No Room for Aunts and Uncles
During the presidential campaign, most Blacks watched with bemusement and embarrassment as so-called Black conservatives like Tim Scott and Byron Donalds stumped for the former president.
We watched as they contorted themselves with slavish devotion to their racist candidate.
Scott telling the former president, “I just love you” to the former president at a campaign rally.
Donalds having his head rubbed by a fellow Republican after a speech, and making apologies for Jim Crow:
You see, during Jim Crow, the black family was together. During Jim Crow, more black people were not just conservative, black people have always been conservative-minded, but more black people voted conservatively. And then, HEW., Lyndon Johnson, and then you go down that road, and now we are where we are. What's happened in America the last ten years, and I say it because it's my contemporaries…you're starting to see more black people be married in homes raising kids.”
Both Scott and Donalds were vying for the vice-presidency, doing their best to out-Tom each other.
Neither were selected, but both are hopeful to receive a cabinet-level appointment.
What are they likely to receive?
Nothing.
Even Ben Carson hasn’t been nominated for a post after stumping for his former boss.
The former president threw a bus token appointment to Carson during his first term, making him his Housing and Urban Development (HUD) secretary.
Even if he names one of these Stepin Fetchits as HUD secretary or some other cabinet post, he will have an overwhelmingly White, overwhelmingly male cabinet.
Back in 2016, the former president ran a racist campaign.
In 2024, it’s not merely racist, it is an unabashedly White Supremacist-fueled, aided and abetted by Black people like Scott, Donalds, Carson, Candace Owens, and others.
They campaigned not only against their self-interests, but the interests of millions of Black Americans.
All while waiting for crumbs to be dropped from their master’s table.
None of these sellouts will be accepted.
None of them will affect policy.
None of them will be more than checks in a box, allowing them to say that Blacks had representation in his cabinet.
But this won’t stop them from continuing to embarrass and humiliate themselves.
They will bow, scrape, and curry favor with the GOP hoping to receive some type of twisted favor.
Anything they receive won’t be enough to bolster their lack of self-respect.
No reward will assuage their consciences or make it easier to look themselves in the mirror.
This government doesn’t intend to represent everyone.
Just rich White men.