As President Joe Biden pursues initiatives he announced last week to “help narrow the racial wealth gap,” he should heed a late-May reminder from the 6th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals that preferential treatment based on race is presumptively invalid.
This is as it should be. It is right and just that the courts, in the name of justice, should strike down racial preferences, a pernicious, do-gooding racism sweeping schools, corporations, and the media. It treats all American experience through the lens of race. It would be even worse if the racialism embedded in so-called “critical race theory” were backed by government force.
Biden is right to want all segments of society to prosper. If crafted without racial criteria, his initiatives to help jump-start poor and disadvantaged businesses and improve home values in struggling neighborhoods would be welcome. But the White House announcement focuses constantly on “racial disparities,” and the clear implication is that its proposed solutions will involve racial preferences.
That’s where the 6th Circuit ruling comes in. In the 2-1 May 27 decision in Vitolo v. Guzman, the court held that the government may not award coronavirus relief money on the basis of race and sex.
The Small Business Administration had been doling out $29 billion in COVID response grants to restaurant owners under rules that allowed the money to go only to restaurants owned at least 51% by women or nonwhite proprietors. Writing for the court, Judge Amul Thapar explained that Supreme Court precedent (not to mention simple fairness) allows such preferences only to serve a “compelling” state interest, a term of art with three strict criteria. A mere vague desire to remedy past discrimination is insufficient to permit the government itself to favor or disfavor otherwise eligible citizens just because they are white.
By institutionalizing government-enforced discrimination, the SBA was illogically offending both the Constitution and fairness. Antonio Vitolo and his wife, who is Hispanic, each own half of a restaurant, meaning that it is only 50% rather than 51% female and Hispanic-owned. Thus, on the basis of a racial distinction involving highly dubious mathematical significance, the Vitolos were denied access to the grant. If Vitolo had sold a mere 1% of his ownership to another woman or Latino, the restaurant would have received federal monies.
The absurdity of the arbitrary 51% ethnic cutoff is manifest. Also absurd, as Thapar noted, is the SBA’s policy granting “preferences for Pakistanis but not Afghans; Japanese but not Iraqis; Hispanics but not Middle Easterners.” The resultant ethnic spoils system is the very definition of invidious racial discrimination.
If the Biden administration tries to appeal the 6th Circuit decision and revive the SBA’s flagrantly discriminatory practices, it will surely lose at a Supreme Court whose chief justice, John Roberts, has famously insisted that the “way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
Today, a race-obsessed pathology is infecting institutions that wield cultural power. Under the false banner of “anti-racism,” those spreading the pathology treat our entire national experience as an ineluctable battle between “white privilege” and the perpetual victimhood of ethnic minorities (notably excluding East Asians). In this telling, all whites are inherently racist, stained by the racialist equivalent of original sin, and must become second-class citizens as a matter of policy in order to establish “equity.” Meanwhile, no black or Hispanic person can ever possibly be racist, no matter how great and obvious his animus against whites (or Asians, for that matter) on the basis of their race.
This doctrine posits that whites lack the ability to repent, atone for, or learn from their collective guilt. They can be neither improved nor educated. According to a lecturer feted at the Yale University School of Medicine, there is, in fact, a “Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind,” as if all white people were incapable of individual thought or action and were, rather, a single, hopelessly corrupted, conglomerate organism.
This crackpot ideology embraced by academia and the Democratic Party is psychopathic. Because it discriminates only on the basis of race, its answer is to reward and punish indiscriminately. Its aim is to abolish basic realities such as individual free will and replace them with a collective guilt, collective victimhood, and collective responsibility that bears no resemblance to the equal justice for which this nation stands.
The new racialists, like the worst bigots of old, reject the truth that race is not a marker of guilt or innocence. The courts must now intervene to prevent the resurrection and institutionalization of this ideology. Failure to do so would place a national seal of approval on fashionable but loathsome racism and discrimination.
