We’re not sure what the Harris-Walz campaign was thinking when it came up with Kamala Harris’ “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men,” but it sure is insulting as well as bizarre.
The list of policy priorities to help black men “meet their full ambitions” is a weird mix of the blatantly unconstitutional, the irrelevant and the seemingly racist.
She starts with a promise for a million small-business loans, fully forgivable up to $20,000, for black entrepreneurs “and others who have historically faced barriers to starting a new business” — language that the courts have struck down as unconstitutional racial discrimination.
(In classic Harris-Walz butt-covering, an anonymous campaign aide later told The Wall Street Journal that the program wouldn’t be racially exclusive, which means it wouldn’t be especially pro-black after all — but the campaign’s done nothing official about that shift.)
Harris also promises to legalize marijuana and create “opportunities for Black Americans to succeed in this new industry,” which sure looks like a racist assumption that African-Americans have some special, intrinsic affinity for pot.
Or maybe it’s just a bid to make up for the well-established fact that, as San Francisco DA, Harris convicted black men by the thousands for marijuana-related crimes?
Also tossed into the “plan” is a vow to “protect cryptocurrency investments so Black men who make them know their money is safe.”
We have no idea how to make crypto a safe investment, and neither does anyone else: All experience shows crypto values to be insanely erratic, and the risk is inherently tied to the potential for big rewards.
The fact of the matter is that black men overwhelmingly want what everyone else does: a strong economy that lets them find jobs with a good hope at rising wages, a lasting end to the inflation that’s slammed middle- and working-class Americans, a border that’s under control to protect our communities, etc. etc.
All issues where Donald Trump is killing Harris in the polls, and ample reason for her support among black men to be markedly down from what Democrats usually see.
“The brothers,” as multimillionaire Barack Obama put it in his lecture demanding they get back in line, look to be thinking for themselves — and it’s hard to see how this pack of nonsense is going to change their minds.