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Three Terms Hindering Africa America’s Institutional Development: Affirmative Action, Diversity, & Minority

“All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.” – Tennessee Williams

This article will probably get me in trouble with the politically correct police and let’s all hold hands and get along crowd who typically have an idealistic view that all the resources in the world can magically be distributed evenly across all populations. However, truth is truth especially as it pertains to social, economic, and political (SEP) interest and until we have their idealistic world we have to consider that groups will continue to battle over power to control the resources much like what happens with every one of God’s other creations – imagine that. SEP interest drives every group’s institutional and individual decision-making except for one – African Americans. African America continues to chase the ever elusive ghost of assimilation and inclusion into the (European) American Dream to the expense of its own power. Below are the three terms that to me psychologically have and continue hamper our development and why.

Affirmative Action

Simply put this has been one of the most damaging policies toward a stronger African-American institutional power development. Affirmative Action was a bill pushed for by certain Civil Rights Movement (CRM) groups and was signed into law by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965. It owes its roots to desegregation and the court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, KS in 1954.

Desegregation’s ultimate culmination into the affirmative action law was all but the signature that wiped out African-American institutional development. Prior, we built towns such as “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa, OK and Rosewood, FL and countless self-sufficient African-American towns. These towns would be torn apart ultimately because of our lack of ability to obtain political retribution for social and economic attacks against us which is where the aim of the CRM should have been. Instead, a movement within the CRM decided that equality meant to be assimilated into European American owned and controlled institutions. We would all but abandon towns which we built, businesses we started, and colleges that were founded for our interest and then begin to define success not by what we owned or controlled anymore but by being the “first” to break through into institutions where we weren’t wanted and out flanked socially, economically, and politically. Despite an understanding that in capitalism the ultimate power lies in what you control directly or indirectly and what you own.

Today, less than 15% of African-Americans who can go to college attend HBCUs despite the institutional implications that a college and university can bring to a community as noted in The University of Power & Wealth. “Success” is defined as moving out of our neighborhoods and then we wonder why our elementary and secondary schools are weak. They are weak because the demand that drives home values up which in turn increases the amount of taxes available to fund our schools and then allows them to develop and pay quality teachers was abandoned so that we could live in a “good” neighborhood. The educated and professionals instead of being a permanent presence in the community for children to see (positive social capital) instead leave children to look up to those hanging on the corner (negative social capital). It use to be that our doctors, teachers, and other professionals lived in the community and therefore set the barometer of that community. Yet, we’ll claim they can find role models or they should seek out mentoring programs missing the point of setting the rule in a community for kids instead of hoping they’ll find a way to be the exception. Before affirmative action, we started companies like C.R. Patterson, the only African-American owned automobile manufacturing company. Now, most of define our success by the car we drive not the ones we build.

Minority

The problem for African America allowing itself to be labeled a minority are numerous but I’ll address specifically as it relates to economic policy and actions. In 2008, Dr. Verna Dauterive, alum of Wiley College, donated $25 million to the University of Southern California in memory of her late husband. The money would be used to fund a scholarship for minority students that pursued a doctorate in education. Who is a minority? The answer is simply anyone who is not a European-American male. That means the scholarships from that donation, at a school whose African-American population is not even five percent, never even have to be used for an African-American. It means that if USC so chose they could give that scholarship to anyone that’s not of African descent from here on out and they would be meeting the requirements of that donation. It should also be noted that USC has a $3.5 billion endowment while her undergraduate alma mater Wiley College has a reported $50 million endowment. To say the $25 million would have gone further at Wiley impacting African-Americans is without question.

Recently it was noted by Jarrett Carter, Editor of HBCU Digest, that many HBCUs lead their states in minority purchases. In fact, Prairie View A&M University, Mr. Carter noted leads the state of Texas with 38% of its contracts awarded to minority businesses. Again, it should be pointed out that does not mean $1 has to go to African-American businesses. As a former employee and graduate assistant at Prairie View A&M University it was not unusual for us to hear stories about European American families with businesses making the wife 51% owner of the business in order to access minority contracts. You have to love loopholes.

