Nike investigated over allegations of discrimination against white employees
The EEOC is investigating Nike over allegations of discrimination against white employees and cracking down on its diversity, equity and inclusion policies.
When the Heritage Foundation think tank developed a sweeping presidential transition plan in anticipation of Donald Trump’s return to power, one of its key policy goals was to eliminate affirmative action, which Project 2025 called “positive discrimination.”
For decades, federal contracts to provide hot meals or build missile defense systems have come with strings attached. An executive order signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965 required private companies to take active steps to ensure equal opportunities in the workplace for women and people of color.
In one of his first official acts of his second term, President Trump revoked Johnson’s order. He is now aiming to abolish affirmative action completely.
His target is Minnesota’s affirmative action policy, which the Justice Department began investigating last July.
State and federal civil rights laws prohibit hiring and promotion decisions based on race or gender, but allow employers to create affirmative action plans in narrow circumstances to address workforce disparities in historically discriminated against jobs.
Like many states, agencies in Minnesota must establish hiring goals and timelines to address the underrepresentation of women, people with disabilities, Black, Hispanic, Asian, Pacific Islander, American Indian, or Alaska Native workers.
The Justice Department filed a lawsuit in federal court in January, alleging that the state’s efforts to combat discrimination in public service are themselves discriminatory.
Attorney General Pam Bondi has certified the case as an issue of public importance, with the aim of expediting the case to the Supreme Court.
“Making hiring decisions based on immutable characteristics like race or gender is simple discrimination, and the Trump administration will not tolerate such DEI policies,” Bondi said in announcing the lawsuit.
Brian Evans, a spokesman for the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office, declined to comment.
Legal experts say a ruling in favor of the Trump administration could upend decades of civil rights policy and have far-reaching implications for women and people of color, who have already seen their progress undermined by a sharp rollback in the country’s diversity policies.
“If the court ultimately does that, it will be the end of private sector affirmative action programs as we know them,” said Sachin Pandya, a professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law.
Affirmative action from Kennedy to Trump
Ending affirmative action in the workplace has been on the wish list of conservatives since the days of the civil rights movement.
In 1961, President John F. Kennedy called on government contractors to “take affirmative action” to hire workers “regardless of race, creed, color, or national origin,” as part of a nationwide campaign to end widespread discrimination that had denied African Americans wealth and advancement opportunities for generations.
Contractors largely ignored Kennedy’s executive orders until Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Civil Rights Act contained comprehensive legislation, including a provision called Title VII that made discrimination in the workplace illegal. A year later, he reinforced Kennedy’s executive order with his own executive order aimed at reversing the effects of Jim Crow and other policies that openly discriminated against blacks in the workplace.
Private sector employment, which had been largely segregated, began to integrate, and black workers began to enter upwardly mobile, skilled jobs. Other racial minorities and women have also made progress, but the practice has also caused controversy.
When President Richard Nixon adopted an affirmative action program for federal construction projects in 1969 to correct racial discrimination in the construction industry, government contractors filed lawsuits alleging illegal hiring “quotas” that violated civil rights laws. they lost.
“Quotas have been in place for a long time and have been very effective,” Labor Secretary George Shultz said at the time. “Zero. That’s the quota.”
But the backlash against affirmative action only gained momentum. The term “reverse discrimination” has become a common way of referring to the perceived harm inflicted on white Americans in a difficult economy. The Heritage Foundation blasted numerical “goals and schedules” as a euphemism for quotas.
While running for president, Ronald Reagan campaigned against affirmative action and promoted a new era of “colorblindness.” After taking office, he moved quickly to eliminate affirmative action, but abandoned efforts to rescind Johnson’s executive order after pressure from civil rights groups, business leaders and some Republicans.
According to Melvin Urofsky, author of “The Affirmative Action Puzzle,” the Reagan administration’s own research found that affirmative action was effective. Urofsky concluded that the number of white men harmed by affirmative action was “very small.”
Does affirmative action discriminate against white people?
Still, the legal tug-of-war raged on.
