Federal judge rules that minority businesses must also serve white people

The Minority Business Development Agency, a Commerce Department agency created during the Nixon administration to help minority-owned businesses, discriminated against white people and must offer its services to people of all races and ethnicities, a federal judge ruled in Texas Wednesday.

Judge Mark T. Pittman of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas sided with two of the three white business owners who sued the agency after being told that assistance was limited to members of “underserved” minority groups. The third appeared to have no standing position.

That presumption violated the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law, wrote Judge Pittman, who was appointed to the federal court by President Donald J. Trump. Judge Pittman permanently banned the agency from serving only members of minority groups.

“If courts mean what they say when they give paramount importance to constitutional rights, the federal government should not violate such rights with impunity,” he wrote. “Time is up.”

The ruling was the latest in a series of court decisions that have eroded or overturned federal affirmative action mandates in several arenas, led by a Supreme Court ruling last June that struck down race-conscious college admissions programs at Harvard and New York University. headed. North Carolina.