Blacks-Only Nonprofits

Have you ever heard of the National Association for the Advancement of White People? Not the NAACP, but the NAAWP. It doesn’t roll off the tongue quite the same. I had never heard of it before, but after perusing their unimpressive website, I can see why.

The NAAWP doesn’t seem like a very well-run or prestigious organization. The group was founded by the notorious Klansman David Duke, and although it claims to be a nonprofit, I was unable to find records to substantiate this claim. However, the NAAWP’s website does provide some dark humor. For example, at the top, it claims the group is “modeled after our dear neighbors at the NAACP.” There’s the Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech quote about the content of character on the website and a note saying “Happy NAACP Founders Day,” which immediately adds that the NAACP was “founded by 3 Whites.”

But the NAAWP humor on this admittingly joke of a website (it looks like a blog from the early 2000s) is meant to point out the hypocrisy of groups like the NAACP. And honestly, do they have a point? If you believe the Bible as I do, even a donkey can make a good argument sometimes. Why is it OK that groups that are designed to benefit one race alone, like the NAACP, can exist without a problem today, but the white counterpart can’t? It’s an uncomfortable question, I know.

Nonprofits During the Civil Rights Era

Let’s backtrack a bit. There was a time in U.S. history when black nonprofits and organizations focused on uplifting that one group made a lot more sense. When slaves were newly freed and when the country was fighting to cast off the racism of the Jim Crow Era, the work of men like Booker T. Washington, who worked tirelessly to uplift the downtrodden black man, opening the Tuskegee Institute to provide higher education for young black Americans, was part of the remedy to fix a real problem of those times.

Washington’s counterpart, W. E. B. Dubois, along with others (yes, including white people), founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909, mainly out of concern for the violence against black Americans. Much good work was to be done to help uplift the black community.

But times have changed. Jim Crow no longer exists, and we’ve had decades of Affirmative Action policies to counter the errors of the past. We’ve seen entire urban cities governed almost exclusively by black politicians long enough to have them grow old and retire. At what point does this focus on one race become simply clinging to the struggles of the Civil Rights Era long after the battle has been won? In some cases, such focus can turn into the very thing these groups, like the NAACP, were founded to stop: the supremacy of one racial group over others.

Today’s Black Nonprofits

I bring this up because of what we see today from some black nonprofits like the Black Visions Collective, founded in 2017. With its sister organization, Reclaim the Block, the Black Visions Collective received a reported $30 million in donations by the summer of 2021, along with celebrity endorsements from Lizzo and Falloutboy. They are known for their extreme stance on abolishing the police. For example, on February 4, 2018, Black Visions led a blockade at the Minneapolis light rail station close to the stadium where the Super Bowl would be held just hours later. The protest called for reallocating funds from the city’s police department to community organizations.

Now, let’s throw a hypothetical out here. What if we reversed the races and a nonprofit organization called White Visions Collective received millions in donations? Then, what if that group used those funds to organize a blockade to disrupt a significant sports event and force their political demands. I have no doubt that such a group would be deemed a domestic terrorist organization and dismantled.

So I’ll ask the question again: Why is it ok that groups that are designed to benefit one race alone can exist without a problem, but the white counterpart can’t?

Recently, the courts have taken up some of these questions, blocking Fearless Fund, an organization that “invests in women of color-led businesses,” from giving grants to only black, women-owned small businesses. The American Alliance for Equal Rights (AAER) sued Fearless Fund (and the related nonprofit Fearless Foundation) for violating a portion of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which prohibits discrimination based on race in contracts. The case has not been decided, as each side has had some legal victories so far. Initially, a district judge ruled on behalf of Fearless Fund, and then just days later, a three-person panel of U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit blocked the grant program. The most recent ruling upheld the injunction on June 3, 2024.

The case can go a couple of different ways and may decide some more significant issues related to discrimination laws, depending on how the courts rule. If the courts rule this as simply a contract dispute, Fearless Fund could possibly just modify its grant process and get around the lawsuit that way. However, the courts may choose to rule on something more fundamental: whether or not the way society seeks to remedy discrimination today is itself a violation of the basic principles of discrimination. Namely, does preferential treatment of minority groups violate those principles. How are things like affirmative action policies in university admissions and preferential treatment for certain races in things like bank loans and hiring practices not the very essence of discrimination? Of course, this single lawsuit won’t answer all these questions, but they are worth raising.

Imperfect Choices

We live in an imperfect world, and to solve these problems, we have two imperfect choices. One path is to get the government out of all these quarrels between private citizens, businesses, and groups and let people discriminate or not (imperfect, I know) because any attempt to legislate away discrimination will only lead to reverse discrimination, as we see today. The other choice is to enforce these discrimination laws equally for both sides, which is more idealistic but far more challenging to do.

The Left doesn’t like either of these choices, preferring a climate where they can place their thumbs on the scales of justice and pick the winners and losers, fairness be damned. This is why California tried and thankfully failed to amend its state constitution to allow for legal discrimination, eliminating pesky civil rights era laws that forbid such practices. I’m proud of my work and rebuttal statement included in the official voter information guide to help stop this legal discrimination.

Ultimately, we have to ask ourselves if we genuinely believe the truism behind MLK’s dream, that men should be judged solely on the content of their character instead of their skin color. Or is it something we just tell children and then ignore in the real world?