Under federal law, affirmative action plans must be temporary measures to eliminate racial and gender disparities in segregated occupations without trampling the rights of other employees.
Some white workers argued that black Americans were receiving preferential treatment at their expense. The Supreme Court upheld the practice in lawsuits filed by Brian Weber in 1974 and Paul Johnson in 1988 challenging affirmative action programs in their respective workplaces.
Weber was turned over to a skilled training program at a factory in Louisiana, even though he had more seniority than nearly all the black workers selected. Johnson was denied a promotion to road traffic dispatcher with the California Department of Transportation. This is because women were not hired for that position.
In recent years, courts have chipped away at affirmative action in American life, most notably in 2023, when the Supreme Court ruled that it is unconstitutional for universities to consider race as a factor in student admissions.
“Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of them,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the court’s majority opinion.
“The Supreme Court has left us with a strange legal situation where affirmative action in higher education is illegal, but affirmative action in the workplace is technically legal,” said David Glasgow, executive director of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Visioning at New York University School of Law and co-author of “How Equality Wins: A New Vision for an Inclusive America.”
“This new Minnesota lawsuit could change that,” he said.
What equals opportunity?
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority has signaled its intention to abandon decades of precedent-setting decisions. With the Minnesota case, the Trump administration is betting it will have a suitable test case to overturn affirmative action under Title VII.
“For too long, courts have allowed employers to discriminate on the basis of race or sex when it is packaged as ‘affirmative action,'” Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, said in announcing the Minnesota case. “This case is the logical next step.”
Nick Barry, senior counsel at America First Legal, an advocacy group founded by White House senior adviser Stephen Miller, said he was optimistic that the lawsuit would “consign race-based discrimination in the workplace to the dustbin of history.”
“The way to stop discrimination based on race is to stop discrimination based on race,” Barry told USA TODAY.
Edward Blum, who has long worked to abolish affirmative action and spearheaded the Harvard lawsuit, has filed numerous legal challenges to race-based preferences in the private sector.
Blum said the Minnesota lawsuit “correctly recognizes that government policies that classify, limit, or favor individuals based on race or gender undermine the core promise of equal opportunity for all Americans.”
But David Oppenheimer, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley and director of the Berkeley Center for Comparative Equality and Anti-Discrimination Law, said overturning affirmative action would increase inequality in the workplace and reduce opportunity.
What’s at stake, he said, is not quotas or quotas, but good faith efforts to include qualified people of color, women, veterans and people with disabilities in the job pool.
Affirmative action plans that conduct rigorous workforce analysis to identify barriers to equal opportunity are still needed because Black and Hispanic workers face discrimination at rates that have not declined since the late 1980s, said Oppenheimer, author of Diversity Principles: The Story of a Transformative Idea.
Black Americans outnumber white Americans 12 to 1 in executive positions, according to the latest data from USA TODAY.
Oppenheimer said: “Without checks systems that encourage or require employers to examine their own procedures and question decisions when they appear to be biased, discrimination will only increase and opportunities for women, people of color, people with disabilities, and people with negative stereotypes will continue to decline.”
Already, many employers have changed or eliminated their diversity initiatives in response to pressure from the Trump administration. Repealing affirmative action would jeopardize 60 years of civil rights progress in the workplace, Damon Hewitt, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, told USA TODAY.
“For too long, Black people and other communities of color have been disproportionately affected by harmful policies and practices. Instead of addressing this issue and promoting equity, this administration continues to allow racism to run unchecked,” Hewitt told USA TODAY. “In fact, the mistaken idea that civil rights laws are harmful to white people has led to a movement that closes down a system that is fair to everyone, while creating opportunities for people of color and women.”
Hewitt said the Supreme Court knew that racism and sex discrimination will persist unless employers take voluntary, proactive steps to identify and address workplace bias.
“Making the promise of Title VII protections a reality required the creation of a very narrow relief exception,” he said. If the Supreme Court were to overturn Weber and Johnson, it would “essentially be an invitation to discrimination.”
