In a scheme that immediately appeared destined to face legal challenges, on Oct. 14, the Harris-Walz campaign’s “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men” promised to provide 1 million fully forgivable loans of up to $20,000 specifically for black entrepreneurs.
Destiny came even sooner than one might have expected. Amid a media backlash, activist litigator Edward Blum threatened to sue the future Harris administration over the policy. Just two days after announcing the agenda, on Oct. 16, the campaign backtracked and stated the loans would be open to all regardless of race.
Despite the backtrack, the loans were just one of a slate of policies designed specifically to benefit black men — a demographic that was once a Democrat stronghold, but which polling shows moving toward Trump — in a strategy evoking Tammany Hall’s famously corrupt system of paying impoverished immigrants for votes.
The “legal plunder” of taxing one group to enrich another is sufficiently corrosive to social harmony to warrant outrage, but perhaps even more appalling is the presentation of blatant racism as “progressive.” How did our society advance through the legal and moral principle of equal protection under the law and the historic victory of civil rights only to reverse into a major party’s presidential campaign thinking it was a good idea to send out a racially discriminatory policy proposal?
The answer is so simple it’s almost comic: they just changed the definition of the word “racism” to mean something else.
Historically defined as “prejudice or discrimination based on race,”
