Blackout

by Candace Owens

  Clearly, this was a community that needed the massive influx of revenue, jobs, and prosperity that an Amazon headquarters would have provided. But the congresswoman revolted against the promised tax breaks to the business and accused the company of being morally deficient when choosing the city as its home. In a series of tweets, AOC blasted the proposed deal, claiming that her residents were more concerned about the deterioration of New York subways than they were having jobs. “It’s possible to establish economic partnerships [with] real opportunities for working families, instead of a race to the bottom competition,” she tweeted. She then continued her assault, adding, “while there isn’t enough money for hot water in NYCHA, we’re giving $3 billion away to Amazon.”

  Her attack was entirely senseless. Under no circumstances was any of New York’s budget going to be redirected to Amazon; that simply is not how a tax break works. But if the Amazon ordeal is any indication, it seems to me that the truth does not matter to Ocasio-Cortez. Not when she espouses the virtues of socialism, nor when she manipulates her millions of Twitter followers by playing to their deepest fears. AOC relied on the ignorance—or, more accurately, the unsophistication—of the working class regarding complex municipal tax incentives to inspire their outrage, while making herself appear to be a moral hero in the process. The confusion and mass hysteria she inspired were enough to make Amazon temporarily pull out of the deal.

  In the aftermath, AOC celebrated her first major win as a socialist congresswoman. But her victory was not over Amazon. AOC defeated the truth, and she defeated the millions of people who stood in agreement with her fallacious arguments simply because she claimed to be doing good by fighting the bad of capitalism. Even now, as Amazon has come back to the table and agreed to expand its New York operations by taking out a 335,000-square-foot lease in the city, the truth remains concealed. The fact remains that not only are the 1,500 positions that will be housed in the new space a far cry from the number of new jobs initially promised, but the new Amazon office is planned for Manhattan’s Hudson Yards—in the same neighborhood where Facebook recently made a giant footprint. It is a neighborhood that is scarcely in need of development and a neighborhood that, while physically being only four miles from Long Island City, is conceptually light-years away from the black community that would have most benefited from Amazon’s initial development plans.

  SELF-SUFFICIENCY IS THE KEY TO BLACK SUCCESS

  More than any other group in this country, blacks have had to place an unnatural amount of faith in the American government. We needed the government to free us from the shackles of slavery, to afford us our right to vote, and to grant us the same rights and privileges as white citizens. Somewhere in the process, I fear we began to worship government, to believe that its benevolence is our only source of promise. We have been preconditioned to fall easily for the socialist trap, preset to believe the foolish lies of socialist leaders, like AOC and Bernie Sanders. We have forgotten, perhaps, that the same government that freed us from bondage is the one that bound us in the first place.

  Is it not ironic that a community of people who were at first enslaved by government policies, then segregated by government policies, and over the last six decades have been systematically destroyed by government policies, somehow believes that more government might offer a solution to their circumstances? Logically, any attempt at government expansion should be vehemently opposed by the black community. Based on our history, we should be on the front lines of the fight against socialism, and yet the Left’s promise of more charity continues to prove irresistible. Our internal conflict is understandable—why shouldn’t the government, after years of slavery and Jim Crow, not eliminate black debt by subsidizing black housing, and otherwise funding black lives? The answer is simple: because a painkiller cannot eliminate cancer. No short-term fix, no Band-Aid over the deeply infected wound, will ever fix the underlying problems that plague our community. As Margaret Thatcher famously said, “Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people’s money.” No matter how much money the government gives to black America, it would be taking it from somewhere else, and those funds will eventually run out. This wealth distribution is achieved via taxation, and as Winston Churchill, who served as British prime minister during World War II, said, “for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.”

  What is more, when the funds do run dry, blacks, having never learned how the dollars were earned, will be left in the position of once again needing to beg the government for survival. Handouts absent hard work render men weak, and with depleted self-esteem; they stifle the entrepreneurial spirit, by removing our innate senses of drive and aspiration. Poverty and despair become the life of the man who is given a fish but never learns to cast his own line. And though many will sympathize, prosperity will never be won until we become our own lifeline.

  The three decades from 1900 to 1930, dubbed the Golden Age of Black Business, lend credence to my claim that we can do it without assistance. It was a period when tens of thousands of black men and women took their economic destinies into their own hands by launching companies. With racist policies barring blacks from many jobs and suitable wage, and with no reasonable hope for government intervention, blacks had to do for themselves. And they did.

  In 1900, Booker T. Washington launched the National Negro Business League to provide a network of support for black entrepreneurs with the goal of promoting “commercial and financial development of the Negro.” For Washington, it was clear that this path was the only one that would ultimately lead to true equality for the race. During his last annual address to the league before his death, he stated, “At the bottom of education, at the bottom of politics, even at the bottom of religion itself there must be for our race, as for all races an economic foundation, economic prosperity, economic independence.”

