PayPal Awards $5m in Grants to Black Community

• Author: Bryan Miller
• Posted: 2023-11-11

Black Lives Matter is a very polarizing movement. Whether you support them or don't, one thing upon which everyone can agree is that some of the members take things a little too far. One way they take things too far, according to many critics, doesn't even involve the riots or harm done; rather, it's about a message they're pushing out. They're saying that "nobody cares about black people," as every corporation in the west scrambles to paint "Black Lives Matter" on their logos. Famous YouTubers like Buddy Brown note that, "It's impossible to say that nobody cares about [your cause] when every single donation today is being handed out specifically to your cause." PayPal is the latest corporation to donate specifically to the black community and to Black Lives Matter, with $5 million in grants.

The news today out of San Jose, California, 9/24, is that PayPal Holdings, Inc., a corporation worth billions of dollars, is spreading out $5 million in grant money among 20 separate nonprofit organizations that are dedicated to supporting Black Lives Matter or minority communities in general. A large portion of these grants will also go specifically to black-owned businesses to help with their recovery due to the effects of the global virus pandemic.

Though for PayPal, this is only a drop in the bucket of what they have pledged to give to the black community. All told, PayPal has announced that they will eventually give out $530 million in grants to black-owned businesses and to various community organizations fighting for supposed equality in black communities. Dozens of other large corporations are doing the same, and is estimated that Black Lives Matter has spurred the donation of over $10 billion this year alone.

The issue here, like most minority-based charities historically, is that the people raising the money always seem to drive nicer cars and live in nicer houses, while the people who supposedly need the money don't get very much of it. We witnessed this around 20 years ago, when tens of billions of dollars were donated to Haiti, yet the Haitians ended up with none of that money. The people who were in charge of overseeing the charities became rich and famous. Wyclef Jean, formerly of the hip-hop group "Fugees," was indicted for theft, while the Clintons, America's most powerful political family, were also suspected of misappropriating funds from these charities.

PayPal's CEO Dan Shulman claims that their goal is to strengthen black-owned businesses and help them pull through this crisis, along with helping assist in achieving social justice for black-specific causes in the United States. Time will tell whether or not this money actually makes its way into these communities, but organizations like PayPal do believe that their hearts are in the right place and that they're doing the right thing.

Critics Have Had Enough

In mainstream media, via print and television media, it's hard to find any criticism of these measures presented to the public. And it's been like that for a long time. After all, according to the vast majority of mainstream media, Hillary Clinton was a lock for the presidency in 2016. So, to hear media tell it, everyone supports Black Lives Matter and a fight for social justice. Though on alternative media, people feel a lot differently. From the aforementioned Buddy Brown to Ben Shapiro, Tim Pool and Carl Benjamin and hundreds of other independent news sources, propping up Black Lives Matter with all of this money is the worst thing that can ever happen.

"Say you give these organizations billions of dollars because they believe [Breonna Taylor's} death was racism," says Benjamin. "Okay, so what do you do the next time, and the time after, and the time after? People always die under suspicious circumstances. Do we give people billions of dollars every time just to hope things go away?"

And that's the crux of the issue for critics. They don't believe that this money is about justice, or about helping businesses. They believe this is "hush money," so to speak, to hopefully stop the looting and rioting while also ingratiating these brands to a new class of consumer.

The fact of the matter is that there are hundreds of corporations out there offering grants specifically to black businesses and organizations, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars in 2020 alone. We'll have to wait and see if these places are actually getting this money.