A federal judge in Texas has ruled that the U.S. Minority Business Development Agency, founded during the Nixon administration, must avail itself to disadvantaged entrepreneurs of all races and ethnicities, including whites.
The summary judgment rendered on Tuesday by U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman, appointed in 2019 by then-President Donald Trump, was the latest in a recent series of federal court decisions rolling back decades of affirmative action programs aimed at remedying racial discrimination.
Pittman, a judge in the Forth Worth branch of the Northern Texas District, sided with two white businessmen who sued the Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA), a branch of the Commerce Department, last year after being denied benefits on the basis of race.
The plaintiffs were told they were ineligible for agency assistance because they were not members of any of the races or ethnicities included on a list of qualified minorities presumed to be disadvantaged and thus entitled to services, according to the judge’s summary of the case.
I believe you may think you know what it is, but I don’t think you do. Systemic racism is subtle. We likely don’t even recognize a good chunk of it yet. Even if we did, a system that assumes equality of opportunity literally systemically perpetuates the effects of racism.
If a scale has $60 on one side and $100 on the other, you will literally never restore the balance by adding money equally on both sides. The best you can do is obscure the imbalance by adding so much money that the scales start to look balanced from a distance.
Now the value of the money means nothing compared to assets (property, denied to minorities historically through policies like redlining), which will hold their value through inflation. Guess who has all the assets? The side that started with $100… so even that doesn’t work.
Ultimately, there is no way to restore the balance without the $100 side’s feelings getting hurt before because they aren’t getting as much. It’s not like white folks are being told to move out of their home so a black family can move in. Speaking as a white dude, we can stand to suck it up for a bit.
Systemic racism can be subtle. The Chinese version is blatant. I’m absolutely certain that the previous poster knows quite well what blatant state supported systemic racism looks like, they grew up in such a system. I don’t know if that would help or hinder their ability to identify such structures in the subtle ways that the US does it.