Well, the Gold Rush is on, and the prospectors of the Black Lives Matter movement are grabbing every dollar they can get their grubby hands on. Making money off of mostly bogus claims of “police brutality” and “systemic racism” is going to be a growth industry for years to come. Every race hustler from Hollywood to Harvard is rushing to cash in while the getting is good. And the modern-day BLM money train dwarfs the earlier rackets of such esteemed “social justice warriors” like the Reverend Al Sharpton and the Reverend Jesse Jackson.
According The New York Times, so-called racial justice groups have collected hundreds of millions dollars in contributions since Mr. Floyd’s death. I suspect the actual amount will easily exceed a billion dollars. But we don’t know for sure because, as the Times explains, “some of the leading black and racial justice groups declined to comment on the scope of the windfalls.”
No doubt some of these nonprofits do good work and make good use of their donors’ generosity. But they are virtually unregulated and have very minimal financial reporting requirements.
“African-American Studies” will be another big winner. There are hundreds of such programs, and from an academic and intellectual perspective, most are of highly dubious value. They are also of very questionable value for the students themselves. Basically, a degree in African-American Studies qualifies you to be a racial activist, or a barista at a progressive coffee-shop, and that’s about it. But there are of course vocal demands to increase their funding dramatically, and I suspect few university administrators will have the necessary backbone to resist.
Meanwhile, there are virtually no African-Americans teaching or conducting research in the natural sciences, especially at the highest levels of academia. For example, at the ultra-elite California Institute of Technology, there is not one African-American among that institution’s 74 professors in its Department of Physics, Mathematics, and Astronomy. In short, African-American students are incentivized to major in what really is “a celebration of me and people who look like me,” rather than anything more useful.
“Corporate diversity” is already Big Business and is poised to expand. U.S. corporations spend about $8 billion a year on “diversity and inclusivity” training. And yet, most participants in these mandatory re-education camps end up feeling that it’s at best a complete waste of a day’s time. In fact, according to the Harvard Business Review, “diversity training doesn’t extinguish prejudice. It promotes it.” The HBR article goes on to cite a study of 829 companies over 31 years showing that “diversity training had ‘no positive effects in the average workplace.’”
Philonise Floyd, George’s brother, has already raised over $14 million on his Go Fund Me page. From his GFM page, it is a bit unclear how these funds will be managed, but it does state “This fund will be governed and controlled at the discretion Philonise Floyd for the family’s benefit.” Now, the FBI estimates there were 16,214 murders in the U.S. in 2018. So there are thousands of children every year who lose a parent to violent crime, and if you add up all the charitable contributions towards their benefit, it wouldn’t amount to a hill of beans. So, morally, there is something very wrong with this picture.
And let’s not forget the “civil rights” lawyers. Some of them are legalized vultures who style themselves as modern-day Thurgood Marshalls, fighting for justice. But they seem to be interested exclusively in cases where there is a big payday for themselves, taking a hefty cut on settlements with city governments. And the playbook is simple: inflame public opinion, threaten to sue for an outlandish sum, and wait for timid city officials who fear riots and municipal bankruptcy to capitulate. Query: what’s 30 percent of $300 million? For these jackals, the answer is “social justice, for my bank account.”
There are also plenty of hack “journalists” and “activists” who know that the ticket to fame, bookings on Colbert, and a well-paid speaking tour is easy if you just wildly exaggerate the problem of police misconduct and blame all the problems of the African-American community on “systemic racism.” By the way, I do watch Colbert regularly, and I have never seen a police officer invited on his show to explain the difficulties of inner-city policing.
The sad fact is, the real motto of these people should be Most Black Lives Don’t Matter. Many African-American communities are war zones under constant siege from career criminals, many African-American children attend schools that are woefully underfunded, and too many African-Americans suffer from serious but preventable health problems. But for the increasingly powerful and well-funded BLM Lobby, making race relations worse and whitewashing difficult realities is actually key to cashing in on White Guilt.