Dearest Reader,
Circa fall 2002, there were two cases in litigation accusing University of Michigan Law School of discrimination against two white women in a challenge to affirmative action. Gratz v. Bollinger & Grutter v. Bollinger both found their way to the Supreme Court which ultimately ruled against Jennifer Gratz and Barbara Grutter in June 2003. A key statement from the Court was “the nation’s future depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure to the ideas and mores of students as diverse as this Nation of many peoples.” The irony is that white women statistically were the greatest recipients of affirmative action, but in just a few short years, by 2023, affirmative action would be gone. By ending legal protection for taking race into account in college admissions, as one factor among many, a chilling effect began over diversity initiatives across the country in every industry. Just this week an Atlanta based venture capital company, called the Fearless Fund, lost an appeal to halt a case against the fund in violation of the 1866 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race when enforcing contracts. Two years ago this case would have no merit, but now the gloves are off as conservative activists strategically target black women in their fight to make America separate and unequal (again).
The Fearless Fund is an Atlanta based venture capital (VC) company dedicated to providing capital for women of color entrepreneurs. The company is led CEO Arian Simone in partnership with fund advisors Rodney Sampson and Tracey Gray (serial entrepreneur, Ayana Parsons co-founded the fund in 2019 and continues to uplift the work though no longer with the company). The need to support women of color entrepreneurs is a real one. For example, according to the Brookings Institute:
“In 2020, Black people represented 14.2% of all Americans but only 2.4% of all employer-firm owners. Latino or Hispanic people represented 18.7% of the population and 6.5% of employer-firm owners, while Asian Americans represented 6% of the population and 10.6% of employer-firm owners. [Black-women-owned] employer businesses increased by 18.14% between 2017 and 2020—outpacing [new] women-owned businesses (9.06%) and Black-owned businesses (13.64%).”
Indeed, Black women are considered the fastest-growing group of business owners and yet they receive only 0.34% of VC money as noted by the World Economic Forum in 2021. However, for all women entrepreneurs, the rate of investment was nominally higher, at 1.9% as of 2022. Meanwhile white women receive 79% of that 1.9% in seed funding. According to Fortune magazine, in 2022 there was a total $215.9 billion in venture capital invested in business that year, but black founders overall received just 1% of VC. After the George Floyd protests of 2020 some $850 million to $1.2 billion in VC investments were directed towards Black-founded startups. By 2022, venture capital investment towards black founders plummeted 45%.
Although VC has been dropping overall, it’s disproportionately affecting black founders and the truth is, this trend reflects years of underinvestment that anomalously spiked for a year in 2020—when white guilt was at a high. And yet, Black woman-owned business generate $100 billion in revenue annually for the US economy. So why does this ambitious, successful demographic of business owners receive a pittance in financial investment? As Fearless Fund CEO Arian Simone asserts, there are structural barriers to getting capital for women of color “beyond racism and sexism. There is something called ‘proximity.’ The investors in the venture capital field, 92% of them are white males.” Simone strongly believes that “if we can diversify the investors, we can diversify the investments.”
Before the elimination of affirmative action by the majority conservative Supreme Court, this lawsuit against The Fearless Fund would be considered outrageous and dismissed as racist, or at least a violation of First Amendment Rights for the company. But in our current draconian legal swamp, this case could very well have a devastating impact on all manner of diversity initiatives across the country.
The non-profit organization American Alliance for Equal Rights who brought the case against The Fearless Fund is led by conservative Edward Blum. Blum has a long history of attacking diversity initiatives and honed in on The Fearless Fund as a vulnerable domino he can tip over to undermine DEI in corporate America and beyond. This week, two of three judges in federal appeals court (Trump appointees vs. a lone Obama appointee) sided with Blum in a 2 to 1 decision. Although The Fund has pledged to keep litigating in court, as of now their grant program is suspended.
