Herman Cain: Let’s Pay Attention to the "Pizza Man"

When one of us, a supposed "Talented Tenth" member, is successful and practices self-hate or pandering to White prejudice, we need to look at him. He says we need to take our country back. We need to return our country to the good old days. Listen and let’s not avert our eyes. Know the opposition and treat him accordingly.

[Nothing But The Facts]

Some call Herman Cain the Pizza Man with a slick carnival con-man banter.

Some call Cain a contemporary Uncle Remus masterful in philosophy to suit any White racist’s dream. Others call Cain a misguided dupe of the right-wing-nuts of the Tea Party.

Say what you will: it would be foolish to dismiss Herman Cain as a race traitor. While he’s not in the rarefied league of Thomas Sowell, Alan Keyes, or Clarence Thomas, we as a community should pay attention to what he’s saying. He speaks: what the Tea Partyers cannot in the glare of the media; what the birthers mutter under their breath, and; what the half-wit GOP hack was thinking when he issued a photo of President Barack Obama among the apes.

Oh yes, Herman Cain has a good personal story. Grew up poor with a father as a chauffeur and a mother as a cleaner. Worked his way to a master’s degree at Purdue. Was a star in the world of business, snatched from Coca-Cola by Pillsbury, and turned around a floundering Godfather’s Pizza in Omaha in 1988. Ran the business from 1988-1996. Married to the same woman for over 40 years.

Survived Stage 4 cancer of the colon and liver.

So why should Cain matter? White conservatives love his message of traditionalism, patriotism, capitalism, and bullish cronyism. They love it when he says racism is not holding Blacks back today or that Blacks have a level playing field when it comes to economic matters.  “They weren’t held back because of racism,” Cain says. “People sometimes
hold themselves back because they want to use racism as an excuse for
them not being able to achieve what they to achieve.”

Cain is a master diversion while this country is undergoing high unemployment, dismantling of the union, two meaningless wars, soaring poverty and mud-slinging  in Washington.

Compared by some to a modern-day Booker T. Washington, Cain sat out the civil rights movement, but he benefited greatly from it. Wealth and greed trumps all. One pundit called Cain “Ronald Reagan, our greatest conservative president, with a deep tan.” However, what would William F. Buckley Jr. or Barry Goldwater say about Cain? Like the current crop of GOP presidential hopefuls, they would see him as a huckster, “the Pizza man,” with simple, untested solutions to very complex issues. They ridiculed his inane “9-9-9” flat tax in the last Republican candidates’ debate.

Cain, “the Anti-Obama,” believes he could siphon one-third of the Black vote from the president, who is in trouble politically. He’s never held public office. In the one race Cain entered, he was trounced.

The “experts” on the Sunday morning talk shows consider him unelectable and a flavor-of-the-month, just like Rick Perry or Michelle Bachmann. Blacks wisely recall the shoddy treatment of Mr. Michael Steele and how he was eventually drummed out of service to the GOP.

Why does Mr. Cain matter? When one of us, a supposed “Talented Tenth” member, is successful and practices self-hate or pandering to White prejudice, we need to look at him. He says we need to take our country back. We need to return our country to the good old days.  Listen and let’s not avert our eyes. Know the opposition and treat him accordingly. 


“Speaking Truth To Empower.”

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