Supreme justices are making decisions that take a lot from Blacks

After witnessing atrocities such as George Floyd, a Black man, slowly killed by police in front of dozens of people and cameras; a person traveling to a Black neighborhood in Buffalo to livestream a massacre of Blacks at a grocery store; and witnessing a Black woman Breonna Taylor killed in her bed by the police while sleeping, you would think that maybe these folks would think twice about rolling back protections for the Black community.

You are wrong to think that.

The recent action to outlaw affirmative action is easy enough to understand. With the direction of the public discourse since Donald Trump hit the scene, we should have seen it coming. But we cannot blame Trump. He is just saying and doing what a lot of them wanted to say and do for years.  He is just their conduit to finally release those monsters they have been keeping hidden.

We should have seen it coming back in the late 70s and 80s, when the Republican Party belonged to Ronald Reagan, the majority opposed having their schools desegregated, and they coined the phrase “reverse discrimination.” The majority, especially the MAGA crowd, has actually taken the term and has adopted it as their badge of honor. Every advancement in science, in social commentary, in political discourse is somehow now some sort of discriminatory action against them. Lose an election? It’s not because they could not get enough votes to win, but instead some sort of plot to keep them down. Try to protect the public from a pandemic? It is some plot by evil doers to poison them and implant tracking devices. They must have been cheated. There must be a deep state using their tax dollars to keep them down.

So, it should not have been a surprise to anyone that the Supremes would strike down affirmative action. When there is Affirmative Action for Black people, there always seems to be a visceral response from the majority. But give preferential treatment to others, like legacy college acceptance for descendants of Whites, deafening silence.

The Supremes have added to the unease felt by Blacks when they ruled against the LGBTQ community when they allowed a website developer to use religious beliefs to turn away potential clients based on their sexual orientation. There is nothing in that decision that stops bakers or anyone else from denying service to Blacks, or Jewish people, or anyone else different, if their religious beliefs say they should. I predict that there will soon be several cases moving their way to the highest court, asking for permission to discriminate against anyone not of their ilk.

Of course, the Supremes decision to deny the president the ability to forgive student loans, so that those folks can use those funds to build families and buy homes, and build generational wealth, just piles onto the systematic dependence that keeps Blacks in poverty.

This is just the beginning. Funding for Black colleges is on the horizon for slashing. There is currently about a billion dollars appropriated in federal funding for loans to HBCUs. Last year President Joe Biden’s administration provided for over $2.7 billion in funding in the American Rescue Plan. It may sound like a lot, but it isn’t nearly enough to assist these HBCUs, which like most Black institutions have been historically underfunded. The 10 largest HBCU endowments in 2020 total just $2 billion compared to $200 billion across the top, primarily White institutions. HBCUs are chronically underfunded, due largely to state underinvestment, lower alumni contributions, and lower Black incomes and wealth.

You can bet your last dollar that the Marjorie Taylor Greene’s in Congress are already writing the legislation to defund these HBCUs.

Maybe there is a silver lining in what the court and the congress are doing to Blacks and others who are not part of their brotherhood. For many years, through this country’s history with its Black citizens – from the middle passage, slavery, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights movement – Black communities have managed to “take care of their own” and become prosperous despite the lack of public dollars and generational wealth that was stolen from them through government policies. Black communities in Tulsa Oklahoma and Rosewood were economically successful before they were destroyed by jealous neighbors. Intellectuals like Frederick Douglas and W.E.B. Du Bois did not need to study with Whites to achieve greatness.

Perhaps this will encourage us to take care of our own and recycle some of those dollars back into our communities. The very successful former basketball star Charles Barkley recently announced that he was changing his will to provide $5 million to his alma mater Auburn to make that college more diverse. That is a start. But maybe he would have more impact if he actually donated those dollars to a HBCU to help build that college network.

Perhaps maybe we should start a movement to encourage our best and brightest to attend HBCUs. And perhaps we should start encouraging our star athletes to attend HBCUs, instead of going to the typical White leading schools, like Florida State, where the governor has put out “Blacks Not Wanted” signs.

Neither party is innocent when it comes to systematically denying resources to Blacks and their institutions. But the differences are so stark right now that no one should be denying the importance of voting, and for what party they should cast that vote.

But, in the meantime, we should begin to have the discussions about how to build our communities without the government being the main tool. Government has not really worked for us for the 400 years we have toiled in this country.

Rev. Boise Kimber, Ph.D., is pastor at First Calvary Baptist Church.