  From 1900 to 1914, the number of black businesses doubled from 20,000 to 40,000, but by 1929 the country had fallen into the Great Depression, and blacks, especially, struggled to break free. But while it is understandable that the black community turned to government assistance in those impossibly lean years, it is confounding that retrospect hasn’t taught us any lessons.

  Black America will never become prosperous via welfare and government handouts; if it were possible, it would have already happened.

  For too long we have been misled by Democrats, who have depended upon our votes for power. For too long we have been made to believe that the state is sovereign, that we cannot lead prosperous lives without assistance from the government. But the truth is that we do not belong to the Democrat Party, nor do we belong to their socialist creed. We answer not to the false god of government, but to the one true God of our faith. Socialism is the gospel of envy and the sharing of misery, and our time within the pages of its history is coming to an end.

  6 ON EDUCATION

  Consider the word “free” for a moment and record what images flash across your mind. When I do this exercise, I picture a young woman in an open field: eyes closed, curly hair hanging loosely, with her face tilted toward the sun. You may have conjured up an entirely different illustration, but suffice to say that the concept of freedom induces positive thoughts.

  We most certainly do not correlate the word with our various responsibilities. “Free” is hardly considered in the context of our chores. And yet, that is precisely what freedom entails: personal responsibility.

  In a truly free society, individuals are granted responsibility for themselves. Freedom necessitates that we learn how to provide for ourselves, contributing value in whatever form, to generate personal income. We then decide how we wish to spend or save earned income; freedom is the reward for fulfilling personal responsibilities.

  Conversely, slavery is the ultimate example of removing personal responsibility. Slaves were prevented from assuming any obligations to themselves; they could n
ot create for themselves, enjoy the fruits of their labor, or prepare for their futures in any way.

  One year after passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson gave a historic commencement address to Howard University, where he asserted:

  Freedom is the right to share, share fully and equally, in American society—to vote, to hold a job, to enter a public place, to go to school. It is the right to be treated in every part of our national life as a person equal in dignity and promise to all others.

  He was correct. Prior to the abolishment of Jim Crow laws, black Americans had never been granted true freedom. Segregation made it so that we were still oppressed through various limitations. Blacks were not free to choose where to educate themselves, where to live, or even whom to socialize with. Unfortunately, however, LBJ continued his address by stating, “But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying, ‘Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.’ ”

  Here he is wrong. Dangerously wrong. Being freed was enough for black America. The year 1964 should have represented a new beginning, when we began assuming full responsibility over our own lives. It should have marked a period when we made the extra effort to close the gap that the years of oppression had created between us and white America. What black Americans needed in 1964, more than anything, was a commitment to education. The only available means for us to close the gap on the many areas that we lagged was through an exertion of hard work and study.

  Against this reality the president who granted us our rights told us, within the same breath, that we needed help from white Americans to get ahead. Miraculously, just as soon as we were given personal responsibility, it was taken away. In the darkest of ironies, after 345 years of having our personal responsibility stripped from us by governing white society, we allowed that same white society to take it right back. Their method for taking it had certainly changed. Rather than callously telling us we couldn’t be responsible for ourselves, by outwardly barring and banning us from various institutions, this time, they began telling us we shouldn’t be responsible for ourselves because it was unimaginable that blacks would suddenly be expected to perform at their level. This ushered in a period of black victimization, which our community readily embraces to this day.

  To be clear, the belief that white people are to assume all responsibility for black America’s shortcomings is a form of white power. One must believe in black inferiority to accept the thesis that black America is not responsible for any of its own shortcomings in a free society. Conservatives believe neither in white power nor black inferiority, which is why we routinely reject the narrative that the white man is to blame for all of our ills.

  Black Americans who do accept this narrative do so not because they are “woke” but because they are terrified. They are terrified to accept responsibility for their own lives. This deep-seated fear is exactly what spawned the period of black militancy that began just after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. At the very moment they were freed, blacks of that era recognized the burden of freedom, and began searching for something to excuse their many shortcomings. And LBJ, in that momentous commencement address, delivered it to them. Now blacks learned that even if they were free, they could still be victims.

  Shelby Steele, a black American conservative author who grew up during this period, describes this phenomenon:

  The greatest black problem in America today is freedom. All underdeveloped, formerly oppressed groups first experience new freedom as a shock and a humiliation, because freedom shows them their underdevelopment and their inability to compete as equals. Freedom seems to confirm all the ugly stereotypes about the group—especially the charge of inferiority—and yet the group no longer had the excuse of oppression. Without oppression—the group automatically becomes responsible for its inferiority and non-competitiveness. So freedom not only comes as a humiliation but also as an overwhelming burden of responsibility.

