MIKE GONZALEZ: Getting Rid Of La Raza.

Ever heard of La Raza? Probably not, but you and other taxpayers are funding it.

We shouldn’t be. Along with public broadcasters, environmental organizations, and other entities that use taxpayer money to keep insider networks in power, ethnic identity groups should be taken off public support. These movements have for decades lived off the government only to keep enlarging it, maintaining power in the hands of a self-dealing bureaucratic elite increasingly unaccountable and disconnected from outside society.

La Raza—recently renamed UnidosUS—is a case in point. Set up in 1968 with a grant from the Ford Foundation (which also helped create other movements), La Raza has always been more boardroom than barrio. It depends for its survival not on grassroots, but on government contracts and kickbacks, and grants from foundations and the corporations it can shake down.

This corporate and government coziness doesn’t mean that La Raza hasn’t been a divisive force in society. On the contrary, it’s been so from the beginning, and the balkanization it has caused has benefited elites.

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.

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