Meet the man who ended race based Affirmative Action in the United States, Edward Bloom, after his success at getting the Supreme Court to end race based affirmative action in 2023. He set aside on the corporate world. He has a whole slew of lawsuits planned to effectively end Dei programs everywhere. Owen, did I mention he’s responsible for gutting the Voting Rights Act, too? Yeah, he’s a real gem and he is just getting started. I’m Dara Star Tucker and this is the breakdown.
Now, every broom is not a lawyer by trade. He’s a stockbroker. He sees himself as a yenta, or a matchmaker of sorts that finds people or corporations that he sees as being discriminated against because of their race or ethnicity, and he pairs them with lawyers. Then if the lawyers think that the plaintiff has a case, he raises the money for their lawsuits, kind of like a sponsor.
On the surface, it almost sounds like honorable work until you realize that he’s not doing it for the marginalized. He’s fighting for the dominant members of the culture who’ve been given every advantage in life. He clearly sees himself as some sort of color blind equalizer. He claims that all he cares about is preventing race from being used to help or harm anyone. But somehow he’s never advocated to eliminate unfair disadvantages for black or brown people because of the actions of a white person. He seems to be solely focused on so called diverse racism is clearly his calling. He says that he starts his day at 4:30 a. M. Reading newspapers and looking for cases of racial discrimination.
Bloom is funded by a lot of powerful, wealthy right wing benefactors. See, he runs this right wing legal defense fund called the project on Fair Represent Rotation. It’s basically an anti affirmative action group that sues schools, governmental organizations and corporations that implement policies around diversity because they harm white people. I mean, he doesn’t go after policies that attempt to level the playing field for disabled people or gay people or women. No, just race stuff. And over the years, he’s gotten pretty good at getting the Supreme Court’s attention. His villain origin story started in the 90s when he decided to run for Congress as a Republican in a district that was pretty heavily gerrymandered to include a high percentage of black holes. He lost, of course, which incidentally is how a lot of his cases start. Somebody doesn’t get into an Ivy League school that they wanted to get into or doesn’t get a job that they felt that they were entitled to or in his case, can’t convince black people that he isn’t the Joker. Come to life and boom, he’s telling the Supreme Court on you the first time he got something all the way to the high court was that case around gerrymandering. And he one his next big case to make it to the Supreme Court was for a young woman named Abigail Fisher. He helped her to sue the university of Texas at Austin because she didn’t get in and there were minorities who did get in who had lower grades than her. But he couldn’t make a sufficient case to the court that UT’s practices were unconstitutional. Never mind that Abigail’s grades and sat scores were good but not stellar, and UT’s turndown rate was higher than Harvard’s that year. And yes, five black and Latino students who had lower grades in Abigail got in, but 42 white students with lower grades than her did, too. Because grades were just one of the many factors being considered, not to mention that there were 168 black and Latino students with grades that were better than Abigail’s that didn’t get in. He thought he had the perfect litigant in Abigail, but her case just wasn’t strong enough. He had to come up with a better strategy. And he finally figured out how to successfully stick it to minorities by using another minority group against them. He figured out that using Asian students to make his point would be a lot more effective than using white ones. So in 2022, he joined with the Asian American Coalition for education and he sued Harvard for not admitting as many Asian students as they should have.
And this time it worked, thanks to Trump. The Supreme Court was stacked with super conservative judges, many of whom had been waiting for decades to get their hands on affirmative action. Just race based affirmative action, though. No need to question whether gender, sexuality or disability should be on the chopping block, too. No. The Supreme Court outlawed only race based affirmative action in 2023. Oh, but they did make a generous exception for military academies like West Point. Bring them all the black and brown applicants you got.
Now, to be fair, Edward Bloom did try to appeal that decision. But the Supreme Court does have their standards. And making it hard for black and brown people to enter the military is apparently where they draw the line. So now Bloom and his billionaire buddies are feeling emboldened and they are determined, determine to bring litigation against anyone attempting to enact race based diversity mandates. That includes private businesses, internships, scholarships and research grants that are geared towards providing funding and support to minorities. He even succeeded in getting an injunction to prevent the Fearless Fund, a venture capital firm, from awarding black women grants. Yeah, this guy’s a pretty fearless social injustice warrior, just fighting the good fight.
And somewhere along the line, he managed to completely gut the Voting Rights Act. Because of Edward Bloom, the Supreme Court ruled that southern states within notoriously discriminatory voting restrictions could change their voting laws anytime they wanted to, which was something that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was created to prevent.
This guy is pretty nauseating. And this is one of the many reasons that it makes my blood boil when people claim that liberals and conservatives are the same and your vote doesn’t matter. Edward Boone was actually raised in a pretty Liberal environment, but he was indoctrinated into neo conservatism when he moved to Texas in the 80s. And now he’s out here propped up by right wing millionaires being a full on menace to society. Ever Bloom is 70. He is not going to be around to see the long term impact of these laws. He won’t have a lot of time to experience the world that he is creating for us.
At some point, we have to take the reins and decide what kind of future we want. If we just sit on the sidelines, we’re leaving our future in the hands of people like him. And I don’t know about you, but that is not an acceptable option. Me, if you’d like to see more breakdowns like this, you can support my work by joining my Patreon at the link in my bio or in the comments.