Diversity

Every year certain business magazines release “Most Diverse Companies” and they are always speaking of the labor that works for these major corporations. The reality is that while the labor might be diverse the ownership is still typically 99.9% European American. The current idea of diversity just means you were able to get the most talented of other groups to work for another group’s economic interest. Again, I can’t state enough that it is ownership who gets rewarded the most long-term not labor. We see this in college football where schools like the University of Texas have 50,000 students of which only 500 are African-American males and 50% of them are on the football or basketball team. A football team composed of almost 70% African-American males, and is the most profitable college football program in the United States. The profits then go into non-revenue athletic scholarships which are predominantly European American (see golf, softball, swimming, baseball, etc.), along with aiding research, faculty salaries, and much more. The 1% of the population with no SEP power at the university providing immensely to the 99% with all of the SEP power. Now that’s a change.

It is always important to note who is defining what. I always get annoyed by “diversity” often being hijacked and/or pigeon holed to only mean multiple cultures. Diversity is also always talked about from a European American majority. That is to say in a room of 10 people if you have 7 European Americans, 1 African-American, 1 Asian American, and 1 Latino American you have diversity. However, if you have 7 African-Americans, 1 European American, 1 Asian American, and 1 Latino American it is not perceived as diversity. This is the hurdle that HBCUs often face in perception by not only society as a whole but even sadder by African-Americans themselves. Every time a conversation about diversity comes up I have to point out there are a number of variables by which one can create a diverse setting beyond ancestry. If I have a room of eight people of African descent with two from Jamaica, two from Ghana, two from America, and two from Brazil and each of those two is a mixture of male/female then do I not have a diverse room? Yes, I do. I just happen to have one foundational link of ancestry. I can add variables such as but not limited to geographical upbringing, economic class, education, gender, etc. Just for the record HBCUs have always been willing to take poor and underserved European Americans and others. The reverse still is not true unless of course you can do something exceptional on a football field.

We must define things from our point of social, economic, and political interest and not just blindly follow someone else’s idea of what is “good” as their idea of “good” is always from their point of view and interest. I was on a radio show where one of the guests proclaimed to me that Martin Luther King, Jr. was fighting for our right to move into someone else’s neighborhood. A clear problem of what happens when you allow someone else to control your history. Even a man who screamed for our self-sufficiency as many seem to forget has had his image and message watered down over the years. In capitalism, everything is ownership or labor. This is neither good nor bad. It just is and we all know that knowing is half the battle.

Mr. Foster is the President of AK, Inc., President of the HBCU Chamber of Commerce, Interim Executive Director of HBCU Endowment Foundation, and sits on the board of directors at the Center for HBCU Media Advocacy. A former banker & financial analyst who earned his bachelor’s degree in Economics & Finance from Virginia State University as well his master’s degree in Community Development & Urban Planning from Prairie View A&M University. Publishing research on the agriculture economics of food waste, full-time contributor at HBCU Money, and guest contributor for a number of African American media outlets.

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Defending Black Republicanism (Part 2 of 3)

The thing that most drives African-Americans away from the Republican Party today, if one excepts the perceived Republican opposition to civil rights, are deep and fundamental differences in economic and domestic policy.  Given the long disadvantaged socioeconomic station which blacks have historically occupied it is easy to see why the public spending policies of the Democratic Party would have an enduring appeal to the many of us who are poor, struggling, and who need help where we can find it. But just because a certain set of policies may have an appeal to the poor and the working class does not mean  these policies are as beneficial as we would think. For an emerging black community coming into it’s own as business owners, college graduates, innovators and professionals, a different philosophy must begin to take root, one that allows us the means and the opportunities to control our own destiny as independent individuals, as secure families and as an increasingly prosperous community.

