A recent federal court ruling temporarily blocked the distribution of a grant designed to support start-ups by Black women — and honestly, we shouldn’t be the only ones outraged. The most audacious part is that the Fearless Fund’s Fearless Strivers Grant, designed to support Black women-led businesses with $20,000 in venture capital, was deemed discriminatory. The Fearless Fund is one of the venture capital groups targeted for its programs designed to encourage corporate diversity.
Black women are currently the largest growing demographic of business owners, yet they receive less than 1% of venture capital funding, according to Reuters. In 2023, one month after successfully dismantling affirmative action (the system put in place to address discriminatory admission practices of the past) at colleges through the conservative-leaning U.S.
Supreme Court, the American Alliance for Equal Rights filed three lawsuits challenging organizations that support Black and other marginalized business owners. Advertisement For many Black entrepreneurs, the federal court’s decision feels like a racist residual of the 1921 Black Wall Street massacre: An incident where white supremacists set fire to and destroyed an entire neighborhood of Tulsa where Black businesses thrived. Today, instead of overt physical violence, conservatives are using the courts to strip Black and minority-owned businesses from any shot at leveling a playing field that was built only for white Americans to thrive .