Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall is one of 13 attorneys general that sent a letter to Fortune 100 CEOs Thursday regarding workplace discrimination.
“Today, we warned Fortune 100 CEOs that race-based discrimination, under the guise of DEI, is illegal and will lead to serious consequences,” said Marshall. “The Supreme Court struck down race-based college admissions and the Court made clear that all racial discrimination, no matter the motivation, is unlawful.”
In June, The Supreme Court struck down race-based admissions policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina.
“Notably, the Court also recognized that federal civil-rights statutes prohibiting private entities from engaging in race discrimination apply at least as broadly as the prohibition against race discrimination found in the Equal Protection Clause,” the letter stated.
The letter stated the court’s ruling “powerfully reinforced the principle that all racial discrimination, no matter the motivation, is insidious and unlawful.”
Because the attorneys general said they had identified racial discrimination as commonplace among large businesses, they asked the CEOs to comply with race-neutral principles in employment practices.
“These discriminatory practices include, among other things, explicit racial quotas and preferences in hiring, recruiting, retention, promotion, and advancement,” the letter continued. “They also include race-based contracting practices, such as racial preferences and quotas in selecting suppliers, providing overt preferential treatment to customers on the basis of race, and pressuring contractors to adopt the company’s racially discriminatory quotas and preferences.”
The letter referenced several news articles that mentioned companies, such as Microsoft, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan, setting goals to hire more blacks and meet racial quotas. It said those practices are immoral and illegal on a federal and state level.
“Racial quotas and other explicitly race-based practices in recruitment, hiring, promotion, and/or contracting have also been adopted by other major companies, such as Airbnb, Apple, Cisco, Facebook, Google, Intel, Lyft, Microsoft, Netflix, Paypal, Snapchat, TikTok, Uber, and others,” the letter stated.
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 states that “[i]t shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer (1) to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin;’ or (2) to limit, segregate, or classify his employees or applicants for employment in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. 42 U.S.C. 2000e- 2(a).
The AGs put any company that has previously “resorted to racial preferences or naked quotas to offset its bigotry” on notice, urging the CEOs to cease those practices.
Attorneys general from Arkansas, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, South Carolina, Tennessee and West Virginia also signed the letter.
Corporate Racial Discrimination Multistate Letter July 13 2023 by Erica Thomas on Scribd
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