"Problem Profiteers" Have a Long and Sordid History

The racial divide in the United States is wider than it has ever been. The vast majority of Americans are not racists. They sympathize with Black Americans who have been treated unjustly. The history of Black suppression is real. It’s been a slow road to make right past injustices.

Unfortunately, the Black Lives Matter movement has hijacked much of the goodwill that has been growing in the past few decades and turned race into a political club. It’s getting to the point that anything and everything is racist. Requiring that students show their work in math is said to racist. Even insisting on getting the right answer is now racist. Really?

Showing an ID is racist? Come on. To do any business in the United States requires an ID. Try to cash a check, fly on an airplane, drive a car without identification. And yet, requiring people to have an ID to vote is racist since some people find it difficult to get an ID. Aren’t there white people who find it difficult to get a free ID in Georgia? “New polling shows that a large majority supports voter ID laws that require individuals to show a photo identification before voting, including almost 70% of black voters.” (Source)

Exploiting race for political and financial advantage has a long history. Black “leaders” like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have made their living by promoting black victimhood and white guilt. Jesse Jackson has been shaking down corporations using threats and boycotts against big-name corporations. Patrisse Khan-Cullors, the co-founder of Black Lives Matter, “went on a real estate buying binge, snagging four high-end homes for $3.2 million in the US alone, according to property records.” (Source)

Booker T. Washington (1865–1915) warned of such people within the black community in his 1911 book My Larger Education. He described them as “problem profiteers”:

There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs – partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.

Washington could have had in view, although writing more than a hundred years ago, black people who rail against a black conservative like the late Herman Cain. Cain didn’t present himself as a victim, and this disturbed people like Al Sharpton. Cain lived at a time when there were “colored” water fountains, segregated schools and neighborhoods, and racial discrimination that few people today can imagine. If anyone had a right to play the victim card, it was Cain. He didn’t feel sorry for himself. He stayed out of trouble, worked hard, and made something of himself without the help of a cadre of “poverty pimps.” Cain was the antithesis of the Democrat Party and 90 percent of blacks who support it.

Washington continues with a story that encapsulates what is wrong with so many black “leaders” and their guilt-ridden white supporters. Those victimizing blacks are other blacks:

A story told me by a coloured man in South Carolina will illustrate how people sometimes get into situations where they do not like to part with their grievances. In a certain community there was a coloured doctor of the old school, who knew little about modern ideas of medicine, but who in some way had gained the confidence of the people and had made considerable money by his own peculiar methods of treatment. In this community there was an old lady who happened to be pretty well provided with this world’s goods and who thought that she had a cancer. For twenty years she had enjoyed the luxury of having this old doctor treat her for that cancer. As the old doctor became — thanks to the cancer and to other practice — pretty well-to-do, he decided to send one of his boys to a medical college. After graduating from the medical school, the young man returned home, and his father took a vacation. During this time the old lady who was afflicted with the “cancer” called in the young man, who treated her; within a few weeks the cancer (or what was supposed to be the cancer) disappeared, and the old lady declared herself well.

When the father of the boy returned and found the patient on her feet and perfectly well, he was outraged. He called the young man before him and said:

“My son, I find that you have cured that cancer case of mine. Now, son, let me tell you something. I educated you on that cancer. I put you through high school, through college, and finally through the medical school on that cancer. And now you, with your new ideas of practicing medicine, have come here and cured that cancer. Let me tell you, son, you have started all wrong. How do you expect to make a living practicing medicine in that way?”

I am afraid that there is a certain class of race problem solvers who don’t want the patient to get well because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public.

If the patient gets well, an entire industry of victimhood will get cancer and die. This would be the best thing for the black community. Until blacks throw off the shroud of victimhood, they will be at the mercy of “doctors” who treat a self-inflicted cancer that only makes the doctors rich.

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