You would think the last thing the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees would want to do is blemish its progressive bona fides by cutting off the United Negro College Fund, the nonprofit that supports the nation’s historically black colleges and universities and provides college scholarships to 10,000 young black people every year.
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But it did!
The underlying reasons for the decision – the nonprofit’s decision to accept a $25 million donation from outfits run by billionaire libertarian activists Charles and David Koch – tells us something important. Supposedly-progressive public-sector unions and the activists who support them only care about improving life for black youths when blacks toe the party line.
Last week, AFSCME moved to end the 11-year old internship and scholarship program it ran with UNCF after the organization received a $25 million grant from Koch Industries and the Charles Koch Foundation. This should have been music to the ears of AFSCME, which has long touted its ties to civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King, and which counts African-American civil servants among its rank and file.
But for the union, which has lost in Wisconsin and other states against Koch-funded right to work groups, the very idea that UNCF would take money from their mortal enemy (and that the Kochs may actually care about helping black children get out of poverty) was too much to bear.
As far as AFSCME President Lee Saunders was concerned, UNCF’s decision to take the Koch money (along with an appearance made by its president, Michael Lomax, at a Koch-sponsored event) was “deeply hostile to the rights and dignity of public employees”.
For UNCF, which generated $208 million in donations and other revenue last year, the loss of AFSCME’s annual donation (including $54,500 in 2012-2013) is basically a rounding error. On the other hand, the Kochs’ $25 million donation will help it address one of the biggest problems facing black communities and the nation as a whole: low college graduation rates among young African Americans, who, along with Latinos and Asians, will soon account for the majority of American workers.
Just two out of every five black college freshmen graduate in six years, largely because of the high costs of attending four-year colleges. The Koch donation will help more black collegians finish school, and provide more money to cash-strapped HBCUs that lack the endowments and well-heeled alumni of their peers.
This is befitting of UNCF, which long been more-concerned about getting more black kids into the economic mainstream than maintaining solidarity with unions and progressives. Lomax himself has been one of the most-active players in the nation’s school reform movement, which has battled fiercely with AFSCME’s key allies (and sometimes rivals), the American Federation of Teachers, and the National Education Association. This includes serving on the board of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, the lobbying group for the privately-run public schools loathed by teachers’ unions.
By cutting ties with UNCF, AFSCME shows that it’s far more-concerned with enriching its own coffers than with addressing the educational ills that are plaguing black communities. But, again, this isn’t shocking: Public-sector unions and those progressives who are their beneficiaries are often only concerned about black communities when it advances their agenda.
Public-sector unions are only willing to back civil rights groups in exchange for services rendered. Last year, the AFT gave Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH Coalition $50,000 and handed out $27,500 to the NAACP. In exchange for those dollars and political support, public-sector unions expect — and demand – that the groups follow the party line. It is why Jackson was out on the streets of Chicago alongside AFT honcho Karen Lewis last year opposing Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s school reform efforts, while the NAACP voted two years earlier to oppose charters.
During the 20th century, public-sector unions were far more welcoming to blacks than their private-sector counterparts. This included the AFT, which was the first union to allow blacks into the rank-and-file. Particularly for college-educated blacks in the American South barred from many professional jobs, public-sector unions were the way to improve their lot and that of their communities.
But these days, the interests of blacks and public-sector unions are less-aligned than they used to be. Especially for young black families in big cities who realize that education and economic empowerment is as key to addressing less-obvious forms of racism as civil rights laws, public-sector unions can often be the biggest obstacles to their goals.
Because young black men are more-likely than whites to end up in prison for longer sentences on drug offenses, blacks are the biggest supporters of sentencing reform. But for unions representing cops and prison guards, who benefit from the jobs created by increases in the number of prisons, sentencing reform is a threat to their jobs.
On education, the divergence is even starker. Sixty-one percent of blacks surveyed last year by Education Next and Harvard University rated public schools in their neighborhoods C or lower, a wider level of dissatisfaction than for the public at large. Blacks are also more-likely to support charters and other forms of school choice. Black celebrities such as former football star Deion Sanders, gospel singer Marvin Sapp, and onetime basketball star Jalen Rose have also become some of the most-prominent operators of charter schools.
As a result, public-sector unions such as AFSCME, NEA and AFT find themselves in confrontations with black organizations and leaders even as they proclaim to be social justice groups fighting for black communities. This became clear four years ago when black and Latino parents of charter school students in New York City, along with prominent school reform advocates such as Geoffrey Canada helped beat back an effort by the AFT’s New York City affiliate (along with the NAACP) to end the Big Apple’s practice of allowing charters to share space with its traditional counterparts in the city’s massive, often half-empty, buildings.
For blacks, AFSCME’s decision to cut off UNCF funding is just the latest admission that they only serve to provide political cover for public-sector union ambitions.
Meanwhile many progressives aren’t all that disconcerted about the AFSCME’s move. For them, especially those who are opposed to school reform, the problems and concerns of blacks only matter when they move in lockstep with their ideology. In fact, they are often the first to engage in the very racism that they often accuse conservatives of doing.
A particularly enlightening incident happened last May when Diane Ravitch, the darling of traditional education defenders, wrote on her eponymous blog that Derrell Bradford, who heads a branch of the school reform group 50CAN, should have gone into “sports or finance or broadcasting.” While Ravitch later revised the piece, she refused to apologize for her blatant race-baiting, and her fellow progressives defended her actions.
Sure, as Rare Editor Jack Hunter has pointed out, conservatives have earned the mistrust of Black America thanks to their insensitivity to their (often-justifiable) concerns. But blacks have also learned long ago that public-sector unions and so-called progressives can be just as condescending.