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With video bloggers Diamond and Silk (Lynnette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson), it's never a matter of making some or even any sense. It's always pure nonsense. But there is a logic to it (in the same way that logic might be found in the ravings of a lunatic), which is black women saying the kinds of horrible things that would come out of the mouths of white conservatives, if they weren't afraid of being called racist. This logic has made the pair a little bank and fame. And so, they received applause at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) for saying that socialism (which now means any effort to prevent or mitigate anthropogenic climate catastrophe) would send us back to slavery.

But I must be clear about this. As a black person, I do not hate Diamond and Silk. I don't even feel pity for them; I only see where they are coming from.

I place Diamond and Silk in the context of this: black poverty is a real and present danger for all black people. Seattle, for example, is considered a pretty liberal city (some would even go so far as to call it a socialist shithole), but, as the Seattle Times' data master, Gene Balk, recently pointed out, the net value of a black American household in this city is $23,000. It's $456,000 for a white one. Put facts like that next to Diamond and Silk's shtick, and you can kind of understand what's going on. They are black, found a huge white cow, and are now milking it for all it's worth.

All of this recalls something that Ta-Nehisi Coates said during a visit to Seattle in 2016. He told the audience that he had two understandings of Ben Carson, the current head of HUD and sole black person in Trump's cabinet. One, that he is a sell out; and two, that he did actually beat one of the most oppressive forms of American poverty to become a surgeon. Coates explained that he attended, as a boy, an event in Baltimore that featured Carson, and the black kids who heard him speak had their minds blown, not so much by what he said, but by who he was. He had really, really made it. Black and a surgeon. How can you really hate a guy like that? The Ben Carson of today is not that different from Diamond and Silk. Blacks well know that some blacks will do anything to protect themselves from a poverty that is seemingly universal. In the US, you are not meant to be rich at all. And if you are black, you are supposed to be dirt poor.