How the government pays nonwhites to become racist anti-white haters

Here’s a funny / horrifying story from the Washington Post news section about how the federal government hands out lucrative racial privileges to nonwhites for making up narratives about white evilness:

He never saw himself as disadvantaged. Then the government had him write an essay.

It had never occurred to Curtis Joachim to blame racism for his professional setbacks until an SBA application forced him to think differently about his life.

By Julian Mark

June 29, 2024 at 8:05 a.m. EDT

Curtis Joachim sat at his computer, searching for the words to prove his disadvantage.

It was summer 2023, and a federal judge had just ruled that a government program for minority contractors could no longer automatically accept participants like Joachim. For the first time in the program’s 45-year history, simply being Black was not enough to qualify as “socially disadvantaged” — a key requirement to receive set-asides for lucrative government contracts. Now Joachim, an accountant, had to document his struggles.

He had to write an essay.

Joachim arrived from Dominica in the Caribbean at age 15 and now lives on a ten acre estate in Virginia.

So Joachim began examining his life through the prism of disadvantage. It was new terrain for the 56-year-old Marine Corps veteran and longtime entrepreneur, a man who had instinctively equated success with merit.

As he sat down to write, he thought about his many setbacks: the missed promotions, the bankruptcies, the second jobs he took to make ends meet. No matter how hard he had worked, he now realized, there had always been some resistance, almost like an “invisible force” holding him back.

And then it struck him: “It could have been different if I was not a Black man.”

Yeah, if you were white, you wouldn’t have been entitled to all the racial privileges you received on the $32 million of government contracting you’ve received.

Joachim was writing the essay because of a decision several weeks earlier by a federal judge in Tennessee. A White woman had challenged the Small Business Administration’s 8(a) Business Development program, one of the government’s defining affirmative action programs, which certifies businesses as “disadvantaged” so they can pursue federal contracts set aside for minority-owned businesses. Last year, more than a dozen agencies disbursed $24.4 billion through the 8(a) pipeline.

Joachim said the program changed the course of his life, allowing him to win more than $32 million in accounting and auditing contracts over the past decade from the departments of Housing and Urban Development, and Transportation, among others. The experience gave him the foundation to pursue other government work and increase his staff to 15.

But now, the judge said, the program could no longer admit applicants based solely on their racial identity. Instead, every applicant would have to offer a narrative of disadvantage, one that demonstrated how their identity set them back.

Since last June, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down race-based college admissions at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, the nation’s most selective universities have been forced to undergo a similar transformation. Applicants can no longer expect special consideration on the basis of their race, though they can use their personal essays to discuss how race has shaped their experiences.

We’ll probably start finding out late this August whether elite colleges saw a huge drop in the percentage of blacks admitted because of the Supreme Court’s anti-affirmative action decision, or whether the Ivy League has outsmarted the Supreme Court with work-arounds of the law, like encouraging even whinier admissions essays about how oppressed you are as a quarter Bermudan, quarter Argentine, half Jewish, vaguely LGBT preppie at Choate.

The Harvard-UNC decision touched off a broader shift in the way institutions approach diversity. In the corporate world and government contracting, as well as higher education, explicit preferences for people of certain races or ethnicities are giving way to processes that focus on the totality of an applicant’s character, said David Glasgow, executive director of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging at New York University.

It’s fascinating how so many Americans can’t keep in their minds the fact that for over half a century, government agencies and other powerful institutions openly routinely discriminated against whites.

… For the 4,800 businesses that participate in the 8(a) program, the court ruling last July touched off a frenzy. The SBA trained additional staff to review the essays that were now pouring in from participants. Lawyers hired by applicants to help complete their narratives said the process sowed confusion — and dredged up past trauma.

Nicole Pottroff, a partner at the law firm Koprince McCall Pottroff, said many applicants drew upon such severe experiences as “sexual harassment, blatant racism — things that were very hurtful to the individual telling the story.”

