Candace Owens of Red Pill Black, the toxic right's newest African-American star

The clickable young black conservative thinks that switching political parties will cure racism — it never has

By D. Watkins

Editor at Large

Published September 25, 2017 2:17PM (EDT)

Candace Owens (Youtube)
Candace Owens (Youtube)

Candace Owens — the voice behind the Red Pill Black website and YouTube channel — is positioning herself to be the next young popular black conservative. She identifies as a reformed liberal, a person who woke up one day and realized that conservatism is the only way to save black America.

I never heard of Owens until a colleague sent me a link to her Fox News interview yesterday with Jesse Watters, where she explained her transformation and what’s wrong with black America.

"Well, with black Americans," Owens explained to an excited Watters, "I mean, the main issue is that we keep voting Democrat and expecting different results, and in every major city where democrats are running like Chicago, it’s a complete mess."

She continued, "I mean it’s absolute disaster, and they make these false promises. They secure our vote with all these false promises, and the second they get in to the White House, they do absolutely nothing for African-Americans but make sure we remember that we are black so they can play the same identity card the next election cycle."

It’s no secret that most black people in America support the Democratic party. Owens went on to use her red-pill "Matrix" reference to explain how the plight of African-Americans would instantly change if we swapped parties. I’m not sure if she knows that African-Americans used to vote proudly for Republicans from the time we received the vote in 1870 all the way up until the aftermath of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927.

You see, we truly represented the party of Lincoln until the flood left more than 200,000 African-Americans displaced — forced to live in camps where they were treated horribly under the Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover. Hoover made promises to right the wrongs that had been done to the black community when he became president a little over a year later. Like most politicians, he forgot those pledges as soon as he was elected, opening the door for Franklin D. Roosevelt to swoop in after Hoover’s first term and convert all those black Republicans into black Democrats.

So, switching parties is possible, but it's simply not the answer.

Owens, like most young pundits that make it to Fox, never really offered any solutions other than becoming Republican. She did comment on the struggles of Democrat-led cities such as Chicago and pivoted to what seems to be an Obama reference, saying that he made it to the White House and then did absolutely nothing for African-Americans.

To say Obama did nothing is kind of stretch. It’s another empty argument that can be picked apart with a simple Google search or by clicking on the White House’s Progress of the African-American Community during the Obama Administration. That site gives facts on everything from higher income levels to extra funds distributed to historically black colleges and the creation of the My Brother’s Keeper program. Given that Republicans also refused to work with Obama on pretty much everything, he actually achieved quite a lot.

False facts are one thing, but my biggest problem with Owen and the news stations that book such fact-less pundits for fact-less segments is how they manage to ignore the obvious.

Truly, what has Donald Trump done for anyone other than members of the top 1 percent? Remember that we have a Republican Congress and a conservative-majority Supreme Court and still­­ nothing is being done. Instead, we've got a president who seems to be putting all his effort into to becoming more incompetent and openly racist every day. Dude just called a guy an S.O.B. for taking a peaceful stand against violence.

How could Owens think a president who champions white-supremacist Confederate statue lovers and trashes athletes who are fighting for the justice of people who look just like her would ever care about any single thing on the black agenda? Our Republican commander-in-chief has done little but surround himself with people like Steve Bannon and Jeff Sessions, past and present core advisors who have distinctly racist histories.

But Trump is, in many ways, nothing new for his party. George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon — we've had almost 50 years of Republican presidents who've done little to nothing to enhance the black experience in America. Indeed, many of them have made it worse.

African-Americans, just like white Americans or Asian-Americans or any other ethnic group, don’t vote blindly based on race. Give us more credit than that. We all vote based on our own self-interests. If Trump had promised African-American slave reparations during the 2016 campaign, he might have taken the black vote. Instead he headed Klan-like, Confederate-leaning rallies that celebrated everything divisive and regressive about this country. He's governing with the same mentality.

And that's what Owens either doesn't say or doesn't seem to understand: It really doesn’t matter whether you vote Democrat or Republican in a country where racism trumps all.


By D. Watkins

D. Watkins is an Editor at Large for Salon. He is also a writer on the HBO limited series "We Own This City" and a professor at the University of Baltimore. Watkins is the author of the award-winning, New York Times best-selling memoirs “The Beast Side: Living  (and Dying) While Black in America”, "The Cook Up: A Crack Rock Memoir," "Where Tomorrows Aren't Promised: A Memoir of Survival and Hope" as well as "We Speak For Ourselves: How Woke Culture Prohibits Progress." His new books, "Black Boy Smile: A Memoir in Moments," and "The Wire: A Complete Visual History" are out now.

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