Big: Federal court rules that federal agency serving minority businesses alone is

Is another brick coming off the wall of the race-grievance industrial complex?

That’s what the Washington Post reports, without admitting it, in an important federal court ruling shutting down biased, counterproductive racial preferences in federal government “help” to small businesses.

According to the Post:

A federal judge in Texas has ordered a 55-year-old federal agency created to help minority-owned businesses to open its doors to all races, a ruling that potentially imperils dozens of government programs that also presume racial minorities are inherently disadvantaged.

In a 93-page opinion rendered Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Mark T. Pittman ruled that the Minority Business Development Agency’s presumption that businesses owned by Blacks, Latinos and other minorities are 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. The MBDA has done so for years. Time’s up,” wrote Pittman, who was appointed to the bench by President Donald Trump in 2019.

The Post gets credit for reporting the who-what-where neutrally in its opening paragraphs. It also makes an interesting observation about this ruling being a knock-on effect of the Supreme Court’s rulings against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina over its affirmative action shutdowns, which the ruling judge did indeed cite.

What it doesn’t do is discuss any of the particulars of the case — that of COVID shutdown-battered small businesses trying to get back on their feet with “grant opportunities, financial sourcing assistance, strategic business consulting, and other resources,” and being told ‘no’ because only minority-owned firms could get such services. being underprivileged and all.

The small business owners were all white, one a doctor who founded a lifestyle clinic, one a handicapped Romanian immigrant who founded a project management company, and the third the owner of an architectural firm.

According to the actual ruling, which I had to read just to try to understand what the story was about, here was one business’s experience:

The MBDA seemed perfect, as its vision statement says the Agency exists to catalyze “[e]conomic prosperity for all American business enterprises.”  But unbeknownst to Plaintiffs, there was a catch. As its name suggests, the MBDA doesn’t serve “all American business enterprises,” but rather “all American minority business enterprises.” But even that’s not the whole picture. The Agency uses a codified list of preferred races/ethnicities to determine who gets benefits and who doesn’t. The Agency presumes anyone from the listed groups is “socially or economically disadvantaged” and is thus entitled to services. Anyone outside those groups—white or otherwise—is presumptively not disadvantaged and thus not entitled to benefits. 

You really needed to check one of their boxes or else no help for you:

“listing of racial groups that the agency serves.”

Here’s what you get if you do:

…“access to contracts, access to capital, training, and other services helpful for sustaining and growing business.” 

From the ruling, here’s who the federal agency says they are:

“The Department of Commerce’s Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA) is the lead federal agency dedicated to assisting minority business enterprises (MBEs) in overcoming social and economic disadvantages that have limited their participation in the nation’s free enterprise system.”3 Founded by President Richard Nixon as the Office of Minority Business Enterprise (“OMBE”),4 the Agency has existed in several historical permutations—all dedicated to “the growth and global competitiveness of the minority business community.”5 Made permanent in 2021, the Agency now enjoys the authority and scope of a full executive agency under the leadership of

Defendants Raimondo and Cravins, who report to Defendant Biden.6 With a $550 million appropriation through fiscal year 2025, the Agency operates in over thirty-three states plus Puerto Rico, providing resources for MBEs and mobilizing business-development initiatives.7 …”

Which seems kind of a stretch.

The judge pointed out that under this agency’s framework, billionaire Oprah Winfrey could help herself to all the cash she could get, being disadvantaged and all. That’s Oprah with all the white elitists on her staff and never mind that many white-owned businesses have many minority employees, some of them have a majority of their employees minorities, providing jobs in the inner cities.

Meanwhile, the humble Romanian immigrant, who probably deals with people making fun of his accent and maybe his handicap, gets nothing, nothing at all, owing to the color of his skin and never mind that many Romanians are pretty dark-skinned anyway. The Romanian, in any case, didn’t want special privileges, he just wanted equal treatment like he didn’t get back in once-communist Romania, and like he expected he would get in the land of the free after picking himself up by his bootstraps, overcoming his handicap, and building a business. The Haitian immigrant at the business next to his gets it, but he does not. You can see how vivid this problem would be to him.

Which brings up another problem with it: The system is based on skin color and ethnicity, not actual disadvantage. The only thing that mattered in what was described in the ruling was ethnicity or skin color, and there was no effort to identify who’s a disadvantaged minority and who’s the upper class Caribbean or Mexican immigrant who came to the U.S. yesterday.

What’s more, goosing the system to help minority businesses from the huge federal government apparat with all its contracts pretty well amounts to a joke, given that the feds are most of the economy these days and they aren’t supposed to be discriminating in the first place. Whites are effectively shut out of the contractor market from the nation’s business employer, so they have the scraps of the smaller private sector to compete in amongst themselves and minority businesses compete in those, too. It makes little sense and some states are starting to see that it’s costing them and loosening those minority-owned business requirements so that they have a decent-sized pool of applicants to search for the best deal for the government from. The judge emphasized that he could see the violations of the equal protections clause all over this agency, which started out as a mini-project by Richard Nixon and morphed into a huge entrenched federal agency by 2021 with a $550 million budget.

The other problem with this, not cited in the ruling as far as I’ve read but known very well to ordinary Americans:  the Elizabeth Warren problem, that of whites fraudulently making themselves out to be blacks, Indians, Mexicans and other minority nationalities in order to get access to this kind of funding and benefits, or else putting their black brother-in-law at the top of the ownership structure in a straw-man way, which is hardly what is meant by black-owned business. We see it all the time because the system is skewed that way, and people of all races respond to incentives. Equal protection? Only for those whites who fake it.

The Post didn’t bother to quote anyone from the winning plaintiff side of this case, it only sought out a series of leftist law professors who cried henny penny, upset that the racial grievance group complex was going down. 

The Post reported that there will be big-dollar appeals, but they’ve got to get through other Texas judges first and then the Supreme Court. It may mean that this is a turning point. Equal protection needs to be equal protection, not carve-outs- and set-asides for people who are hardly underprivileged, the way Latin America has or in the case of Chile, used to have, rendering the business community inert. This is a very positive development for American competitiveness and freedom, this end to reverse discrimination. The clear-eyed Texas judge should be praised. Bit by bit, we will get back to judging people on their character, not their color, as Martin Luther King, Jr. Like President Trump, it’s coming.

Image: Pixabay / Pixabay License