“Most of this is painful,” Pottroff said. “They’re hoping to repress a lot of these memories.”

In his essay, Joachim needed to describe two episodes when he experienced discrimination to establish what the SBA called “chronic and substantial social disadvantage.” Pottroff worked with Joachim to identify the incidents, which could have taken place during his education, his employment or in his business history.

He chose to write about his time in the military.

Joachim wrote that he had been a “Poster Marine” who spit shined his boots every night, kept his hair “high and tight,” and earned his sergeant’s stripes in just under three years — it typically takes four to five — while attending college at night and competing as a power weightlifter. He had been named Marine of the Month, then Service Member of the Year, the essay said.

None of it was enough to qualify him for the officers training program, which would have provided him with a college education and propelled him into the commissioned officer ranks. Instead, he wrote, a White Marine had been selected.

“It was my lifelong dream to be a Marine Officer,” he wrote, “but that dream was crushed because of the color of my skin.”

If you say so.

For his second incident, Joachim wrote about how, about a decade later after discharge, he repeatedly had been passed over for promotions while working as a civilian with the U.S. Army Audit Agency in Germany. White peers moved to bigger roles, he wrote, even though he was sure he performed better.

Sure. It’s your essay, so tell us your truth, your lived experience.

“Given my success and incredibly (nearly excessive) hard work — race again was the only ‘advantage’ they all had over me at that time,” he wrote. “And apparently that was a significant enough ‘advantage’ to promote them three years before me.”

Joachim had not always seen things this way. It had not occurred to him to blame racism when he was rejected for the officers training program or missed out on promotions.

But now he knows better.

To paraphrase Upton Sinclair: “It is easy to get a man to believe something when his millions of dollars in racial privilege set-asides depend on his believing it.”

Back in 2009, I wrote about the essay written to qualify for Small Business Administration racial privileges by the scion of an Asian billionaire’s family:

In 2005, the Office of the Inspector General sent a report to the SBA: Criteria for Overcoming the Presumption of Social Disadvantage is [sic] Needed. A whistle-blowing citizen had filed a complaint about an Asian businessman in his mid-20s who had qualified for the SBA's 8(a) minority business development programs. The whistle-blower argued  that the entrepreneur was not really disadvantaged.

See, in theory you don't qualify for taxpayer-subsidized loans just by being "Asian". No, you have to be a socially or economically disadvantaged Asian. And how do you demonstrate you are disadvantaged? You fill out a form about how you've suffered under the lash of white bigotry.

Thus this Asian entrepreneur related a tale of woe on his application, including:

"I then watched as young, less experienced white men got the promotions and salary increases that I had been promised."

The Inspector General's office discovered, however, that in the company where the victim toiled, his father was a senior officer and shareholder. In fact, this young martyr to social and economic disadvantage:

1. came from a wealthy family; e.g., according to a newspaper article, since 1996, three companies his parents founded and were affiliated with were sold for approximately $3 billion;

2.  was raised in his parents' home, which had an assessed value of $5.2 million as of January 1, 2005; …

5.  was gainfully employed by the United States Senate, Goldman Sachs International … among others.

As the title of the 2005 report points out, after decades of handing out loans to each and every Asian who submitted a form claiming to be "socially or economically disadvantaged", the federal government still hadn't gotten around to developing criteria for "overcoming the presumption of social disadvantage".

In other words, if you are Asian, the government just takes your word for it.

Consider the psychological effect of the government prodding you to lie about white persecution. Sure, this Asian applicant no doubt knew he was fibbing the first time the government asked him to complain about being discriminated against by whites in order to qualify for quotas. Yet, as the years go by, and he keeps having to fill out these forms to get more advantages over whites, and keeps donating to ethnic lobbies to preserve his privileges, it will only be natural for him to start believing his cover story about how he's the real victim and thus he deserves his loot.

If you pay people to exploit you, they will come to believe you deserve it.

In fact, maybe you do.