Blackout - Candace Owens

I almost never read political opinion books written by elected officials anymore because I think the majority of them are actually written by the kind of hired-gun ghost writer paid handsomely to make the politician look a whole lot smarter than they actually are. I do, on the other hand, still occasionally read a political book written by a relative outsider, someone still far enough away from scene of the crime that they are not completely nauseated by the smell in the room. I generally prefer the ones written by respected historians (although my respect for even some of those people has slipped more than a notch or two in recent years) or by someone with a particularly interesting point-of-view. 

Candace Owens is one of those people, and Blackout is one of those books. 

Owens is what used to be much more rare than it is today: a young, black conservative with the courage to publicly share her beliefs about today’s political environment. As such, she has often been viciously targeted by media people and/or via social media in an attempt to discredit her to the point that she shuts up or changes her message to suit her critics. To her credit, this articulate young woman has done neither. Instead, she has responded to those who want so badly to destroy her with Blackout, a compelling argument that African American culture is going to continue to deteriorate as long as her fellow blacks are willing to sell their votes to the Democratic Party so cheaply. 

Owens contends that it is time for African Americans (she, I think, prefers the term “American Blacks”) to lose the herd mentality that has allowed one political party to claim roughly 95% of their votes for the last several decades. In that spirit, she has founded the “Blexit” movement by which she urges blacks to leave the Democratic Party until Democrat politicians actually earn their votes. She says that it is time to quit working for the Democrats for free. 

But perhaps the most damning charge Owens makes against Democrat politicians is that they will never allow black Americans to quit thinking of themselves as victims of systemic racism. Her argument goes that as long as blacks have someone other than themselves to blame for their cultural failures, they do not have to do the hard work of solving their own problems. It is just too much easier to have someone else promise to do that for them, as both political parties do, even though both parties almost never deliver in a meaningful way on those promises. The concept of black victimhood, Owens says, is a card that the Democrats have relied on for too long, a card they can never afford to give up now because black bloc-voting is what keeps them in power.

Bottom Line: In Blackout Candace Owens makes a strong case for what she herself has only relatively recently come to believe about American culture. Along the way, the reader learns about Owens’s upbringing and why she changed her own mind about the relationship between the Democratic Party and American Blacks. Sadly, I doubt that a significant number of  American Blacks are going to cut through all the noise and personal attacks on Owens long enough to read the book. That is part of the problem. And that is the saddest thing of all. Right, wrong, or somewhere in the middle of the real truth, Candace Owens deserves to be heard.