Black conservative Christian leader Dr. Deborah De Sousa Owens says the Biden campaign’s choice of Kamala Harris as his running mate shows the Democrat Party is still condescending to black voters by assuming they will simply fall for its identity politics that, this time around, amounts to “affirmative action at the highest level.”
Owens, who serves as executive director of the Coalition of African American Pastors (CAAP), wrote in an op-ed for The Stream on Sunday she expects the Democrat Party believes her vote should be all “sewn up.”
“According to the logic of identity politics, this announcement should have secured my vote,” she remarked, noting that, like Harris, she, too, is a black woman with a “multicultural” background.
“As an African American woman, I was pleased to see another Black woman reach such political heights,” she said about Harris. “And as an American, I appreciate her success story.”
“But as a conservative Christian, I would not vote for her,” Owens asserted.
“I remember a time when you would be branded a bigot for basing your vote purely on the basis of a candidate’s race or ethnicity,” she wrote. “Now, apparently, it’s the only thing we’re supposed to consider.”
Owens said this “paradox” has “reached new heights” with the announcement of Harris as Biden’s running mate.
She said she finds it very frustrating to see Democrats expecting black voters to fall in line because Biden chose a black female as his running mate.
The actual facts about Harris’s record, however, will cause many black voters to think again when they vote, she added.
For example, Harris performed poorly in the primary campaign, even though the complicit media is essentially “rewriting” her record, Owens continued:
She has only been a Senator since 2017, and her short time in Congress did not impress. Her most notable moments in the past few years have been her grandstanding during the Kavanaugh hearing — an embarrassing display that demonstrated little other than her political ambition — and her embrace of the radical left.
Owens and her husband, Rev. Bill Owens, president of CAAP, recently released a book titled A Dream Derailed, in which they detail how the policies of the left have destroyed black communities.
She wrote for The Stream that these policies have led to “failing schools, and decaying inner cities.”
“The left is also hostile to the Biblical principles that are at the heart of the Black church, and progressives often seek to silence or marginalize Christians,” she added.
The notion that Harris was “tough on crime” when she was a San Francisco prosecutor is also “unconvincing,” Owens remarked, and also at odds with the Democrats’ “defund the police” movement:
She gained notoriety for throwing marijuana users in jail and for threatening the parents of truants with criminal penalties. Far from helping the African American community, Harris was one of the prosecutors who pursued disastrous policies in policing and incarceration. Prison reform, such as Trump’s First Step Act, had to be enacted in order to mitigate the harm done to the Black community by prosecutors like Kamala Harris.
“There is nothing in her record to recommend her other than her gender and ethnicity,” Owens asserted. “To nominate her shows an infuriating level of political cynicism on the part of the Democratic Party. That’s because it assumes that this is all it takes to win over an increasing[ly] alienated Black electorate.”
She pointed, however, to Trump’s rising level of approval among black voters, owing to “his efforts at prison reform and reducing Black unemployment have proven that he cares.”
“Democrats, on the other hand, have responded with their usual strategy: Engage in identity politics and assume you have the Black vote all sewn up,” Owens observed, adding that “optics and pandering” in the form of the Harris running mate announcement is just the latest example of Democrats taking the black vote for granted as they have for years.
Owens stated she will “still hold true to the dream of Dr. King.”
“I want a future where we hold hands as brothers and sisters in a country where the color of our skin has no meaning, but the content of our characters does,” she wrote.
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Breitbart News 2020-08-16 22:41:00
