In March of 2020, our world changed. Suddenly, 2020 became the most horrible year in living memory as we all found ourselves locked down in our homes. Businesses were forcibly shut down in an effort to combat the COVID-19 virus.

As a result, we’ve been living in a world none of us could have imagined.

I’m not interested in getting into the virus itself. What I do want to talk about is how President-elect Joe Biden has decided to continue to pander to minorities.

It started with his preference to provide vaccine priority to minorities, rather than focusing on risk factors that make far more sense.

That was bad enough. Now, though, Biden is doubling down on his racism. Not only is he willing to let people die in order to protect certain segments of the population—remember, Democrats have been preaching how the virus is about the deadliest thing ever—but now he’s also wanting to only try to help some businesses.

Joe Biden just laid out his vision for trillions more in COVID-19 stimulus spending. The president-elect’s pitch includes a racial twist.

“The price tag will be high,” Biden admitted in a speech on Friday. “Yes, it will be trillions of dollars… [but] if we don’t act now things are going to get much worse. We have to invest now.”

Biden went on to invoke race and racial justice as a defining factor on which he wants to structure his relief efforts.

Biden-Harris Presidential Transition @Transition46

"Our priority will be Black, Latino, Asian, and Native American owned small businesses, women-owned businesses, and finally having equal access to resources needed to reopen and rebuild." — President-elect Biden

January 10th 2021

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"Our priority will be Black, Latino, Asian, and Native American owned small businesses, women-owned businesses, and finally having equal access to resources needed to reopen and rebuild,” the president-elect said. His campaign website states his intention to “Ensure all small business relief efforts are specifically designed to aid businesses owned by Black and Brown people.”

Biden and others who embrace this approach hope to address the real problem of racial inequality. Indeed, the COVID-19 crisis and sweeping government lockdowns have hit minority-owned businesses especially hard. Advocates insist that lingering inequality can only be addressed through policies that specifically treat different racial groups differently.

This comes in the context of the federal government already having spent an astounding $3.5 trillion in taxpayer money on COVID-19 stimulus efforts to date. Many of these initiatives have proven to be fraud-rife and ineffective. Yet Biden, evidently, just thinks the same initiatives need to be more racially-targeted.

The problem with this approach is that when you cannot erase years of inequity by creating all-new inequities. All you’ll create, if you’re lucky, is resentment.

Currently, there are a ton of businesses that are suffering. There are also a number of businesses that aren’t, believe it or not. Some innovated and found new markets such as restaurants that began offering takeout or delivery service rather than exist exclusively on dine-in service. Others were never at any risk in the first place, being able to adjust to telecommuting without missing a beat.

Regardless, some businesses are suffering and some aren’t.

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If the government is going to try and help, then it needs to do so with a certain degree of blindness. Sure, they should assess need, but beyond that, little else should matter. Most especially, race.

This is assuming, of course, that the programs actually accomplish what they’re supposed to accomplish. The last round, as noted in the above-quoted section, was rife with waste, fraud, and abuse. There’s little reason to believe this time would be any different.

Yet on top of that fraud, Biden now wants to introduce race into the mix.

Right now, there’s already enough tension in this country as it is, yet Biden seeks to stoke those tensions still higher by blatantly pandering to a demographic long known to be key to Democratic victory plans.

In other words, Biden’s racially-charged pandering is really a payout to an entire community for voting the right way.

The thing is, people aren’t likely to just roll over and pretend it doesn’t matter. Oh, some will, but those who watch their businesses collapse because they didn’t have the right melanin content in their skin? They’re going to be resentful. It’s not that someone else’s business was saved so much as the fact that theirs wasn’t due to something completely beyond their control.

Right now, a lot of people in the black community continue to harbor resentment fueled in part by past wrongs. How can anyone believe that repeating those mistakes will somehow make anything better?

At best, it’ll simply shift things around. Black Americans will be fine while white Americans are now resentful.

More realistically, though, we’ll now have two groups harboring resentment. After all, you’re not going to just make long-simmering tensions go away with a single program.

But it is enough to create new ones, especially when the stakes are so high.

No, this is racism, just a different flavor of racism. It’s the last thing we need.