between Black and Latino residents.

Wallace said he hears echoes of that past bigotry — intentional or not — when Black Chicagoans complain about the assistance being given to migrants. It makes him wonder: “How did we become like the white folks who were resisting our people coming to the city of the Chicago?”

Also, take a gander at this 2017 exchange between Ann Coulter and Anna Kasparian in which Coulter, conservative legacy American that she is, argues on behalf of blacks being displaced in their own neighborhoods by immigrants. Kasparian then, like any good Leftist, responds by eschewing victimhood and promoting a free-market, can-do attitude when it comes to learning new languages.

It’s a bizarre world we’re living in, isn’t it?

At this point this is all speculation, but when there is some polling backing up Tim Scott’s optimism, maybe there is something there. According to NPR:

“There’s a lot of reasons why the shift is now becoming so blatantly obvious that it is now undeniable that there is something amiss. It’s real,” Scott said in a meeting Wednesday with a group of reporters. “It’s not just racial, but it’s going to manifest itself in a racial shift that we haven’t seen in probably three decades of politics.” . . . In a recent poll by GenForward, conducted by the University of Chicago, just 33% of young Black people said they would support Biden if the election were held today — and 23% chose Trump. While the poll showed significant undecided and third party sentiment, Biden won Black voters under 45 by more than 80% in 2020.

This could all be nothing more than an elaborate and cynical scheme by which Tim Scott will make himself Vice President (“Pick me, Mr. Trump! Pick me!”). Even worse, this all could all be moot by November if the people who stole the last election have the wherewithal to do it again — or if, God forbid, Trump gets the Derek Chauvin treatment at Rikers Island.

Either way, the fact that illegal immigration may ultimately vindicate the Chocolate City Thesis while ushering American blacks back to the party of Lincoln shows that we’re living in interesting times.