  (from White Guilt, Harper Collins, 2006, p. 67)

  There is nothing more terrifying than freedom, particularly when it arrives to you suddenly, after years of oppression. After years of being told that they were unequal, black Americans suddenly had to contend with the empirical proof that indeed they were, albeit through no fault of their own. Understandably, due to prior oppression, blacks lagged greatly behind white Americans in all areas of education. Too fearful to rise to the challenge of outworking our opponents, we accepted the poison of the victim narrative that we see today. Rather than dealing with the burden of responsibility, we began accepting handouts. Or rather, we began allowing white Americans to create an illusion of progress. There is no greater example of this than the morally contemptible practice of affirmative action.

  THE NEGATIVE RESULTS OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

  Of the myriad bad-faith systems put in place by our government to “help” blacks, there is none more verifiably useless, or more positively discriminatory, than the practice of affirmative action. Typically, media coverage of affirmative action in the educational system is focused on whether a qualified white or Asian college applicant is penalized in order to make room for an unqualified minority. What we do not hear about enough, however, is the inescapable truth that affirmative action harms the communities it was designed to help.

  Economist and social theorist Thomas Sowell was an assistant professor of economics at Cornell University in the late 1960s when he noticed that a significant portion of Cornell’s black students were on academic probation. After investigating, Sowell determined that, while the university had taken drastic steps to eliminate racial disparities in its admissions process, it had also enrolled students who simply were not academically talented enough to be there. Indeed, those struggling students were not at Cornell on their own merit but because of affirmative action policies. They were given a seat for the sake of appearance and then were left floundering when they could not compete with their academically superior peers. In short, they were misplaced. Intrigued by the idea that a policy designed to help black students was actually hurting them, Sowell then did more research to confirm what he had observed at Cornell and found that the same held true everywhere: When you mismatch students based on the color of their skin, they do not perform well.

  Affirmative action policies within American colleges and universities began taking shape in the early 1970s. Formally, they were inspired by President Johnson’s Howard University speech, which was largely considered to have provided the framework for positive forms of discrimination. By 1965, Johnson had signed an executive order for positive discrimination in the workforce, requiring government contractors and subcontractors to take “affirmative action” by hiring minorities. It is fair to assume that the authors behind such policies had good intentions—but intentions are not results. Quite humorously, in the hope of amending their historical record of judging individuals based on the color of their skin, the academia put in place official policies and quotas, which worked by judging people by the color of their skin. Of course, on a more selfish note, these policies made white allies feel as though they were effectively dissociating themselves from the contemptible past of their ancestors. What better way to virtue-signal to those around you than to discriminate on behalf of a minority group, as opposed to against one? But as is true of all forms of discrimination, they eventually lead to regress.

  Black students—just like all other students—will eventually be made to compete in the real world. Giving them early educational advantage solely because of their minority status—which is no different from disadvantaging them for the same discriminatory reason. In the end, it directly inhibits their ability to flourish, a notion which flies directly in the face of current progressive aims, which seek to give everyone a theoretical trophy to ensure that no one feels bad for losing. But that is a model based on feelings, not facts. Factually speaking, masking inefficiency under an undeserved medal does nothing to edit one’s true rank
ing. Rather, it creates an ecosystem of overconfident young adults, who will be crushed by the inevitability of the real-world markets, where there are no concessions made for the ill-prepared.

  In the name of social goodness and feminism, I might decide to become a linebacker for a professional football team, and in the name of positive publicity, the NFL might decide to give me a shot. But the flowery intentions of neither me nor the league would prevent my abysmal performance on game day. Similarly, when we falsely elevate black students to positions in which they do not belong it is the students themselves who are made to suffer when the figurative game begins. In theory, affirmative action is meant to level the playing field. In practice, it digs ditches.

  I believe that the reason blacks continue to lag behind whites in terms of educational achievement is due to a culturally widespread belief that we should not be made to put in the same effort because of our earlier oppressive circumstances.

  Generations ago, black Americans understood that the only way to get ahead in life was through hard work. The idea of shortcuts and handouts through policy was not yet fashionable. And as Sowell noted, their willingness to work is the primary reason why the black community achieved what it did under far more harrowing circumstances:

  The history of blacks in the United States has been virtually stood on its head by those advocating affirmative action. The empirical evidence is clear that most blacks got themselves out of poverty in the decades preceding the civil rights revolution of the 1960s and the beginning of affirmative action in the 1970s. Yet the political misrepresentation of what happened—by leaders and friends of blacks—has been so pervasive that this achievement has been completely submerged in the public consciousness. Instead of gaining the respect that other groups have gained by lifting themselves out of poverty, blacks are widely seen, by friends and critics alike, as owing their advancement to government beneficence.…