Getting Rid of La Raza

By Mike Gonzalez* at The American Interest

The government should not be in the business of funding ethnic factions, which only reinforce the power of the elites.

Aztlan La Raza

. . . "No less a liberal lion than U.S. Representative Henry Gonzalez of Texas took to the floor of the House on April 22, 1969, to decry the Ford Foundation’s creation of “a very grave problem” in his district. “I cannot accept the belief that racism in reverse is the answer for racism and discrimination,” he said. It is worth quoting Gonzalez at some length, as the dysfunctions he identified remained a fixture of the group:

As deeply as I must respect the intentions of the foundation, I must at the same time say that where it aimed to produce unity, it has so far created disunity. The Ford Foundation believed that the greatest need of this particular minority group [Mexican Americans] was to have some kind of effective national organization…. This good desire may have rested on a false assumption; namely that such a disparate group could, any more than our black brothers or our white ‘Anglo’ brothers, be brought under one large tent.

"La Raza was “invented for the purpose of receiving the grant,” said Gonzalez, and in its first year of existence had “not given any assistance that I know of to bring anybody together,” existing only to “promote the rather odd and I might say generally unaccepted and unpopular views of its directors.”

"And that’s just it. Political scientist Peter Skerry describes groups such as La Raza as participants in a game called “elite network politics.” Even though these networks have “weak community ties,” the groups involved win policy brawls by participating in “a process of specialization and professionalization by which politics become more and more an insiders’ game…a politics increasingly turned in upon itself and insulated from the surrounding social flux.”

"In La Raza’s case, that meant a turnstile relationship with the Obama Administration that the president himself boasted about." . . .

*Pointedly added.