Yeah, sure, racism is the result of a herd mentality. Rand was, of course, Jewish, which she concealed behind a pen name, perhaps because she dissociated herself from the Jewish religion, perhaps because she resented the fact that someone else named her and she preferred to name herself.
I remember that after the Civil Rights Bill passed, there were those "We reserve the Right to Refuse Service to Anyone" signs in nearly every non-chain restaurant in Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma. I don't recall seeing any of them anywhere West of Santa Rosa in NM, but they were all over WV as late as the mid-70's. I do not recall ever witnessing anyone thrown out of any restaurant or reading about such an incident, but there were few Blacks dining in such places, and more take-outs among Blacks and Whites. Rand believes that property rights give the owner the right to discriminate as however he sees fit.
You don't see those signs anymore. Non-chain restaurants are much less common. The chain stores like McDonald's, KFC, BK and such may not have food that is as good, but they DO serve food that is predictable both in what you get and what you pay, and that is probably a greater factor than their not posting the "We reserve the Right.." signs.
I suppose that there are still people who still think their rights have been violated because they are barred from discriminating. They still have signs that say "No shoes, no shirt, no service", but I don't see this as a Civil Rights issue. It is safe to assume that anyone who has driven to the place has something shoelike or shirtlike available that they could put on.
Hegel said that every action in history provokes a reaction. Rand is a sort of a mini anti-Lenin. Like Lenin, she was not Russian and was an atheist. In every other way she was his opposite, except in terms of success. Lenin's ideas ruled the Soviet Union for over 50 years, Rand's ideas have never ruled any country and never will. Pure Randism was something that only Rand and perhaps her husband Frank O'Connor were experts at: she was such a hideous ideologue and monstrous wet blanket that she turned off nearly everyone capable of independent thought. The reality is that John Galt, Daphne Taggert and Hank Reardon are only cartoonish fictional characters: not even Rand was up to being a Daphne Taggert: she was all for free love until her lover Nathaniel Brandon decided to have a fling. Then she erupted in a volcanic fit of jealousy.
In this essay, she invents a straw man (Negroes, meaning all Negroes, demand 25% of the jobs because they are 25% of the population). There may have been a few Black people who made this claim, but by saying that all Blacks demand this, she is collectivising them just as Stalin collectivised the Jews, the Chechens, the Koreans, and deported them away from where they were causing him trouble.
There are LOTS of people who have a better understanding of race relations than Ayn Rand. Despite the fact that Rand claimed her ideas were universal, she left Los Angeles, which was much more diverse, to live in Manhattan, where most of her neighbors and all of her main disciples were of the same Slavic country Jewish atheist persuasion. She detested anyone that did not think the way she thought, and turned on people like Buckley and even the ideologues at the Cato Institute.
