We should expect our politicians to resist the temptation to balkanize the electorate for the sake of fleeting, parochial electoral advantages. But we don’t. So it’s hardly a surprise that Kamala Harris is responding to her failure to attract sufficient support from young black men by violating the spirit of America’s proscriptions on the distribution of public goods to preferred constituencies based on their accidents of birth.
This week, Harris rolled out what she’s billing as an “opportunity agenda” explicitly aimed at appealing to African-American males. Some of the proposals in this overture are innocuous — increasing “mentorship programs” and “launching a national health initiative focused on the illnesses that disproportionately impact black men,” for example. Others are slightly more sinister. Why is it, we might wonder, that black males in particular are thought to be especially enthused, as compared with other demographics, by the federal legalization of “recreational marijuana” use? And some of the proposals, like her plan to “protect cryptocurrency investments so black men who make them know their money is safe,” are just ponderous. (Know who else wants their investments secured? Everyone.) But the proposal that is perhaps most repulsive is her promise to provide “black entrepreneurs and others” with forgivable loans of up to $20,000.
“And others” is the load-bearing framework here, allowing the proposal to avoid collapsing under the weight of its sheer unconstitutionality. We have ample evidence that this two-word aside was grudgingly included in the Harris camp’s attempt to pander to black men because the Biden administration has already failed to subvert the Constitution.
Under the rubric of “equity,” the president tried and failed to task the Small Business Administration with offering congressionally appropriated Covid aid only to the “socially and economically disadvantaged.” By that, they meant women and racial minorities “who have been subjected to racial and ethnic prejudice or cultural bias.”
Aside from the callous approach to the distribution of relief amid the universal hardships associated with a viral pandemic, the maneuver blatantly violated the 14th Amendment’s equal-protection clause. The Biden administration knew full well what it was doing, but, as it has on so many other occasions, the White House pursued this unconstitutional proposal with the understanding that they could later attack the courts that would invariably strike it down.
The excesses of the equity approach weren’t exclusive to the Biden White House. The logic of “equity” led officials in California’s Marin County to attempt to create something approximating a universal basic income, but one that was available only to “mothers of color” who face “the daily travails and insults of overt and covert racial discrimination.” Those hardships may be real and even debilitating, but they do not license public officials to undermine the constitutional order.
The people rejected that initiative, just as California’s voters rejected an effort to codify racial discrimination in the state’s constitution by nullifying its proscriptions against distributing public-contracting grants and offering admissions to state universities based on race, gender, and ethnicity. Even in the deep-blue Golden State, the American civic religion of rejecting racial discrimination, both the positive and negative varieties, is still inviolable.
Who is Harris’s “opportunity agenda” for? It’s not for those who believe opportunity should be universally accessible. It is not a plan to identify, much less break apart, whatever structural impediments presently prevent black men from realizing their full potential. It’s rhetorically exclusionary, and it is designed to appeal to those who believe some Americans deserve to be excluded.
You’d think Kamala Harris might have learned a lesson from the failure of faddish concepts like equity to catch on. It seems all her team has internalized following this experience is that racial favoritism needs a savvier marketing strategy. Taken together, “black entrepreneurs and others” is an unnecessarily cumbersome way of saying “Americans.” But among the progressive activist class, a rising tide that lifts all boats is undesirable. The kind of “equity” that its advocates desire isn’t the sort that provides relief to the long-deserving. What they want is retribution against those who are born into identities they prejudicially assume benefit from unearned historical advantages.
“The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination,” the self-described “anti-racist” philosopher Ibram X. Kendi pronounced. “The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” Harris cannot come right out and say that, but nor can she afford to alienate those who believe the egalitarian American social compact is a fraud. That spiteful outlook may be voguish among a tiny cohort of far-left agitators, but the rest of the country — even the Democratic Party’s core minority constituency — isn’t buying it.
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