It is no coincidence that black women, in particular, are being targeted. The Fearless Fund is led by black women though it serves women of color, more broadly. Black women are a threat to the ongoing backlash against diversity initiatives because we are so ambitious and successful. Black women have been leaders of civil rights as long as this country has existed. Black women move society forward, consistently inventing and implementing ideas across industries that create space for themselves and by extension everyone else. Nevertheless, as Malcolm X once said, “The most disrespected person in America is the Black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the Black woman. The most neglected person in America is the Black woman…”
Black women represent change literally and figuratively, so by targeting black women, who are uniquely vulnerable because of racism, sexism and systemic barriers, it sends a message not to rock the boat to everyone else. So just as the upliftment of black women correlates to greater equity in this structurally racist society, the opposite is also true—targeting black women indicates rising inequality across the board. As seen in VC spending data, Black women’s leadership in industry in clear, to the tune of $100 billion annually. Yet this community achieves success time and again with less than 1% of capital investment. This makes black women formidable opponents and speaks to the rash of black women being attacked in this moment as conservatives struggle to halt the sands of time.
As I’ve detailed in previous articles like The Trial of Claudine Gay and The DEI Boogeyman: How DEI is Weaponized Against Dissent, Christian conservative reporter and activist Christopher Rufo is a major catalyst behind nationwide anti-diversity efforts beginning with his so-called reporting. In 2023, Gov. Ron DeSantis invited Rufo to serve as a member of the Board of Trustees of New College of Florida. Now a sitting board member in higher education, Rufo’s “theories” on DEI have shifted towards implementation as he unleashes an anti-diversity agenda on students. Rufo’s reporting gained many admirers during the the 2020 George Floyd uprisings and seized on the fears of conservative white America (by evangelizing his own) making him a prophet, of sorts, for the “anti-woke” warriors of America.
By painting critical race theory or CRT as an existential threat to white identity, Rufo turned CRT (a graduate level, legal theory that encourages an intersectional analysis of race in society) into a slur against people of color. Subsequent to his success demonizing CRT, Rufo set his sights on diversity, equity and inclusion or DEI. These programs have existed for years, but became popular after the 2020 murder of George Floyd—particularly as many businesses and other institutions struggled to create harmony amidst a global outcry to address unequal treatment of black people. DEI is essentially any institutional program or initiative with a mandate to celebrate difference, strive to create equal access/opportunity to redress systemic issues and cultivate greater inclusion of community members (staff, students, employees, aid recipients, executives, etc.) within said institution and society overall.
Rufo weaponized DEI as the journalist who “broke the story” about Dr. Claudine Gay, who was president of Harvard at the time and remains a tenured professor. Rufo claimed Gay had plagiarized some of her work (which was hyperbole and she also revised any citation errors) to damage her credibility. Furthermore, Rufo has ignited a trend of anonymous smears against black academics for plagiarism. By targeting a prominent black woman, Rufo found the perfect scapegoats for white supremacist grievance. Even before Gay was targeted, renowned African-American law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw who coined the term “intersectionality” and helped develop CRT became a punching bag for the right.
Under pressure from all sides, Gay resigned. By targeting and vanquishing the second women and first black person to lead Harvard University, Rufo made use of entrenched racist and sexist ideas regarding competence to lead. Imagine, after the election of the first black president of the United States, conservatives became so panicked by Barack Obama’s competence to lead that they are literally returning to laws from the 1800s to halt progress on issues of race, gender and class in America. I think Rufo fancies himself a cultural strategist or social architect, similar to convicted felon Steve Bannon who is about to serve a 4 month stint in jail. These men are, in fact, totally elitist but they project a kind of “man of the people” aesthetic to trojan horse all many of racist, sexist, and classist ideas.
Downstream of characters like Rufo are people with deep pockets and nutty ideas like hedge fund manager Bill Ackman. Ackman is worth $9.3 billion according the Forbes (several billion more than when I last wrote about him) and donated millions to Harvard, his alma mater, before becoming the main torch bearer of the anti-DEI movement. Ackman has gone as far to say that DEI on college campuses is anti-capitalist and racist (against white people) plus made a pledge to tackle ‘problems with how our media operates’ (signaling media manipulation). Recently, he may have had a hand in the University of North Carolina (UNC) essentially shuttering their DEI programs citing concerns for “public safety” relative to anti-war protests on campus. We know for certain that Ackman made a donation of $10,000 to a UNC fraternity who fought to ‘defend’ the American flag against pro-Palestine students. UNC’s $2.3 million DEI budget was subsequently shifted to policing on campus.
