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White conservatives nationwide are waging a legal, legislative and administrative attack on minority-owned, minority-led and minority-serving organizations.
The latest example: A federal judge in Texas (appointed by Donald Trump) ruled Tuesday that the Minority Business Development Agency, a federal organization that's helped minority-owned businesses since the Nixon administration, will need to start serving white people as well. The ruling by Judge Mark Pittman followed a lawsuit filed on behalf of white plaintiffs by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, a conservative group.
As The Washington Post reported:
In a 93-page opinion rendered Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge Mark T. Pittman ruled that the Minority Business Development Agency’s presumption that businesses owned by Blacks, Latinos and other minorities are inherently disadvantaged violated the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection. He permanently enjoined the agency’s business centers, which have assisted minority-owned businesses in accessing capital and government contracts, from extending services based on an applicant’s race. “If courts mean what they say when they ascribe supreme importance to constitutional rights, the federal government may not flagrantly violate such rights with impunity,” Pittman wrote. “The MBDA has done so for years. Time’s up.”
“Time’s up.” How cute — and how utterly detached from reality that little quip is.
As I wrote last June, the Supreme Court — by suggesting racism is a thing of the past in its rulings against affirmative action in college campuses admissions and against the Voting Rights Act — has given white people a legal pretext to jettison any guilt they may have harbored over systemic racism. This is a manifestation of white evangelicals seeking absolution of America's racist sins — not through God or good deeds, but through the gavel.
Since those rulings, we’ve seen an effort to roll back racial progress in just about every arena imaginable. Edward Blum, the man who successfully sued college affirmative action into oblivion, has brought another suit before the Supreme Court that seeks to outlaw private philanthropy groups' race-conscious giving. Blum’s organization is also trying to end affirmative action at West Point and other service academies. And it recently filed a lawsuit that claims the Smithsonian’s Latino museum is practicing “pro-Latino discrimination” by offering an internship program geared toward Latinos.
Stephen Miller, the Donald Trump adviser who purports to fight “anti-white bigotry,” is crusading against diversity measures, as well. USA Today reported in December that Miller has filed “about two dozen” so-called reverse discrimination lawsuits, including a successful suit that stopped federal aid from going to minority farmers, a group that has historically been targeted by discriminatory policies. More recently, Miller’s organization filed a lawsuit seeking to thwart efforts by broadcasters and production companies to diversify their writers' rooms.
The federal court ruling out of Texas and the numerous anti-diversity lawsuits nationwide collectively represent a broader right-wing movement against diversity: Conservative politicians are pressuring schools to end diversity, equity and inclusion programs on college campuses; education officials are restricting what school's can teach about racism and discrimination.
The irony of claiming that systemic racism is a thing of the past is that by vigorously targeting Black and other under-represented group's participation in civil society — that is, by prioritizing white people's emotional comfort over genuine equality — these right-wing legal activists have brought that racist "past" into the present. And they've proven it to be just as much a scourge as ever.