Courts

Killing Affirmative Action Hits Another Business Sector

Tough time to start a business.

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business-g49b682630_1920We’ve been covering the backlash against affirmative action in Biglaw, but it is far from the only business reeling from SFFA v. Harvard. The Lone Star State recently provided the next push to make affirmative action a thing of the past. From Bloomberg Law:

A Commerce Department agency for minority-owned businesses must begin serving all races, a federal judge ruled, in the latest courtroom blow to the Biden administration in Texas.

The 55 year-old Minority Business Development Agency violates the US Constitution’s equal protection clause by discriminating against White business owners, Judge Mark T. Pittman, of the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas, concluded, rejecting the Biden administration’s efforts to keep the agency’s mission intact.

“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.”

Can we get a Supreme Court case that addresses root causes of inequality and not attempts to fix them? Take the legalization of marijuana, for example. Weed arrests have been the financial backbone of police departments and prisons for decades now — so much so that there have been carve outs to subsidize police departments that lost revenue from not being able to harass smokers. Black people have disproportionately faced the brunt of weed arrests made during the drug war. For a moment, there was hope that the legalization of weed would be an opportunity for some Black-owned businesses to go legal. That hope was dashed. The legal weed market is overwhelmingly white-owned — 90% of weed industry executives were white in 2021. And weed is just an example — venture capitalists frequently discriminate against Black startups and have more legal protections to boot.

Like it or not, race matters in business. It is cruel to know that the discrimination being targeted isn’t what gave rise to the inequality, but attempts to even out the playing field.

Biden’s Race-Based Minority Business Rules Struck Down (1) [Bloomberg Law]

Earlier: The Affirmative Action Cases Went About As Well As You’d Expect Them To. What Now?

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Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s.  He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.

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