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Edward Blum's "fragility" needs to be addressed! [1]
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Date: 2023-09-27
Hello everyone!
Who knew the same guy who had victories shutting down affirmative action in education would go for the Fearless Fund, declaring "reverse discrimination"?
Edward Blum is that guy.
He is in feels about Black women supporting other Black women in their entrepreneur endeavors.
In the above linked article is an excerpt from Rolling Stone explaining why he is feeling that way.
Shortly after successfully engineering the seismic Supreme Court ruling this summer, Blum, with a new organization called the American Alliance for Equal Rights, set his sights on the Atlanta-based venture capital fund. AAFER filed a lawsuit on August 2, accusing the Fearless Fund of racial bias in private contracts because it offers four $20,000 grants a year to start-ups run by Black women. The lawsuit builds on Blum’s previous victories, quoting in its opening paragraphs the conservative majority’s recent assertion that “eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.” Like Blum’s earlier efforts targeting policies designed to address historic injustices like disenfranchisement of Black voters and the exclusion of minorities from prestigious universities, the suit also ignores, dismisses or otherwise minimizes the barriers that groups, Black women entrepreneurs in this case, have consistently faced. By email, Blum told Rolling Stone that his organization “was contacted by a woman-owned business who was ineligible to participate in these programs because she was not Black and [is] thus disqualified.” The complaint details the grievances of three plaintiffs, none of whom are named in the document. Blum said he was “unsure” how the women found his organization, which was incorporated in 2021. (He has previously described himself as a matchmaker for aggrieved individuals and the lawyers willing to take on their cases.)
I emboldened the last part of this article excerpt because I smell a rat.
I don't believe he had any contact with any woman-owned business that was turned down by the Fearless Fund because that woman wasn't Black; I believe it's possible he had no contact with any woman-owned business. Yes, I believe he's lying.
Here's another excerpt from the same Rolling Stone article explaining why the founders, Arian Simone and Ayana Parsons, hired Ben Crump as their attorney.
TWENTY YEARS AGO, Arian Simone was a college student in Tallahassee, Florida, trying to scrape together money for a small mall-based boutique called Fabulous. “I started to notice that a lot of investors didn’t look like me,” Simone, a Black woman, tells Rolling Stone. “I made a promise to myself to not be concerned about the investor landscape, because one day I was going to be the business investor that I had been looking for.” Two decades later, the disparity Simone recognized back then persists: According McKinsey and Company, in 2022, Black and Latino founders received just 1 percent of venture capital funds disbursed in the U.S. — 0.1 percent of all funding last year went to female founders who were Black or Latina. At the same time, women of color are starting businesses at a rate that far outpaces every other demographic. Simone and a friend from college, Ayana Parsons, founded the Fearless Fund to address that gap. Four years into the project, the fund, backed by Bank of America, Ally Bank, MasterCard and others, has invested $26.5 million in more 40 businesses owned by women of color — Fresh Bellies and the cult restaurant chain Slutty Vegan among them — and awarded over $3 million in small grants to 346 businesses.
In this News One article, I will predict he will act even more butt hurt because a federal judge in Atlanta struck down his request to block the Fearless Fund from accepting more applicants.
Here are some parting words for Mr. Blum; thank you for showing the country who you are.
Thank you for being the kind of man that people want to not ask you to invest in their businesses.
Enjoy giving your money to lawyers who may not grant you the victory you want.
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/9/27/2195655/-Edward-Blum-s-fragility-needs-to-be-addressed
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