Category: Social Justice

From The American Conservative (both of them?):

There once was a general who fought a war to protect slavery. That’s not how he would have described it. He would have said he was fighting to protect his way of life from a foreign invader. Whatever construction he put on it, his so-called way of life rested on the sweat wrung from forced labor on plantations and gold earned from buying and selling black flesh.

That general was Samori Touré. The West African chieftain is honored today by black nationalists for resisting French imperialism in the Mandingo Wars of the late nineteenth century, but thousands of Africans were enslaved by Samori’s raiders in the course of building up his empire. After his final defeat in 1898, for more than a decade, columns of refugees tramped into French Guinea to return to their home villages as they escaped or were liberated from Banamba or Bamako or wherever Samori’s men had sold them.

Ta-Nehisi Coates named his son Samori, after the great resister. That means that Between the World and Me, the best-selling anti-racist tract of the current century, which takes the form of letters from Coates to his son, is addressed to someone named after a prolific enslaver of black Africans.

Unless the U.S. is packed with hidden Deplorables that poll-takers can’t find, at some point in 2021, the U.S. will be led by a president who identifies as “Black” (though we also have to accept the possibility that Kamala Harris changes her racial and/or gender ID between now and then).

Is it safe to say that the BLM protesters/rioters will go home for eight years, starting November 4? We didn’t have BLM riots during the Obama Administration, right? (“Obama Says Movements Like Black Lives Matter ‘Can’t Just Keep on Yelling’” (NYT, 2016) turned out to be prescient!)

Every day of the Obama administration was a day in which life for Black Americans became more challenging (see “Effects of Immigration on African-American Employment and Incarceration,” NBER 2007) Yet as long as there was a person in the White House who identified as “Black,” it apparently did not bother lower-income Black Americans that their jobs, apartments, and infrastructure were taken over by immigrants

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John Lewis, a Civil Rights leader of the 1960s who became a Member of Congress, died two weeks ago. I hope it is not too soon to wonder whether he was actually working against the interests of the people whom he claimed to be helping.

From his 2011 press release:

“I am a very proud member of the Congressional Black Caucus,” said Rep. John Lewis. “Throughout my quarter century in Congress, the CBC has been a tireless, consistently progressive voice, always advocating for and insisting upon inclusion as a mandate of our democracy. The CBC is a powerful and seasoned advocate for African-Americans and all people who have been left out and left behind in this country.”

Was Mr. Lewis actually an advocate for the interests of African-Americans?

In his role as a member of Congress, Lewis was a reliable advocate for increased low-skill immigration. Example: 2018 press release. He voted “no” on Donald Trump’s border wall and was rated 0% by two organizations that seek to restrict immigration (ontheissues.org).

“Effects of Immigration on African-American Employment and Incarceration” (NBER, 2007):

One reason, the authors argue, is that black employment is more sensitive to an immigration influx than white employment. For white men, an immigration boost of 10 percent caused their employment rate to fall just 0.7 percentage points; for black men, it fell 2.4 percentage points.

That same immigration rise was also correlated with a rise in incarceration rates. For white men, a 10 percent rise in immigration appeared to cause a 0.1 percentage point increase in the incarceration rate for white men. But for black men, it meant a nearly 1 percentage-point rise.

In other words, Mr. Lewis was a thoroughly modern U.S. politician. Thanks to BLM, Black Americans (and their white “allies”?) can choose their statues, but immigrants will take their jobs, compete with them for rental apartments and public housing, space and resources in the public schools, space on the jammed roads and packed (now with Covid-19!) subway cars and buses, etc.

Readers: Can a politician actually advance both the interests of low-income African Americans and would-be low-skill immigrants at the same time? The U.S. does not have infinite financial resources nor infrastructure capacity. When an immigrant moves into public housing in San Francisco, for example, that unit becomes unavailable to a Black American, no?

Related:

• “Yes, Immigration Hurts American Workers” (by George Borjas, Harvard Kennedy School labor economist, in 2016): Both low- and high-skilled natives are affected by the influx of immigrants. But because a disproportionate percentage of immigrants have few skills, it is low-skilled American workers, including many blacks and Hispanics, who have suffered most from this wage dip. The monetary loss is sizable. The typical high school dropout earns about $25,000 annually. According to census data, immigrants admitted in the past two decades lacking a high school diploma have increased the size of the low-skilled workforce by roughly 25 percent. As a result, the earnings of this particularly vulnerable group dropped by between $800 and $1,500 each year.

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