Institutionalizing Blacks ... BLOOD OF MARTYRS UPDATE!!

Picking up from my post the other day, "Institutionalizing Blacks," recall The Blog Prof:

I have pointed this out many times before, but it's worth repeating yet again. One of my all-time favorite movies is The Shawshank Redemption. In it, Morgan Freeman, aka "Red", coined the term when prisoners become dependent on the prison system and can no longer survive without it - institutionalized. One of the older prisoners, Brooks, was willing to kill to stay in the system as he knew nothing else after so many years. Yet they let him out and he promptly hung himself. He was institutionalized. The Democrats have institutionalizing the black population in this country, no different than slave masters did many decades ago. The same party that fought for slavery, not against it, segregated schools and filibustered the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 now has shackled the black population to another form of slavery - slavery to the state. Stripped naked of their dignity, their hope and their self-reliance.

And don't forget the Democratic Party's "Blood of Martyrs" racial grievance shakedown strategy:

The "Blood of Martyrs" refers to the chokehold the far-left grievance masters have on the post-1960s Democratic Party. As told by Juan Williams, in Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America - and What We Can Do About It, the story goes back to Al Sharpton's speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, where Sharpton attacked President George W. Bush for taking the black vote for granted:

"Our vote is soaked in the blood of martyrs, the blood of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner, soaked in the blood of four little girls in Birmingham, Alabama. This vote is sacred to us. This vote can't be bargained away...given away. Mr. President, in all due respect, read my lips: Our vote is not for sale!"

But as Williams asks, what record of achievement could the Democrats claim to justify continued black partisan support?

The answer: absolutely nothing. But by waving the red flag labeled "blood of martyrs," Sharpton diverted all attention from dealing with bad schools, persistent high rates of unemployment, and a range of issues that are crippling a generation of black youth. Somehow, "blood of martyrs" remains the anthem of black politics at the start of the twenty-first century. Black politics is still defined by events that took place forty years ago. Protest marches are reenacted again and again as symbolic exercises to the point that they have lost their power to achieve change. As a result, black politics is paralyzed, locked in a synchronized salute and tribute, by any mention of the martyrs, the civil rights workers who died violent deaths at the hands of racists. The major national black politicians invoke these icons and perform shallow reenactments of the powerful marches of the movement as hypnotic devices to control their audiences. And if people try to break the spell by suggesting we move beyond these ancient heroes and their tactics, they are put down with language that implicates them as tools of the white establishment, reactionaries who've "forgotten their roots." Race traitors.

And leftists will defend this bankrupt agenda to no end, despite contrary evidence from real folks on the ground:

RELATED: John Fund, "Why the Left Needs Racism."