We won’t rehash the payday loan argument here.   Intelligent people understand there is a place for them when provided, and used, responsibly.  Yet one of most vile tactics used by opponents of payday lending, as well as the newspaper editorialists who conspire with them, are bogus claims that the African-American community believes payday loans exploit them.

What is most troubling about this strategy is how “fair-minded” Liberals like Cleveland Plain-Dealer columnist Thomas Suddes – a white man – claims to know what is best for the Black community.  In a typically illogical screed of April 27, Suddes wrote “Fact: NAACP national Chair Julian Bond has denounced payday lending as “legalized extortion,” saying “it compromises our efforts to build wealth and savings in communities of color.” 

Readers should take note of how Suddes pulls Mr. Bond onto his stage as if he were a trophy.  “Look, I even have a black man saying payday loans are bad for the black community”. 

Mr. Suddes’ arguments demonstrate schoolyard logic anyway, but any payday loan opponent should be able to make their argument stand on their own, and not have to play the race card to gain sympathy from readers.  I won’t even bother to point out how the vast, vast majority of Americans of all races and ethnicities have benefited from the use of payday loans.

But Suddes doesn’t stop there.  In an Email exchange discussed here, it is brought to Suddes’ attention that Mr. Bond’s opinion is just that – an opinion.  It is not reflective of the black community as a whole, according to Niger Innis of the Congress On Racial Equality.  In fact, Mr. Innis quite clearly stated at this year’s CFSA Conference that “black people do not like it when white people drive up in their Mercedes and tell us how to spend our money”.

Suddes takes his racist rhetoric one step further.  He replied by saying, “Mr. Innis, according to a prestigious academic journal, is not perceived in the mainstream of black America’s spokespeople.”.

The mere idea that a white man should pronounce who is and who isn’t a “mainstream” spokesman for black America is racism at its worst, because Mr. Suddes doesn’t even realize he is being racist.  It is this subtle bigotry that permeates the Liberal mindset.  People like Suddes insist on placing blacks in the role of perpetual victim.  Rather than encouraging men and women of all races and ethnicities to lift themselves up, Suddes wants to keep black America down by poisoning their minds with his own misguided ideology.  He is so driven by a foolish, fantastical, misguided agenda that he fails to appreciate the destructive insult he delivers to black America.

The Plain-Dealer and Ohio University should immediately review Mr. Suddes’ qualifications as reporter and instructor and act accordingly – fire him.