Put Y'all Back in Chains, page 20
CRT Requirements for Big Government Hurt Blacks
Part and parcel of CRT’s agenda is the creation of a significantly larger role for Washington, D.C. Such an expansion poses a significant threat to black America.
When the country was established, America’s Founding Fathers envisioned a thriving commercial republic where the government had limited powers and Americans could be free to achieve “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”36 They understood that the larger a government becomes, the greater the risk it will become oppressive—especially for political minorities. Consequently, one of the most important features of the American system is that it distributes power among three branches of government as well as to the states and operates with checks and balances.
I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive.37
— Thomas Jefferson to James Madison December 1787
A government of limited powers has been and will always be the friend of all minorities. Big government, on the other hand, always tramples liberty and hurts everyone. In fact, blacks have paid an enormous price whenever America has failed to heed Jefferson’s warning. Despite this history, progressives continue to press for more and greater responsibilities—and authority—for government at both the state and federal level.
Starting shortly after the end of the Civil War, vicious and destructive laws were adopted in many parts of the country that placed severe restrictions on the life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness of blacks.38 Historians refer to these as Jim Crow laws, named for “Jump Jim Crow,” a minstrel routine (whose earliest performance was in 1828 by Thomas Dartmouth Rice).39
Jim Crow laws limited voting and property ownership for blacks, and generally made their lives harder. Initially, blacks could at least re-locate to other parts of the country that weren’t as oppressive.
The Caucasians…are not going to let their standard of living be destroyed by negroes, Chinamen, Japs or any others.
— Samuel Gompers, founder of the American Federation of Labor, 1905
Perhaps feeling somewhat left out, Congress in the 1930s enacted a series of workplace laws that were specifically designed to harm the ability of blacks to compete in the labor market. This effort undid a remarkable phenomenon: until then, blacks had been employed at higher rates than whites.40
One of these anti-black federal laws was the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act that requires contractors to pay “prevailing wages” for all federally-funded construction projects over $2,000. “Prevailing Wages” were pay rates set by unions for union members. Unions limited blacks from membership as a means of artificially boosting the earnings power of their members. Blacks often worked for lower hourly rates than whites, which lowered market rates for “skilled labor” jobs.
During the Great Depression, private sector construction was all but halted, leaving public works projects as the only employment option. Before enactment of Davis-Bacon blacks were over-represented in the construction industry all across America.41 After Davis-Bacon blacks were all but banished from work in federal and state funded construction projects since they couldn’t be members of the local union—a requirement of Davis-Bacon.
Engineering Marvel or Racist Relic?
The Hoover Dam is one of the wonders of the engineering world along with the Golden Gate Bridge and the International Space Station.42 Today, the Hoover Dam uses some seventeen turbines to generate electricity for over a million homes and is critical to flood prevention along the Colorado River.43 Work started on the project in 1931, and more than 21,000 men were hired to work on the project until it finished in 1936,44 yet only twenty-four of them were black.45 This isn’t a unique situation. The Davis-Bacon Act did then exactly as it was designed to do: employers stopped hiring blacks and replaced them with whites.
Blacks ended up unemployed at significantly higher rates than their white counterparts.46 While you might think that, during a serious economic downturn, employers would be even more willing than ever to accept the labor of blacks at lower cost—as they had been doing since the 1880s—the FLSA and Davis-Bacon made that unlawful.
Sadly, even when America was most vulnerable—during the Great Depression when jobs were scarce—Washington pushed its Big Government jobs-preference plan, which operated on the basis of race. Though Washington cloaked this racist agenda in the language of “prevailing wages,” the ruse worked. Soon black unemployment was triple that of whites.47
Today, as in the early twentieth century, minority-owned firms tend to be small and unable to pay union wages. Davis-Bacon limits their ability to get federal construction projects today as it did when it was first passed. All Americans (including blacks) pay for federally funded construction projects today, yet Davis-Bacon means fewer black taxpayers disproportionately participate in those contracts because nearly half of all black union members work in the public sector.48 Almost no federally funded construction is done directly by the federal government, which means that blacks are locked out of these projects, since even today they aren’t admitted to construction unions.49
Repealing Davis-Bacon would create nearly 50,000 new jobs, and most of these would go to minorities. Today only 7.5 percent of the construction workforce is black—a legacy of DavisBacon.50
A Klansman Leads the New Deal
Another statute, the Fair Labor Standards Act, was even more deadly for black job creation, because it wasn’t tied to federal appropriations. And its Klansman sponsor ended up getting appointed to the Supreme Court.