In recent days, former Republican Speaker of the House and current presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has made headlines, and met with fierce allegations of racism from some, for saying at a campaign stop in South Carolina, “The African American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps.” His words made the blood boil of many progressives generally and many blacks particularly, but it is worth curtailing the emotion to at least acknowledge the legitimacy of the point. As President Obama himself has acknowledged, there are a segment of people, and surely we observe them in our own community, who are content to live off of the public dollar as long as they can without making a serious effort at sustaining themselves. Naturally this doesn’t characterize our community as a whole, but what is more broadly true is that even for the large majority of black Americans who work hard for a living or who are trying their best in this difficult time to be able to provide for themselves and their families, there is a sense that true social mobility for us in this society is mostly a bitter mirage. Therefore we think education won’t help us. We believe that corporate America will not accept us. We expect the legal system to hinder us. In our history there have been many reasons to feel this way. But in the 21rst century too many of us cling to these limiting attitudes even as the walls of institutional oppression have crumbled around us before the advance of the black condition and the opening up of American society. For all of our problems and even given the current economic climate, black Americans are more wealthy, more educated, and more influential in recent years than we have ever been before. Yet instead of tending towards policies that would open wider the gates of our opportunities, we support initiatives designed to make sure we will fall only so far.

There is a reason that perhaps the steepest historical decline in the black unemployment rate occurred as a result of the tax cuts of Ronald Reagan in the 1980’s. There is a reason that even with cuts in investment taxes and welfare spending black unemployment reached a historic low at the end of the Clinton presidency, to only be neared again under George W. Bush’s presidency as a result of, in my opinion, the Bush tax cuts for the upper and middle class. (We’re it not for the real-estate crash and the financial collapse the national unemployment rate would probably have remained under 5% for sometime.) These periods of high employment and increase of black wealth and American wealth and employment generally came not as the result of aggressive government spending and public assistance. They came as the result of people being able to save, spend and invest more of what they had earned. There is a psychological difference of course in being able to keep more of what you yourself own or produce as opposed to simply receiving for free of what has been taken from the pockets of others. People have more appreciation for what they earn than for that which is given them without effort. Like the song says, “God bless the child who has his own.”

That is not to say that food stamps and welfare are innately bad. For the many people who are trying hard in tough times to get by and who have nothing else to rely on (believe me I know what it’s like) it’s important to have this safety net. But growing the social safety net does not grow long lasting prosperity, which is what needs to happen if things are to genuinely get better. It has been the approach of the current administration to funnel money directly into state governments, pet projects and rebates in order to stimulate economic growth. And while it should be noted that a good deal of this massive spending came in the form of tax credits, these were temporary and insufficient to generate real economic growth. Meanwhile as we spend money with little restraint, the very funds needed to fund our social welfare programs are missing because the economy is languishing. Raising taxes on the wealthy and cutting defense spending can barely begin to cover these bills. It is only economic growth that can accomplish this.

One area where President Obama deserves more credit than he has gotten is in the area of education. For as willing as many of us are to roll in the mud over the issue of Affirmative Action, the affirmative action we should all be calling for is stronger performance on behalf of our children from an education establishment that rewards seniority over ability. Consequently our children suffer while the teacher’s unions protect themselves. We keep pouring money on the education problem, but study after study have shown that government funding does not impact student achievement and neither, in fact, does class size. What matters most is not funding, or surroundings, but teacher quality. We have only been subsidizing the mediocrity of a failing union culture. President Obama has at least shown the political will to say to the left wing teacher’s unions that performance should be the deciding factor when it comes to retaining and rewarding educators. This is a conservative sentiment that Republicans have fought for for some time, and it’s unfortunate that more Democrats have not voiced support for at least this element of the President’s educational agenda.

I do not believe that black Americans will long be content to accept government programs as more than a nominal factor in ensuring the welfare of our people. I do not believe that black Americans will long tolerate an educational system that has no expectations for our children. We as a people do have a higher sense of who we are and what we can accomplish. But the interests of the Democratic Party are largely served by our dependency on federal dollars and our belief in the illusion that the poverty of our surroundings prevents us from being able to learn. These are a couple reasons why some of us are Republicans. But it doesn’t matter whether one is a Republican or Democrat. What matters is that we look at the example of an exceptional black Democrat like Barack Obama to realize the wisdom of a great black Republican like Booker T. Washington, who said that “character, not circumstances, make the man,” and furthermore, that “we should not permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities.” We have the ability. It is only the embrace of freedom and opportunity that we need to able to succeed.