I struggle sometimes. I hold my tongue. But some evils are so vexing I feel that the stones will cry out if I don’t. If you follow any kind of media, you’ll hear the word “racism” thrown around. Cheapened like one of those Zimbabwean trillion dollar notes.

And that makes me angry. Because I’m old enough to have lived in Jim Crow America. I spent my college years getting “non-violence” training from Dr. King’s civil rights organizers. We students would march into “whites only” establishments and stand our ground, until the police came to drag us out. We knew the risks. We’d seen the nooses hung over people’s front doors. We’d seen the wrecks of firebombed churches. At meetings of civil rights leaders, I heard those men say that none of them really expected to live past 40. And indeed, Dr. King died at age 39.

In that world, white teenagers would call adult black men and women they’d just met by their first names. In return, we’d have to say “Mister” or “Miss.” Even worse, there were a few stock names that whites just felt free to use for any black person. “Hey Bubba!” they’d say to any random black man they wanted to summon. Or “Willie.”

I learned this fact the hard way: My mother had named me “Willie.” When I was a young boy, I went and asked her, “Mama, how is it that so many white people I don’t know can guess my name?” She explained things to me, and I started to use the name “William.” Not “Willie.”

The Democrats Are Still Calling Us “Willie”

But there are countless ways that America is still calling us “Willie.” Today, as back in the 1950s, the worst offenders are Democrats. Oh, the style in which today’s Democrats dismiss and demean black folks is different now. It’s subtler. Even sneaky. But the effects are just as devastating, and in some ways even worse.

When the Democratic party decided to stop filibustering the Republican-backed civil rights bills, and instead take credit for them, they also did something else. They created a cradle-to-grave welfare system that rewarded poor folks for not working. For having babies out of wedlock, or getting divorced.

The Black Family Used to Be Strong

When I grew up, most black men stayed with their wives. Both spouses worked, and the children worked. I made my way through college collecting laundry from other students’ dorm rooms and delivering it back to them, dry-cleaned. I’d worked since grammar school, and I never stopped. But the welfare system today almost seems designed to prevent people from starting. When conservatives point out how destructive all this is to the work ethic and the family, the Democrats cry “racism.” But who’s the racist? The citizen who expects his fellow citizens to earn their own keep in this world? Or the one who thinks they’re too shiftless, lazy, or hopeless to even try?

Shutting Down America

Today, as you read these words, the Democrats have shut down the United States government. Why? Is it because that government gives almost half a billion dollars a year to Planned Parenthood? That organization was founded by a racist eugenicist, Margaret Sanger, who admitted to speaking to Klan rallies. It targets the inner-city poor with the deadly medicine of abortion. Hundreds of thousands of black babies each year die in its clinics. Then their tiny parts are sold to research labs, which use them to make medicine for mostly white, rich people’s problems. No, the Democrats are fine with that. In fact, they support it almost unanimously.

Have the Democrats shut down the government because of the violent crime wave afflicting America’s cities? The thousands of deaths in Chicago, and Baltimore, and dozens of other communities? No, in virtually every such city, a Democrat mayor has governed for decades, with Democrat city councils. They run the inadequate and often dangerous schools where our children go to get educated. Most them even oppose voucher or tax credit plans that would give black parents a choice. They’re relegated to bad, effectively segregated schools based on their zip codes. And the Democrats are fine with that.

Importing Replacements for Black Americans

Have the Democrats shut down the government because of black unemployment? No. In fact, since Donald Trump became president, that has been getting better. Black unemployment rates are now at an historic low. But the Democrats say Trump’s “racist” so that doesn’t matter. Now, I’ve known white racists all my life. I remember an insurance collector coming into my mother’s home. He did not take off his hat. He called my beloved mother by her first name, and waited for his money. I was old enough and aware enough to walk right up to him and demand he take off the hat and address my mother properly. I told him she was “Mrs.” to him.

Democrats do want to do something about black unemployment. They want to keep making it worse, by opening the borders to millions more low-skill workers that America doesn’t need.

But Democrats do want to do something about black unemployment. They want to keep making it worse, by opening the borders to millions more low-skill workers that America doesn’t need. We have teenagers, high-school dropouts, ex-cons, and millions of other American citizens who need entry-level jobs. Many of them are black or Hispanic. Most of them had ancestors who fought for this country. Even slaved for it. The Democrats look past them, to the next shiny new package of voters they can bring in from other countries. Cheap, compliant labor that will fill up the bottom rung on the ladder to success. And keep us out.

“Participation” Citizenship

No, the Democrats have shut down the government because President Trump won’t offer instant, unconditional citizenship to people whose parents snuck them into the country. Oh yes, and then reward those same parents with citizenship! All of this without any commitment to securing America’s borders, or limiting the wave of low-skill workers that has kept blue collar wages effectively flat for the past 40 years.

Democrats want to just hand out U.S. citizenship like a t-ball participation trophy. That’s the same citizenship my ancestors were denied until the 14th Amendment, and couldn’t fully exercise until the Voting Rights Act. Which mostly Democrats opposed. Today’s Democrats see people in poor countries as future registered Democrats, and they want to hustle as many in as they can, the country be damned.

That’s why the Democrats are shutting down the government, using the filibuster. Remember that? It’s what Strom Thurmond used to try to stop the Civil Rights Act.

Some things never change.