Fighting The Injustice of DEI Discrimination: “What did that person do wrong other than be born with the wrong skin color?”

Fighting The Injustice of DEI Discrimination: “What did that person do wrong other than be born with the wrong skin color?”

On February 23, 2023, Legal Insurrection Foundation launched the Equal Protection Project (equalprotect.org) to fight discrimination done in the name of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.”

I had an chance to talk about EPP on Matt Allen Show on WPRO in Providence. The discussion started with an update on LIF’s complaint against the Providence Public School District over a new teacher loan forgiveness hiring incentive open only to non-whites. I had previously appeared on Allen’s show to discuss that complaint, Black Community Activists Support Legal Insurrection’s Challenge To Providence School’s Anti-White Hiring Incentives.

The discussion of EPP starts at the 13:10 mark.

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Partial Transcript (auto-generated, may contain transcription errors)

(emphasis added)

WAJ (00:51): So the loan forgiveness program, as you’ve indicated, is for new hires in the Providence School District. So this is a government operated program. So let’s make that very clear from the start. This is the government acting, right? Right. Providence School District, which of course, is run by the state. So in a sense, it’s the RO state of Rhode Island acting here. And they have developed a program which is funded by the Rhode Island Foundation, but is administered as part of the employment hiring practices of this state run entity. And that provision provides that only people who are non-white can apply for the loan forgiveness. So if you’re get a new hire into the Providence system and you are non-white, you get an extra bonus, you get an extra incentive to come to Providence, which is up to $25,000 of your student loans will be paid off.

But if you are designated as white, you can’t apply for that. It’s not available. So you have an employment practice by a governmental entity, doesn’t matter who’s paying it, who’s funding it, but it’s administered as part of the employment practices of a governmental entity, which discriminates in benefits and hiring incentives based on race and ethnicity. And that’s unlawful. At least it’s our view that it’s unlawful. Providence may think differently. I’ve never really actually heard them state their position on it, but presumably they don’t like it.

So we filed a complaint with the US Department of Education, office of Civil Rights, and the reason we did that is that Providence receives, I think it’s about 200 million a year in federal funding. A lot of that comes from the Department of Education. We understood that there’s a legal nuance here, because these are teacher hiring rather than student activities. There’s a question whether it falls under the Department of Education or the E E O C, we felt it was proper at the Department of Education. They reviewed it and they felt it was better at the E E O C. And so they made a formal referral to the E E O C, and that’s where it is now, and that’s where it will move forward. Presumably, I don’t know what the E E O C will do, but, uh, because it was an employment practice and allegedly discriminatory, the E E O C is looking into it. And that’s where it is now and how long that process takes. I don’t know.

***

…  But I think the, the big question here is why are they even doing this?Where is the governor? I mean, this is a state agency running the Providence School District. Is this something the Governor wants, discrimination on the basis of race for hiring benefits? Is this something the Attorney General wants? Where is the Attorney General?

There’s only so much we can do as a private foundation. If there were a plaintiff, a teacher who wanted to come forward, perhaps that person could sue and go to court. But as a private foundation, all we can do is ask the apparatus in place to enforce the non-discrimination laws to do their job. And so far, it’s been sent over to the E E O C, I presume they will take a fair look at it. But my question is, where is the Governor and where is the Rhode Island Attorney General when open discrimination is taking place in the biggest school district in the state?

WAJ (08:00):

… this has spread very far and wide, the philosophy of Ibram Kendi, how to be an anti-racist, which explicitly says that present discrimination is justified to remedy past discrimination and future discrimination is justified to remedy current discrimination. So it’s a philosophy that says discrimination on the basis of race is okay as long as it’s part of an anti-racist effort.

But of course, you know, the Constitution, the 14th Amendment, that says every person is entitled to equal protection of the law, the Civil Rights Act, Rhode Island statutes, never distinguish that it’s okay to discriminate against one group, but not another. So this is legally not a viable strategy to say, well, it’s okay to discriminate against whites, because some years ago, some people who share a skin color did bad things. But what about the person actually applying for the job? What did that person do wrong other than be born with the wrong skin color?

***

WAJ (10:09):

Well, it’s, it’s more than idiotic. It’s so damaging to our society. What it is turning us into is essentially the equivalent of Yugoslavia, where you’re going to have different ethnic groups, and in our case, racial groups fighting it out with each other over goodies to be offered for an employment or jobs or other things. It’s such a damaging strategy. It’s basically forcing people not to identify as Rhode Islanders or as Americans, but forcing them to identify as part of an identity group. And of course, as we know from Elizabeth Warren, a lot of people will just fake it and check the Native American box. It’s a scam at every level, but it’s a very damaging scam because it really rips at the fabric of our society to promote discrimination by the government.

***

WAJ (13:11):

Last week, the Legal Insurrection Foundation, based in Barrington, Rhode Island, launched the Equal Protection Project. The website is equalprotect.org. That’s equalprotect.org. And this really was an outgrowth in many ways of what we’ve seen in Providence, because the Providence School District has multiple problems, not just the teacher loan forgiveness program, and not just the segregated teacher meetings. There’s other things we’re looking into. And we said, it’s one thing for us to document this. And we’ve been documenting these things for years and we’ve been getting publicity about them, but now we need to be able to do more.

So the Equal Protection Project, we’ll take action when we find these things, what that action looks like may be a lawsuit, but it may be short of a lawsuit. It might be like what we did with the segregated Providence Teacher meetings. We wrote to the event venue and said: Hey, we know you probably are not aware, but this is a segregated event, and you are bound by the Rhode Island Public Accommodations Law.

So it might just be letter writing, might be more publicity. Sometimes when people get publicity on bad things they’re doing, they stop doing it. That doesn’t seem to be the case with the Providence School District. But ultimately, if we have a sound basis to do it, we will seek legal remedy in the courts for clearly illegal discriminatory conduct. Of course, that requires us either to have standing as a foundation or have a plaintiff who has standing.

So Equal Protection Project is our new initiative. We’re gonna stick with it. And there’s, we’re gonna, we’re national in our focus, but of course, Rhode Island, since we are here and we have our ear to the ground here, and a lot of people, teachers have been reaching out to us and giving us information, we know more what’s going on here. So there’ll be more to come in Rhode Island as part of this initiative.

…. And if anyone’s aware of these sort of bad practices in Rhode Island, you can come to equal protect.org and we have a contact box. You can give us that information.

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