Thread by @radleybalko

I've seen a number of people (many of them fellow libertarians) share this Wesley Yang post on the excesses of "wokeism."

Two of his examples jumped out at me, and I think are worth discussing in more detail.

wesleyyang.substack.com/p/welcome-to-y…

First, let's look at his claim that the "the Small Business Administration prioritized emergency Covid grants to restaurants by race."

This isn't some affirmative action program to address vague wrongs inflicted decades ago. It's about harm inflicted *last year.*

The first COVID relief package for small businesses required the loans be processed through banks, even though most of the loans wouldn't need to be repaid.

cbsnews.com/news/minority-…

There also appears to have been an advantage to having a relationships with large banks.

Black-owned businesses have more difficulty getting loans. They're less likely to have existing relationships with banks. Which means they were less likely to get PPP loans.

Congress & the Trump administration could have given money to small businesses directly. Intentionally or not, by requiring the loans to go through banks, they systemically excluded a whole lot of minority-owned businesses.

reuters.com/article/us-usa…

Even if you think the federal government shouldn't be telling banks to whom they can and can't lend, it's pretty well-documented that banks tend to see black-owned businesses as higher-risk, even when all else is equal.

The PPP program baked private ...

reuters.com/business/finan…

... sector discrimination into public policy.

The new Biden policy tried to remedy this. It has now been suspended after a lawsuit brought by a think tank co-founded by Stephen Miller.

vox.com/2020/10/5/2142…

Next up: "The Department of Agriculture prioritized funding to black farmers."

There's a long history of discrimination against black farmers, from discriminatory lending, to an inability to access ...

theguardian.com/us-news/2021/j…

. . . aid/subsidies available to other farmers, to outright lynching and theft of land from successful black farmers during Jim Crow.

Black farmers too have problems accessing capital, both in the private sector and through federal aid programs.

politico.com/news/2021/07/0…

Here too, the past is ever-present. The WP recently published a deep dive into how black farmers still have problems getting natural disaster relief. Why? Because some can't produce a title for their farms.

washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/07…

And why can't they do that? Because for decades, black people were systematically excluded from the legal system. So they had no choice but to pass land from generation to generation informally.

Again, we aren't talking about reparations to third- or fourth-generation descendants of slaves, here. This isn't about payouts to black people who may have immigrated here after Jim Crow. It isn't giving a slot at Harvard to a wealthy black kid over a low-income white kid.

These policies are attempts to remedy real, ongoing harm done to black people by current public policy, by programs that failed to account for the legacy of systems built and honed during a time when racial segregation and discrimination were prescribed by law.

Conservatives and libertarians might say these programs are all public handouts that distort the market, and that we'd be better off without them. Perhaps! (Though COVID relief was in part to compensate for government-mandated shutdowns.)

But if we are going to have them, it hardly seems like wokeism run amok to say they shouldn't *further* marginalize groups that have already suffered from historic discrimination, or that we shouldn't have programs with rules that result in public aid for white farmers . . .

and business owners, but not to black ones.

Or that if a program does have that effect, we should fix it.

One more thing: I doubt many people at the SBA, FEMA, or USDA are vicious racists. Yet there's no question these programs discriminate, in most cases . . .

. . . by failing to account for ongoing harm done by discriminatory practices of the past.

A policy can be discriminatory due to the legacy effects historic racism even if the people who administer it are well-intentioned.

It's the very definition of systemic racism!

/end