Just before the start of Black History Month 2005, a federal judge in Kansas City raised anew a racial issue that has reverberated throughout this nation since former Maryland Congressman Parren Mitchell attached to the federal Public Works Employment Act of 1977 an amendment requiring that 10 percent of those public funds be spent with minority businesses.
That unprecedented legislation sparked the development of the body of law that the Kansas City court must abide by in deciding whether the 20 percent minority business participation goal set by Missouri in 1998 violates the constitutional rights of white business owners.
As the law relating to the establishment of minority business goals has evolved over the past two decades, so has our experience with a more inclusionary economy evolved. Actually, minority goals reflect the country’s experiment with a non-discriminatory economy, for minority goals are enacted specifically to eradicate that ingrained institutional racial barrier known as the “good old boy” network, which has historically insulated white businesses from competition.
The positive impact that minority businesses have had on the economy over the past thirty years is undeniable. We need look no further than our own backyard for proof, as St. Louis boasts the nation’s largest black business n a billion-dollar technology firm whose contribution to the city’s economy and civic life are a matter of public record. Yet the very programs that have enabled this and other minority firms to access the public contracting market have been under unceasing attack for over a quarter of a century.
Like the organized labor movement in America, the protracted movement for minority economic empowerment n an extension of the civil rights struggle n has been fought in the courts, the legislative halls, and the streets. And, like the labor movement, the fight for entrepreneurial opportunities poses a fundamental economic restructuring n the dismantling of entrenched discriminatory business practices and customs.
But, aside from remedying discrimination, minority goals serve proactively to structure racial inclusion into the economic mainstream. Goals make the proverbial “level playing field” more than just a rhetorical economic aspiration. Goals democratize the expenditure of public funds by guaranteeing the minority community at least some share of the economy generated and driven by its tax dollars. In other words, goals provide minorities some measure of economic justice.
The irony of all this is that the movement for minority economic empowerment has been a fight not for a handout, but simply to work, because contracts awarded to minority businesses have to be performed just like contracts awarded to white businesses.
The other irony is watching a federal court, during a time when the state is desperately trying to spur business development, put a chokehold on the only economy that offers hope these days n a diverse one.