Bush's NAACP Appearance Was Not About Civil Rights

BlackNews.com - Column: Bush's NAACP Appearance Was Not About Civil Rights

Much ado was made over President George W. Bush’s first appearance at the national convention of National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), after declining to speak for five consecutive years. Bush called his “appearance” a “moment of opportunity.”

For the NAACP, it was a moment of lost opportunity (one of several over the past 25 years). Did the NAACP expect some major revelation from a president that has essentially ignored the civil rights agenda all of his administration? If they did, they are more colored than they were in the 1980s when the agenda was single-handedly dismantled by the Reagan administration. It was no big deal that he “boycotted” the nation’s oldest civil rights group for five years, because he would’ve had nothing to say.

After the grand fanfare that the “President was coming, the President was coming,” Bush still didn’t have nothing to say. If the NAACP and the civil rights community think Bush’s appearance at the NAACP was about a new opportunity to partner on some meaningful civil rights agenda, then I have another war to sell you.