I fully understand why Tremon Chandler is upset over losing his $500 per month stipend from U.C.S.F. That’s a lot of free money the 25-year old aspiring rap artist was using to pay his studio expenses and music video bills.
Competing in the rap music business is expensive. Video production can run as high as $500 an hour, while recording an actual music demo can add at least another thousand. Chandler, who works as a shift manager at a fast-food restaurant, needed that $500 a month badly.
Unfortunately, the university’s Black Economic Equity Movement (BEEM), which provided the stipend to Chandler and others, lost its funding due to the Trump administration’s anti-DEI initiatives. Without that extra income, Chandler is going to have to figure out another way to pay his music expenses. BEEM has been providing 300 young Black people, in Oakland and San Francisco, with a guaranteed monthly income, “to help [them] overcome the barriers that society has placed in front of them in financial and economic assistance.” But the National Institutes of Health, part of the federal Department of Health and Human Services now run by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., determine that BEEM “no longer effectuates agency policies” and cancelled BEEM’s grant.
Was HHS right?
Yes. I can’t see any way that giving free money to Black people in the form of a guaranteed monthly income is Constitutional or morally justifiable. As the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly pointed out, race-based preference programs are counter to our democracy. I can envision, intellectually, a program that awards free money to poor people, but that would be based on income, not skin color. For U.C.S.F., or Oakland (which had a similar program during the Schaaf administration), to give taxpayer money to people based on their race is an outrageous perversion of legislation.
Schaaf was a member of Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, a group of several dozen U.S. cities that sponsored guaranteed income programs. The group claimed that “mayors across the country are coming together to advocate for a guaranteed income--direct, recurring cash payments--that lifts all of our communities, building a resilient, just America.” But when a program, like BEEM’s, includes only Black recipients, it can hardly claim to lift “all of our communities,” which is what makes such programs so objectionable. Little wonder that HHS took one look at BEEM and decided to shut it down. And besides, what “barriers” has society “placed in front of” people like Chandler? This myth that people of color confront insurmountable “barriers” to success is a pernicious lie. Yes, it can be hard to succeed in America, but it’s not because of one’s skin color.
Let me be clear, I am in no way endorsing DOGE’s sweeping cuts to government agencies and programs. Elon Musk has gone way too far in ending government support of scientific research, park rangers and the like, not to mention Social Security, on which I and tens of millions of Americans depend. But I do favor ending DEI programs that I construe as promoting illegal and immoral racial preferences. It’s all well and good that Tremon Chandler wants to be a rap star: more power to him, and I mean that sincerely. But not on the taxpayers’ dime. If cities want to give free money to people who really need and deserve it, how about nursing students, teachers, EMTs putting themselves through college, air traffic controllers--people with careers that actually benefit humanity? But if you’re asking me to pay for an aspiring rap musician’s fantasies, I say, No, no, no.
Steve Heimoff