Democratic Senator Hugo Black from Alabama is the father of the forty-hour work week. He was also a member of the Ku Klux Klan. First elected in 1927, Hugo Black had joined the KKK a few years earlier in anticipation of a career in the United States Senate.51 Although he would later claim that he had made a mistake in joining, the Klan had publicly backed his successful campaign.52
In 1933, he originally introduced a thirty-hour work-week bill, which was amended, and in 1938 became the Fair Labor Standards Act.53
While most Americans assume that the federal minimum wage law and the forty-hour work week were created to protect unskilled workers, the truth is more sinister. These laws were part of the racist effort in the early twentieth century to give white workers an advantage over black ones.54
In truth, much of the “New Deal” was racist.55
For instance, the NAACP opposed the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) and the Social Security Act (SSA) of 1935.56 The NIRA was derided by blacks as the “negro removal act.”57 Once enacted, the SSA’s limits resulted in two-thirds of blacks throughout the country being ineligible for the program and significantly expanded the black-white income gap.58 And when the Supreme Court struck down the NIRA in 1935, blacks cheered louder than the NIRA’s big business opponents.59
For men of ambition, the New Deal created significant opportunities, regardless of its impact on blacks. Hugo Black was a great soldier for the New Deal who took advantage of those opportunities for advancement. As a result, FDR nominated Black to replace retiring Justice Willis Van Devanter on the Supreme Court. Black had acknowledged to several of his Senate colleagues that he had joined the Klan, but his official line was that he had resigned his membership. Later, the Roosevelt White House would deny any knowledge of his Klan membership.
Reporter Ray Sprigle of the Pittsburgh News Gazette won a Pulitzer for his series exposing Black’s racist past, including that he had been awarded a KKK “Golden Passport” as well as holding a life-time membership in the Klan.60 Sadly, the expose didn’t stop Black’s confirmation or force him to resign.
The Davis-Bacon Act still exists, and its effects that hurt blacks in the workforce persist to this day.61 .Today, commentators see the unemployment gap between black and white Americans and wonder how it persists—and the answer is that progressive regulations do what they were designed to do.
The alliance between blacks and Big Government advocates has been a one-way relationship since it began. Radicals and progressives who worship at the altar of an ever bigger and more encompassing government have rallied the votes of blacks to create a behemoth that taxes, regulates, and even strangles Americans’ economic success in a way that the nation’s Founders never could have imagined. Meanwhile, the progressives pursue their own goals while the interests of blacks become further and further removed from a central place in American society. Ultimately, the New Deal is a raw deal.
What is freedom? It is the right to choose one’s own employment.
— Frederick Douglass, Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society Boston Speech, 186562
CRT is Reverse Racism
If the anti-black bigotry of their past isn’t enough, Democrats’ newest effort, anti-white bigotry, is just as bad. Calling for what they call “restorative justice,” CRT seeks to use Washington to squash whites to aid blacks. The justified backlash has and will foment anti-black racial division. The new term is “anti-racism.” CRT advocate Ibram X. Kendi explains, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.”63 In other words, anti-racism is just racism with a new target: whites. Kendi’s solution is completely unbounded from cause and effect. Instead of holding actual bigots responsible for their bad behavior and forcing them to restore to their victims the value of the property or income taken from them, “anti-racism” proposes Jim Crow twenty-first-century style.
It is true that finding living bigots and their living victims is difficult. But justice involves punishing or penalizing perpetrators, not the richest or the nearest white person. When a bank is robbed, police don’t arrest any random person just to close the case. Law enforcement has to do the hard work of finding the bank robber.
CRT supporters think that race alone is a proxy for guilt and any refusal to accept this standard is proof of racial animus. Actually, refusing to use race alone is proof of a willingness to seek justice.
Under the CRT standard, even the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would fail. Title II of the Civil Rights Act prevents a restaurant or store from denying an individual access on the basis of his or her race, color, religion or national origin. It requires anyone who claims racial mistreatment to provide the name of the place, the time and date, and the circumstances of the discrimination. Thus, Title II doesn’t allow aggrieved parties to sue Walmart or Home Depot for discrimination in the past. Notably, these two companies didn’t even exist before the civil rights era.
CRT urges its followers to go where even civil rights statutes fear to tread. Pursuing what they call “restorative justice,” CRT divides America between the racial haves and the racial have nots. The haves get benefits and advantages on the basis of their race. The have nots face penalties and obstacles on the basis of their race. In practice, there is no difference between the Jim Crow of the past and the Jim Crow of our time. In the twentieth century, black Americans rightly chose the American legal and political system to rectify wrongs. Today’s activists avoid the legal and political system to accomplish their ends.
Make no mistake: penalizing Americans (some of whom don’t even have ancestors in America), who are far removed from the codes of the Jim Crow era, only creates new unfairness and discrimination.
