"The Only Way to Stop Discrimination is to Stop Discriminating"

 9/11/25 Inside Higher Education:

The U.S. Department of Education plans to end discretionary grant programs for a slew of minority-serving institutions, officials announced Wednesday—after Congress had already appropriated hundreds of thousands of dollars to those programs. The move stunned MSI advocates, who argue the department doesn’t have the authority to nix them.

The Education Department asserted that these programs amount to “discrimination” and are “unconstitutional” because they require colleges to enroll a certain percentage of students from a particular racial or ethnic background to qualify. For example, HSIs must enroll at least a quarter Hispanic students, among other requirements, to earn the federal designation.

“Discrimination based upon race or ethnicity has no place in the United States,” U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in the announcement. “To further our commitment to ending discrimination in all forms across federally supported programs, the Department will no longer award Minority-Serving Institution grants that discriminate by restricting eligibility to institutions that meet government-mandated racial quotas.”

When our government started actively supporting HBCUs, it was in the aftermath of slavery.  You can argue, I think legitimately, that subsequent efforts, not entirely in the South, sought to keep blacks uneducated and unskilled. 

Those days are long over.  The legal obstacles have been gone for at least two generations.  Hispanics were never subject to these legal obstacles.  They were in the eyes of the law white.  A friend graduated from University of Texas in 1948.  That institution was still requiring blacks to attend an inferior, all-black law school in 1950.  While looking through her graduation program, I was struck with how many Spanish names there were.

The only defense progressives have left is that this is still a profoundly racist society.  In 1930. Charlotte Democrats would have lynched to accused.  The double standard for justice argues that if there remains widespread discrimination, it is in favor of black criminals, largely to the detriment of black victims.