Buying Off Black America

By Catholic League president Bill Donohue

On April 18, Sophia Institute Press will publish my new book, War on Virtue: How the Ruling Class is Killing the American Dream. One of the subtexts to the volume is the way the ruling class treats black America. Two factors are operative: its members are riddled with white guilt and they have fundamentally given up on blacks. This explains their dedication to buying them off. Here are some recent examples. 

White elites are literally buying off black Americans with lots of cash; they are simultaneously purging themselves of deep-seated guilt. Instead of working with blacks, helping to secure intact families and good schools, they are writing checks, hoping this will keep them afloat. That’s because, deep down, they are the ultimate racists: they believe blacks can’t empower themselves like every other racial and ethnic group. 

California was never a slave state, but the white elite lawmakers in San Francisco, feeling the pangs of guilt, recently voted unanimously to support a plan which grants $5 million in reparations to every black person who is at least 18 years old and who has “identified” as black for the past decade. That would presumably include LeBron James. It might also induce some white boys to “identify” as black and see if they can play the identity game, too. 

If this proposal were to become law, black adults would walk away with at least $97,000 for 250 years, and each family would be able to buy homes in San Francisco for a buck a piece. Another proposal being debated would offer up to $360,000 in reparations per person, provided there is evidence that the applicant is a descendant of black slaves. But what happens to those who learn that their descendants were not slaves, but black slaveowners? Do they have to cough up some cash like whitey? 

Black Lives Matter also rips off black people in the name of helping them. Totally corrupt, the Marxists outdid the most ambitious capitalists by taking advantage of corporate white guilt during the urban riots they helped to promote in 2020. No one seems to know where all the loot went, but no one denies it was a smashing profit-making venture. 

A database from the Claremont Institute recently found that Black Lives Matter received $83 billion from corporate America. That’s more than the GDP of 46 African countries.

 Who wrote the checks? Silicon Valley Bank—yes, that one—Allstate, American Express, Apple, AT&T, Nike, United Airlines, JetBlue, Southwest Airlines, Delta Airlines, Wells Fargo, Deloitte, BlackRock, Capital One Financial, Morgan Stanley, US Bank, Goldman Sachs, Boeing, Northrup Grumman, and The Walt Disney Company. 

From colonial times to the mid-twentieth century, African Americans suffered through the worst of slavery, racism and discrimination, and yet the black family held its own. That changed in the 1960s, at a time of low unemployment for blacks, as well as everyone else. 

For reasons having nothing to do with economic need, the white ruling class instituted an array of welfare programs, and other top-down initiatives, mostly aimed at blacks, people whom they concluded could not cut it on their own. It’s been a disaster ever since. 

Black Americans need safe streets, school choice and charter schools. Who’s stopping them from achieving these ends? The very same people anxious to write the checks. It doesn’t get more perverse than this.