Earlier this year four small business owners sued Comcast for excluding them from a program that would provide “resources and tools to elevate your business,” such as production and media consulting advice, under a contract that grantees would enter with the broadcast and cable conglomerate. Recipients could be awarded up to $10,000 each under the program’s guidelines.
The reason why the plaintiffs weren’t allowed to participate in the program? They are caucasian.
Comcast’s small business training scholarship is just one of many mega-corporation initiatives that have blossomed following the nationwide rioting over the death of George Floyd, who was kneeled on for several minutes by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in May 2020. The riots – condoned by Corporate America both subtly and overtly – were followed by tens of millions of dollars in “white-guilt” donations (according to Patrisse Cullors) to Black Lives Matter-themed organizations.
It didn’t end there for ESG-minded executives and company boards. They have sought to outdo each other ever since in racing to implement so-called “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” measures across their operations and management. The goal: Appear to be as minimally white as possible.
Examples:
- Pfizer offers multiple internships, a paid-for master’s degree, and years of employment through its “Breakthrough Fellowship” program, where whites and Asian-Americans need not apply. “This Pfizer program is so flagrantly illegal I seriously wonder how it passed internal review by its general counsel,” a civil-rights attorney told the Washington Free Beacon.
- Investment giant BlackRock announced in June 2020 that it would commit to increasing its black workforce by 30 percent by 2024. “We need to do better,” wrote CEO Larry Fink in a LinkedIn post at the time, about the planned quotas.
- Both Google and Microsoft cap the number of whites and Asian-Americans that universities can nominate for their respective research fellowships. Both offer significant stipends; Microsoft’s is $42,000. “If a university chooses to nominate more than two students,” Google says, “the third and fourth nominees must self-identify as a woman, Black/African descent, Hispanic/Latino/Latinx, Indigenous, and/or a person with a disability.”
- A white woman, Crystal Bolduc, is suing Amazon over a program that offers $10,000 only to “Black, Latinx and Native American entrepreneurs” for their own delivery start-ups. The tech retail giant also runs a “Black Business Accelerator” under which black-owned businesses get a $500 credit towards operational costs. “Ms. Bolduc will not apply to become an Amazon delivery service partner until Amazon eliminates this racially discriminatory policy,” her legal complaint says.
- The Free Enterprise Project at the National Center for Public Policy Research, a shareholder in Starbucks, is suing the multinational coffee chain for setting quotas tied to executive compensation incentives, to hire anybody who is not white. “All Americans have the same civil rights,” said FEP director Scott Shepard. “Making employment decisions based on race violates those civil rights. Officers and directors who act on such discriminatory policies are violating their fiduciary duties to their shareholders and should be held accountable for those actions.”
- Bank of America has started a zero-down payment, zero-closing cost mortgage program in select cities, limited only to black and Hispanic communities in a reverse-redlining discrimination scheme. One example shows targeted “Opportunity Zones” in Charlotte, N.C. The mega-bank also announced a minority-targeted Small Business Down Payment Program to enable “disadvantaged” business owners to purchase commercial real estate through grants. “If Bank of America were to announce a special lending program only for people buying homes in white or Asian neighborhoods, the law would rightly prohibit it. It prohibits it here too,” said Gail Heriot of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights to Carolina Journal.
Virtue-signaling corporate leaders try to make their customers and shareholders believe they only want fairness and equal opportunity for all. But there are people in other parts of the country who didn’t choose poverty, and are now discriminated against because of their skin pigment, like rural Appalachia, and middle American communities hollowed out by NAFTA.
The new racist reparations administered by “woke” Corporate America will not make anybody whole.
