I dunno, Iain. I yield to no-one in my admiration for Booker T. Washington; but that was then, this is now. What need is there, really, for these ethnocentric lobbies? Are black Americans ever going to stop wallowing in victimology and say: “Okay, there are no more obstacles to our advance than there are to any other group’s. What do we need Black This and Black That for any more?”
I might grant that the National Black Chamber of Commerce do some good; but I’m sure they do far more harm than good, net-net, by their relentless emphasis on black separateness and racial preference. And if they are conservative in supporting entrepreneurialism, they are conservative in nothing else. They were among the signatories to a letter sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee strongly advocating the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. They showed up here on a list of signatories opposed to the 2005 border security bill along with usual suspects like MALDEF, LULAC, and La Raza (“The Race”).
Their actual mission statement, by the way, reads as follows:
To economically empower and sustain African American communities through entrepreneurship and capitalistic activity within the United States and via interaction with the Black Diaspora.
So presumably if an NBCC member company has contract bids for services from (A) a Ghanaian firm, and (B) a Swedish one, they will prefer the Ghanaian bid on racial grounds. If a North Dakota contractor named Nykvist & Sons did the converse thing, we’d never hear the last of it.