Turning to the crusade to dismantle affirmative action, the former ultimate safeguard against inequality; is a man on a mission named Edward Blum. A former financial investor, Blum joined the crusade to end affirmative action in 2003 after Gratz v. Bollinger & Grutter v. Bollinger failed to unmoor affirmative action. Fascinatingly, Blum actually considers himself a civil rights activist (arguably, Rufo does as well) insisting that the objectives of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act and affirmative action have been met (eye roll!) and these laws are now doing more harm than good.
Blum’s outlook is much like Jennifer Gratz and Barbara Grutter, the two white women who sued the University of Michigan Law School of discrimination in their failed admissions process. Despite the empirical fact that white women are the greatest beneficiaries of affirmative action, they somehow still felt aggrieved. Blum who is Jewish-American and was raised in a liberal household, gradually shifted towards the right as he matured. As a proud conservative, Blum wants to restore the “original vision” of civil rights which explains his preference for the 1866 Civil Rights Act over the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The reason the 1964 Civil Rights Act was necessary and passed into law was to address the century of unequal treatment after the civil war, namely the Jim Crow segregation that followed the 1866 Civil Rights Act.
Blum has convinced himself that he is benefiting society, saying “[I am] working to eliminate race-based discrimination, in the tradition of Jewish leaders and laypeople who worked for civil rights.” The man is delusional because I don’t see Howard Zinn, Gerda Lerner, Michael Schwerner or Andrew Goodman praising the mendacity of Edward Blum. Please. In fact Bernie Sanders is more reflective of the Jewish American legacy of civil rights than this nutter Edward Blum.
Blum is the architect behind numerous legal cases including the case that quite literally ended affirmative action in 2023. He is also responsible for gutting of the Voting Rights Act in June 2013 and the recent DEI backlash against The Fearless Fund. There was a break in Blum’s delusional, self-righteous fever dream in 2016 when he lamented consequences of the demise of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that led to new draconian voting laws across the country. Blum told The Guardian in 2016, “I think about it a lot, I worry about it a lot. I agonize over this. [It] may be that one or two of the states that used to be covered by Section 5 [of the Voting Rights Act] has gone too far.” But somehow he couldn’t quite accept that he himself is the plague he seeks. Hero complexes are dangerous. Since that article’s publication voting has become increasingly restrictive with CNN reporting that this year’s election will be harder vote in than any election n recent memory. Since 2020, twenty-eight states have enacted new laws that create obstacles to voting as documented by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University law school.
It’s genuinely revolting to hear conservatives like Rufo, Bannon, Ackman and Blum appropriate white-washed perceptions of civil rights. Somehow they laughably think you can appropriate decades of black and brown intellectual and spiritual labor by ignoring the living legacy of those numerous civil rights leaders and superimposing your own garbage theories. It’s like a sh*tty marketing campaign copying an older, better, more popular campaign. Nothing original or additive or visionary, just a return to the nostalgia factory of white supremacy—probably to distract from all the high level thieving going on among conservative elites. I mean their hero Donald Trump is now a convicted felon who owes $450 million for fraud and many of his cronies are in legal jeopardy.
Once the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act passed in Congress during the 1960s, they laid the groundwork for affirmative action which was initially passed as an executive order by President Lyndon B. Johnson in September 1965 and amended to include gender in 1968. The nature of law and democracy operate through precedents, so there is a forward march towards better and better practices. What we are experiencing in America is regressive.
We are tumbling backwards towards a world that no longer exists. Delusional people like Blum have fantasies of returning to the “original vision” of civil rights which sounds like he wants to bring back segregation, deeper class divisions and oppressive circ*mstances for women. Although, I don’t think most of us will be happy with the world that these conservative white men envision, they are definitely focused on their goals. Those of us who care about CRT, DEI, affirmative action or human rights, need to be focused on our vision of America. Black and brown people alongside white allies have won these battles before, we can win them again. However, it all depends on which vision we feed.
And remember: trust, believe, support and protect black women because we are the the fearless ones who lead on behalf of everybody.
With Love During End Times,
Agunda
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