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Like a disease that bedevils epidemiologists with resistance to treatment, the modern Left’s attachment to racial preferences is proving hard to cure. Though voters have made clear they don’t want government or the private sector to base decisions on race, the Left keeps finding ingenious ways to reintroduce racial discrimination.
This now seems a condition endemic to the Left on both sides of the Atlantic. We see this phenomenon at the local, national, and international levels.
In Virginia, politicians are poised to introduce measures that allow government contracts that favor minorities and disadvantage white men, and Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA), freshly elected and no longer in need to feign moderation, is poised to sign them. At the national level, we see the Trump administration having to sue Harvard University for, again, depriving Jewish students of protection.
Internationally, the signs of this condition are galore. A major European think tank, for example, published a report alleging that “whiteness” and “Europeanness” have become a danger to the EU. The European Union’s research and innovation funding program, Horizon Europe, with a rather large $100 billion-plus funding budget for the 2021-2027 period, bases funding decisions on adherence to diversity, equity, and inclusion-type policies.
This predilection for analyzing everything through a racial construct now has such a hold on leftist thinking that it threatens to succeed in ways that the Left perhaps did not foresee.
If white people come to believe that the Left will never be stopped in its discriminatory path, many will demand their own set-asides, and this demand will be met with a supply of politicians on the Right ready to meet it.
The result will be a society fully balkanized, with groups that have been officialized by the government having different rights and responsibilities. America will then cease to be a single nation with a unifying culture and ethos, and cease therefore to be recognizably American, which seems to be the Left’s real goal.
Give credit to the Trump administration, which more than any of its predecessors has approached racial discrimination against white males not by creating set-asides for yet another group, but by aggressively attacking racial preferences in everything from government contracting to university admissions as violative of the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act and as un-American.
But the Left has met the administration’s crusade by consistently trying to circumvent the law. If that sounds far-fetched, consider Virginia House Bill 61, which Democrats in the state legislature passed on a party-line vote and is sitting on Spanberger’s desk waiting to be signed. Through it, Virginia is seeking to implement this thinking into policy.
The bill mandates that the state give 42% of all contracts to “Small, Women-owned, and Minority-owned businesses,” or SWaMs. It creates a new Small SWaM Business Procurement Enhancement Program that will make sure that discretionary spending going to SWaM businesses increases by 3% a year until the target of 42% is achieved.
As Reason magazine explains, “While it could be argued that the bill only discriminates in favor of small businesses, including those owned by women, minorities, and disabled veterans, the data collection required by the bill reveals its true intention.”
According to the bill, the Department of Small Business and Supplier Diversity will conduct “a disparity study every five years. The study shall evaluate the need for enhancement and remedial measures to address the disparity between the availability and the utilization of women-owned and minority-owned businesses.”
What if nonminority businesses outbid the SWaMs? Don’t worry, the bill writers have thought of that one, too. The program sets aside $10,000-$200,000 to cover cases where non-SWaM businesses have a price advantage.
As for who qualifies as a member of a minority and who doesn’t, the bill describes it in excruciating detail.
For example, the bill defines a Hispanic American, one of the most fluid categories, as “a person having origins in any of the Spanish-speaking peoples of Mexico, South or Central America, or the Caribbean Islands or other Spanish or Portuguese cultures and who is regarded as such by the community of which this person claims to be a part.” (Emphasis added).
In other words, a functional, not a geographic community, exists, and its self-appointed leaders can determine if you make the cut, and more importantly, if you can get a cut.
Borrowing a page from George Orwell, the bill claims to do the opposite of its clear discriminatory intent. “The measures shall be consistent with rulings of the Supreme Court of the United States regarding the available remedies that may be employed to address past discrimination and the need for evidence to quantify past discrimination,” it brazenly reads.
Luckily, the Trump administration sees through this subterfuge and promises to fight the Old Dominion’s new leadership tooth and nail in the courts. In January, when the Democrats in Richmond first introduced the bill, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon posted on X, “This DEI is DOA. It is illegal and will not survive court challenge.”
The bill becomes law if Spanberger signs it or leaves it unsigned on her desk for seven days. Whatever happens, her government is likely to keep Dhillon busy for the remainder of her term. Sesha Joi Moon, her new chief diversity officer and director of DEI — yes, these positions still exist — described with delight in 2022 how a mob tore down a statue of Christopher Columbus and threw it in the James River.
The mob, it appears, was guided by mythical “ancestors.” Moon explained in a video how “the ancestors just took a hold and said ‘we’re done here’ and yanked that joint down and then threw it in the water.”
But the Trump administration will be busy elsewhere as well. In another sign that it will not let up, Dhillon’s division sued Harvard on Friday for violating the civil rights of Jewish students. Harvard, said the suit, permitted hostility against Jewish students after the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, refusing to enforce anti-discrimination policies.
“This Justice Department has no tolerance for such brazen violations of federal law,” Dhillon said. She also posted on X, “Harvard cannot continue to take taxpayer funds while turning a blind eye to racial & ethnic abuse against Jewish & Israeli students.”
The administration had already frozen $2.2 billion in federal spending at Harvard on the same charges. An Obama-appointed judge who has always sided with Harvard in similar cases, however, restored the funding in a September 2025 court decision. The Trump administration appealed three months ago.
Harvard isn’t just being accused of allowing harassment of Jewish students. In a new report issued this month, the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance points out how Jewish admissions have dropped precipitously to its lowest point in decades. “Harvard’s Jewish undergraduate enrollment stands at 7% today, the lowest level recorded since before World War II and the lowest of any Ivy League institution,” according to the report.
Though the drop is most pronounced at Harvard, it has been mirrored by every other Ivy League University except for Brown.
In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court found in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College in 2023 that universities could no longer base admissions on race. What appears to have happened since then is that, while the percentage of Asian American students admitted to universities has risen, the percentage of black and white students, which includes Jewish students, has dropped.
But bean-counting by race is not limited to American institutions, as we seem to have exported abroad a race-based analysis of the roots of inequality. The EU’s large Horizon Europe program, for example, will only disburse funds to universities that can demonstrate they have equality, diversity, and inclusion policies that improve “inclusion” in hiring and promotion decisions.
Universities as varied as Trinity College Dublin, the Universidad de Barcelona, and the Université de Paris, which includes the famed Sorbonne, all adopted policies to count race in their admissions and hiring decisions to receive funding from the Horizon program.
Supporters of preferences say that basing hiring, promotion, and admissions decisions on race, by universities or government contractors, is a solution to persistent racial disparities in outcomes. That automatically assumes that the disparities exist due to racial or sexual discrimination and not individual decisions, such as, say, cultural acceptance of out-of-wedlock births, which are then left unaddressed.
CHICAGO’S DEADLY SANCTUARY POLICIES
This shift has taken place as the Left has also transferred revolutionary agency from socioeconomic classes to immutable characteristics such as race.
But, in America at least, it is illegal for entities that take taxpayer money to discriminate on the basis of race. There is a solution to this epidemic. The administration is right to fight these practices on this legal ground, just as the rest of us must continue to make the case that they are immoral.
