Ending Racial Blackmail

Thanks to the Supreme Court, affirmative action is back in the news.

Racial preferences are blackmail. They are unearned benefits to bribe blacks into good behavior. We pay the blackmail, but it fails to deliver tranquility. It’s a terrible deal. When you pay the Danegeld, the Dane never goes away.

It is time to pull the plug on today’s doomed-to-fail racial preferences.

The benefits would be huge. As Charles Murray’s Facing Reality makes clear, the boost in average IQ across many professions would be enormous, and we would see a jump in productivity. No more incompetent nurses or doctors. Professors could teach demanding courses. Military enlistments would increase.

The worst aspects of black behavior — everything from the riots to illegitimacy and welfare dependency — appeared after the civil rights movement, not before.

There is a growing nostalgia among blacks for the pre-integration era now lost. As a recent article in Washington Monthly put it:

In 1985, 60 black-owned banks were providing financial services to their communities; today, just 23 remain. In 11 states that headquartered black-owned banks in 1994, not a single one is still in business. Of the 50 black-owned insurance companies that operated during the 1980s, today just 2 remain.

This parallels the demise of black-owned taxi services, supermarkets, publishing, cosmetic firms and mom-and-pop businesses.

It is easy to forget the countless black-owned enterprises that were bankrupted by integration. According to Black Excellence, thousands of black-owned and black-run firms thrived, especially where there was Jim Crow.

Millions of decent jobs might await blacks if the US returned to an era when millions of black-run businesses catered to blacks. During the pre-civil rights era, black labor force participation often exceeded 90 percent.

Ending affirmative action may have consequences far beyond eliminating the most prominent feature of today’s racial spoils system. It could start a mutually beneficial and jointly desired racial disengagement. Black businesses and universities would be reinvigorated while white institutions would no longer be pressured to hire people they don’t want.