Op-Ed: Black Americans Were Doing Great Under Trump... Then Joe Biden Showed Up
How can President Joe Biden have the most racially focused presidency in history while black Americans have lost so much ground during his administration?
Horace Cooper’s latest book, “Put Y’all Back in Chains: How Joe Biden’s Policies Hurt Black Americans,” dares to question the accepted view that the Biden administration is making a special effort to assist blacks and the working class.
Instead, he uses Biden’s infamous campaign quote claiming that the GOP would “put y’all back in chains” to reveal the president’s cynicism.
Using research and a critical eye, Cooper thoroughly breaks down the problems caused by Biden’s policies. More importantly, he offers practical solutions in lieu of the left’s standard view of “systemic racism,” the all-powerful force that snatches the hopes and dreams of blacks or any minorities and always requires more and more government.
In “Put Y’all Back in Chains,” Cooper exposes how government intervention has harmed the lives of black Americans (particularly the poorest), and he outlines the Democratic Party’s parasitic relationship with black voters.
Democrats need blacks to fear racism and ignore the real opportunities that can bring about the American dream in their lives, he contends, and fear of racism pushes blacks into the arms of the Democrats while obviating any need for Democrats to produce an agenda to provide economic improvements for blacks.
Cooper opens the book with the jarring fact that at the dawn of the 20th century, black men were the most likely to be employed among all racial groups and were buying and building homes at a faster rate than whites – a stark contrast to today. So what happened?
“Heavy-handed economic regulation kills,” says Cooper. Government intervention supposedly aimed at “helping Americans” has often harmed blacks, and since the 1920s, this has been an intentional tradeoff.
No administration has evidenced this more clearly than the Biden administration.
Three years before the COVID-19 pandemic and during the presidency of Donald Trump, black unemployment was hitting record lows on an almost monthly basis and reaching levels not seen in half a century.
But the arrival of Joe Biden (with the large support of the black community) brought a toxic combination of lockdowns, forced vaccinations, new regulations and inflation. As a consequence, blacks lost big and today are worse off than they were before the pandemic.
Lockdowns disproportionally harmed blacks who worked blue-collar jobs that couldn’t be done remotely. And when the vaccine mandates rolled out, blacks refused the jab in larger numbers than other groups, leaving them jobless. But the federal government, the largest employer of blacks across the country, was unbothered.
There were also other regulations beyond the pandemic response, like attacks on the gig economy similar to California’s AB5 and the push to expand “anti-black” union laws like Davis-Bacon. Plus, with a raft of measures that raised energy prices, Biden seemed dead set on making it hard for black Americans to work, reversing progress gained under the Trump administration.
Consider Biden’s war on fossil fuels. The left claims climate change disproportionately hurts blacks. In reality, the opposite is true. “When climate activists succeed, blacks lose,” says Cooper.
From killing the Keystone XL pipeline to ending drilling on federal lands, Biden has subjected a record number of Americans to rising energy costs, with studies finding that black households pay significantly more.
Hoping to deflect, Biden has conjured up myth after myth to explain record prices at the pump, from gas station owners artificially raising their prices against their own interests to what he called “Putin’s price hike.” But perhaps the most problematic policy has been the inflation that Biden unleashed on unsuspecting households — hurting black families most.
Compounding the effects of Biden’s backward policies has been his administration’s promotion of the woke agenda.
One of the most insightful chapters of “Put Y’all Back in Chains” covers how progressive policies have unleashed a wave of crime in black communities across the country. From the 1960s onwards, progressives have become infatuated with policies that separate accountability from bad behavior. Now, critical race theory argues that racial disparities in the justice system require the circumvention of the system entirely.
Biden’s embrace of Soros-backed district attorneys like Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, who has dismissed or lost more than half of all drug-related cases and almost half of all illegal firearm arrests, and pro-criminal DA Alvin Bragg in New York, who has made self-defense a relic of the past, has been disastrous. With progressive prosecutors refusing to protect the victim and instead serving the criminal, blacks (who are overwhelmingly the victims of violent crime) lose.
Cooper ends his groundbreaking new book by unveiling Biden’s own racist past, which is a far cry from what Martin Luther King envisioned for America’s future.
Biden’s racist pronouncements, his promotion of CRT and his race-baiting all illustrate a policymaking process rife with racial blemishes and expose a desire to keep black Americans down or, as Biden once said, “put y’all back in chains.”
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