OPINION:
When people and groups show you who they really are, believe them.
After this week, there can be no doubt that the once-vaunted NAACP couldn’t care less about Black advancement or success.
The group, in response to the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais and subsequent redistricting efforts in several states, is facing backlash for encouraging Black athletes to boycott SEC and ACC schools.
For those who don’t follow sports, the SEC and ACC college conferences are home to many of the nation’s top programs, including Alabama, the University of Tennessee, Georgia Tech, Texas A&M, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Oklahoma, Duke, Clemson and Florida State.
The NAACP’s “Out of Bounds” campaign asks the nation’s top football and basketball prospects being recruited to “withhold their commitments until the states in question restore fair congressional maps and meaningful Black representation” and for current student-athletes to consider transferring.
This gambit is more proof that the American left cares more about its ideology than people. For decades, the NAACP has stood by while cities rotted, Black-on-Black crime took tens of thousands of lives, schools in Black neighborhoods cratered and fatherless households became the norm.
The group became little more than the perennial attack dog of White liberals aiming to beat Republicans at the ballot box and advocating for more welfare spending.
By every objective measure, the NAACP is a failed organization. Now, it wants young Black athletes who work tirelessly to have a chance to play at a top-tier school to surrender that opportunity — and the education, connections and careers that come with it — for the sake of driving a warped view of America that seeks to institutionalize certain types of discrimination.
Calls for the boycott again show that in the NAACP’s view, Black success, even on the playing field, must take a back seat to the organization’s divisive political agenda, which is wholly out of step with the Constitution and Black empowerment.
Then again, these are the same people who believe that Black Americans are too unsophisticated to obtain or present a free government ID to vote.
Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act prohibits racial discrimination, but for decades, Democrats have attempted to use the law to perpetuate that discrimination for their own political purposes. As Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote in his excellent majority opinion in Callais, “Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was designed to enforce the Constitution — not collide with it.”
The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which preceded the Voting Rights Act, also made clear that discrimination based on race is barred in employment, public spaces and government programs.
You simply can’t have it both ways. The left, which bases its philosophy and strategy around divisive, racial politics, cannot say on one hand that we should have racial equality but then create so-called Black congressional districts.
To be sure, the ruling in the Callais case has sent leftists into panic mode, though after the court’s ruling against affirmative action in the landmark 2023 Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard case, it should have been no surprise.
In that ruling, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. stated a student “must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual — not on the basis of race.”
That is the real intention of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. We remove race from consideration, encourage a more color-blind society, permit legal remedies for discrimination and move the nation toward the vision of our Founders where all men and women are treated equally.
The NAACP, an organization funded by groups dominated by White leftists, including George Soros and his Open Society Foundation and the Ford Foundation, is now flailing about to rescue its strategy of keeping Blacks on the modern welfare plantation.
Its attempts to manipulate these young Black athletes are an insult to their intelligence, abilities and dreams for success both on and off the field. All Americans should be appalled at the grotesque nature of this ploy.
• Tom Basile is the host of “America Right Now” on Newsmax TV.
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