An equality-friendly administration will need to prioritize its options for reversing the spread of racialist ideology across American institutions. Two initiatives should head the list.
First, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and other enforcement agencies should once again take seriously their obligation to ensure that our public and private institutions comply with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and cease racial discrimination—including so-called antiracist discrimination based on critical race theory, which rewards or punishes individuals according to their racial identity.
To this end, the next administration should swiftly instruct all agencies to initiate investigations nationwide against entities that discriminate based on race and pursue cutting off federal funding for institutions that refuse to comply. Targets should include schools and universities and local and state governments. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission should investigate corporations. The DOJ and EEOC should stand ready to follow through with litigation.
In education, this would mean probing many of the large school systems, including those in San Francisco, Boston, New York, and Northern Virginia, that have altered admissions policies to reduce the number of Asian Americans in magnet schools. Additionally, it would mean investigating many universities for discriminatory admissions policies (which the Supreme Court recently deemed unconstitutional) and racially segregated scholarships. University of Michigan professor emeritus Mark Perry has identified hundreds of these programs; all should be shut down.
Second, in partnership with the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission, the DOJ should investigate the three largest passive-investment firms—BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street—for antitrust violations. These firms have aggressively promoted environmental, social, and governance (ESG) initiatives, which often encourage discriminatory racial quotas or segregated employee groups. Federal investigators should look for collusion in these firms’ mutual participation in ESG activist initiatives and examine their lockstep adoption and advancement of parallel ESG goals.
As part of this investigation, the agencies should question the Clayton Antitrust Act’s impact on these giant firms’ joint control over vast swaths of the economy. Two of the “Big Three” are publicly traded—and the two largest owners of each are the other two, leaving the firms in apparent control of each other. The Big Three, jointly, are the largest shareholders in almost the entire S&P 500 stock-market index. They appear to hold joint control of 14 of America’s 15 largest banks. If they are in violation of the Clayton Act, the government could force them to divest themselves from one another and bar them from colluding to promote adoption of discriminatory ESG policies. Good antitrust policy would be good civil rights policy.
These two initiatives would represent a starting point for reestablishing the government’s commitment to equality for all.
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