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Pete Buttigieg Panders to Black Voters With Intensive Affirmative Action Plan
On Thursday, Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Ind., who became an unexpected star of the 2020 Democratic primary but has struggled with a local police shooting in recent weeks, launched a comprehensive plan to boost the fortunes, health, and voting rights of black Americans. Styled as a Marshall Plan for black Americans — after the massive economic program to aid Western Europe after World War II — and named after patriotic orator and former slave Frederick Douglass, the plan is a massive Affirmative Action-style attempt to counter alleged systemic racism.
"So it’s very clear that as a consequence of systemic racism, black Americans have been excluded from the growth and the opportunity that our nation has provided," Buttigieg declares in a launch video. He notes racial disparities in health, wealth, criminal justice, and more, proposing the Douglass Plan as an attempt to bring "true nationwide restorative justice."
The plan checks off many boxes for grievance activists, but the policies within it would create massive problems, even for the black Americans it is intended to help.
While it comes from a place of desperation, the Douglass Plan seems a smart political move. Seeking to feature the voices of black Americans in his policy, Buttigieg enlisted two black activists, Chike Aguh and lawyer Portia Allen-Kyle, to help craft and sell the plan. He also put together an impressively comprehensive plan, addressing racial disparities in health care, all levels of schooling, criminal justice, employment, housing, infrastructure, voting rights, and entrepreneurship.
Sadly, the plan includes a retread of many bad policies, framing them in a racial light. The central driver is a kind of affirmative action. Buttigieg argues that "Black people in America are still disproportionately excluded from systems of social protection, economic uplift, and representative democracy while facing shorter lifespans, lower educational attainment, and dramatic overcriminalization and incarceration compared to their white counterparts." Therefore, his administration would implement fundamental structural changes.
Yet affirmative action in colleges and universities creates a problem of academic mismatch. Black Americans attend more prestigious schools, but not all of them are prepared to compete well academically there. This leads to lower grades and higher dropout rates, a trend which temporarily reversed when California reversed affirmative action between 1997 and 2003.
The Douglass Plan is loose on specifics, and Buttigieg's team may come up with ways to mitigate these inherent problems. The plan is clearly well-thought-out, with sections on encouraging more racial minorities to become teachers — since black students with at least one black teacher in grades 3-5 are statistically more likely to graduate high school and go to college. But it is incredibly difficult to get millions of people to change their career decisions to create this kind of an outcome.
The plan would dedicate an extra $25 billion for Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and other institutions with a large racial minority make-up. Yet even this involves directing federal funds to specific racial groups.
he Douglass Plan includes a Walker-Lewis Initiative, named after two black pioneers in business. That initiative includes an entrepreneurship fund to "co-invest" $10 billion into low-income and minority businesses. It also calls for 25 percent of federal government contracts to go to low-income and minority-owned firms. Furthermore, every student eligible for Pell Grants will have his or her college loans forgiven over a five-year period if they start and maintain a business employing at least three people within five years of leaving school.
Many facets of this initiative would promote entrepreneurship, full stop — not just in racial minority communities. Yet the emphasis on race may introduce some affirmative action-style problems.
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