This one is truly a “man bites dog” story.
Never before has a campaign for a seat on a local community college board mattered so much to so many, and we have Dave Wilson in Houston to thank for it. For Dave Wilson has proven that truth is indeed stranger than fiction.
Dave Wilson would’ve made C. Thomas Howell’s character in the 1980s cult classic movie Soul Man proud. The Caucasian Wilson took a page right out of that movie’s controversial playbook by leading voters in a largely black district to believe he was also black in order to win their votes.
Wilson sent mailers to targeted black voters that only featured pictures and imagery of black people. He also claimed to be “endorsed by Ron Wilson,” who is a respected black state representative in Texas. Except the Ron Wilson he was referring to was his cousin, and the campaign mailer even said so. Wilson even admitted this was his campaign strategy on local television in Houston.
Sadly, a majority of the voters in Wilson’s district lived down to the low-information-voter, race-baiting stereotype—and it worked.
Predictably, Wilson is getting criticism from politically-correct media and the incumbent black opponent he defeated. However, Wilson can only be guilty of the manipulation he’s being accused of if indeed Democrats and politically-correct media are also guilty of the race-baiting and failure to educate voters people like me often accuse them of. For if these black voters were simply not just looking to be represented by someone of the same race, and if they had actually done the necessary research on who Wilson really is, then Wilson may not have been elected to a 6-year term.
Wilson was only successful by taking advantage of the very same underhanded tactics Democrats have infected black America with for decades, much to the black community’s own collective disadvantage and suffering. The Democrat Party doesn’t earn black America’s vote on the merit basis of its policies, because it can’t, so it has to use identity politics instead.
The actual data proves why Democrats have to deal the race card from the bottom of the deck. The black unemployment rate in America has been double that of white America for 50 years. The current black youth unemployment rate is 40%. The unemployment rate for working-age black males in several American cities is currently at or above 50%.
Strip away the understandable symbolic pride of seeing the first black American ascend to the presidency, and the Obama era has substantively been far more epic failure for black America than hope and change.
Wilson simply took a page out of the identity-politics playbook mastered by Democrats to run for seat on the community college board in Houston on a reformist agenda. If it took Wilson pretending to be black to get black voters in that election to give his ideas an honest hearing, then that speaks to how tragically successful Democrats have been at manipulating a voting bloc they cannot win anywhere without for far too long.
Therefore, the politically-correct media and Democrats have only themselves to blame for Wilson holding up a mirror to show them their own reflection. The only thing Wilson is guilty of is taking the Democrats’ own sledgehammer and beating them with it.