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…
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