CRT Will Cause Hostility Toward Blacks
Tribalism doesn’t work for a minority. If CRT advocates have their way, Americans will break down within ethnic groups, ultimately allowing the smaller groups to be overrun by the larger groups. The last thing blacks or any minority group should want is policy based on ethnicity. Minorities thrive when the rules in the public square apply to individuals rather than to groups. Instead of separatism, minorities rightly pursue, and the Civil Rights Act affirms, policies that protect all Americans, not just particular groups. Contrary to the CRT mantra, racist government policy is exactly the wrong way to address concerns for minorities. As U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Robert wrote in the 2007 case Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”64
Transforming the United States into a radical leftwing country with no protections for individuals wouldn’t reduce racial discrimination but increase it. The history of autocratic regimes reveals that minority rights are regularly trampled.65
Moreover, restoring a Jim Crow rule that allows race as the basis for privilege and punishment isn’t just a bad idea. But if normalized it will ultimately harm blacks. For instance, what will blacks—a minority or any other racial minority—do if the political tide shifts and instead of policies favoring blacks, society decides to formally marginalize minority groups on the basis of race claiming that the pro-black policies of CRT need to be corrected for. Laws based on protections of all individuals makes that less likely. Laws based on preferential advantage for groups on the basis of race threaten all individuals—especially minorities.
Joe Biden and much of his party have come full circle on the issue of race. Instead of disregarding race and recognizing that it is a poison that should be avoided at all cost, he has embraced the use of race as a policy tool.
According to President Biden and his party, America is more racist today than it once was. Twenty-first-century racism is more insidious because it is a bigotry that dare not speak its name. Instead, it allegedly hides in shadows, and its adherents refuse to acknowledge their support.
Biden and his allies have created a far more sinister form of racism. It doesn’t wear hoods; it doesn’t burn crosses; it does not physically intimidate. Pretending to be part of the effort to stop bigotry against minorities, “anti-racism” adopts almost all of the tools of the Jim Crow era to achieve its aims. Committed to rooting out this new bigotry, President Biden puts on the armor of Don Quixote and, in the process, tramples the rights and freedoms of innocent men and women.
This time, any white person is suspect. Separate treatment, housing, and even dining is demanded. Employees are to be divided by race and evaluated accordingly. Schools are encouraged to have separate dwellings, and admissions policies effectively block many Asians and whites from attending elite schools.
Biden and his army of “anti-racists” have transmogrified bigotry to mean “mere advocacy of deregulation, free-markets, and equal justice before the law.” If you don’t buy into their efforts, you, too, are categorized as a racist.
For example, the White House forced the Department of Defense to hold an all-Services one-day stand-down to address “extremism” within the nation’s Armed Forces.66 In the midst of recruitment struggles, this was exactly the wrong directive, and it certainly wasn’t needed. A 2019 Pew Research Center report describes the nation’s military now as “more racially and ethnically diverse than in previous generations.”67 In fact, significant racial progress has been made in the military. According to the Defense Department’s 2017 Annual Demographics Report, 57 percent of U.S. Service members today are white, a significant change from 64 percent in 2004.68 The report also shows there are “more women serving in the military, and as ranking officers, in 2017 than ever before.”69
Blacks have willingly served and died in every single one of the country’s wars all the way back to the Revolutionary War. Today, black men make up 17 percent of all Service members—nearly two and a half times their population percentage.70 Far from being hostile to blacks, the U.S. military in the twenty-first century is a place for acquiring leadership and training skills, and blacks, especially men, agree.
On the other hand, the President’s order promotes an inferiority doctrine that Frederick Douglass warned about at the conclusion of the Civil War: “If the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone! If you see him on his way to school, let him alone, don’t disturb him!”71
CRT and the White House have taken the black inferiority doctrine to new heights. In fact, racism has lost all meaning under President Biden’s watch. No longer must a racist skulk around wearing hoods at night, spilling ballot boxes, or engaging in acts of intimidation against a fellow American on the basis of race. Today, mere advocacy of deregulation, free-markets, and equal justice before the law can get anyone tagged as a bigot.
Today, one in six newlyweds is married to someone of a different race. This means that more than 11 million people are intermarried.72 The most dramatic increases in intermarriage have occurred among black newlyweds.73
US Census Bureau.74
Consider workplace discrimination claims. According to the most recent data, for the last five years, the number of Equal Employment Opportunity Commission claims of racial discrimination have steadily declined.75
US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Enforcement and Litigation Case Report
2020 22,064
2019 23,976
2018 24,600
2017 28,528
2016 31,027
Even the gap between whites and blacks in prisons has narrowed dramatically. According to U.S. Bureau of Prisons, the number of blacks sentenced to prison dropped by 31 percent from 2007 to 2017, substantially shrinking the gap with whites.76
US Bureau of Prisons.
Prior to the onset of the pandemic, employment for blacks in America had exploded. Through 2019, black unemployment stood at the lowest levels recorded since the onset of the Great Society.77
