Cracks are developing in President Biden’s racial-equity agenda, thanks to business owners, farmers, homeowners, and other ordinary Americans who stood up to demand equality under the law. Within hours of his inauguration, President Biden declared a “whole-of-government equity agenda” to remove the “unbearable human costs of systemic racism.” While the agenda sounded benign — “Equal opportunity is the bedrock of American democracy, and our diversity is one of our country’s greatest strengths” — much of it constituted a “shock and awe” program of explicit racial preferences. It has not been unusual for government, in handing out benefits and providing services, to use race as an aspirational “thumb on the scale” or to establish (or contrive) a remedial justification for its use. But government has been more reluctant to nakedly hand out things based on the color of the recipient’s skin. Following the Biden initiative, though, there seemed to be a marked departure from preferences that required some demonstration of a remedial purpose rooted in the particular circumstances of the beneficiary. “Equity,” it turns out, was simply code for reverse discrimination.
President Biden’s two signature legislative accomplishments — the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill — wrote this new form of “equity” into our laws. ARPA, for example, contains billions in race-based preferences for nonwhite restaurant owners, nonwhite farmers, nonwhite small businesses, and nonwhite homeowners. And the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill included billions more in set-asides for nonwhite construction companies, labeled by the law as “disadvantaged business enterprises.” What’s more, billions in infrastructure funds are set to be spent based on race, with fair-sounding names such as “Digital Equity Grants,” “Healthy Streets Program,” and “Reconnecting Communities Program.”
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