Biden to increase US contracts awarded to minority businesses

Bloomberg

President Joe Biden announced measures to increase the number of federal contracts awarded to small, disadvantaged businesses. He also said he had directed his administration to more aggressively prevent discrimination in home appraisals, a detriment for wealth accumulation for Black families.
Last week, Biden reiterated calls for Congress to overhaul US policing as he met with the family of George Floyd, the unarmed Black man who was killed last year at the hands of a White Minneapolis police
officer.
The federal contracting changes will help reduce US wealth inequality, a White House official said, which has left White people more prosperous than people of colour. The US government is the largest consumer of goods, but only about 10% of federal agency dollars go to small, disadvantaged businesses, the
official said.
Biden aims to increase spending with those businesses by 50%, or an additional $100 billion in contracts over five years, according to the White House.
Minorities lag behind White people in home ownership, a primary means of building and transferring wealth. Biden directed Housing and Urban Development Secretary Marcia Fudge to lead an interagency initiative to address inequity in home appraisals. Black-owned homes are routinely appraised at lower values than similar ones in White neighbourhoods.
Biden and his administration have criticised Republican lawmakers who have recently pursued laws Democrats consider racist. They include measures by Republican-led legislatures in at least five states that would ban the teaching of so-called “critical race theory.”
Biden said that the US must come to terms with its history, and its lasting impact.
Biden has sought to make racial equity a centerpiece of his presidency and to combat systemic racism in US society. His efforts contrast with Republican lawmakers in states, predominantly in the South, who have recently passed laws prohibiting schools from teaching that racism is embedded in US culture, as well as new election laws that Democrats say would make it more difficult for Black and other minority voters to cast ballots.
“We do ourselves no favours by pretending none of this ever happened or it doesn’t impact us today — because it does still impact us today,” Biden said. “We can’t just learn what we want to know, and not what we should know. We should know the good, the bad, everything. That’s what great nations do – they come to terms with their dark sides.”
It went on to say that the city’s Black residents, like many across the United States, experienced redlining that prevented them from using homeownership to build wealth. The proclamation also discussed ways the federal highway system furthered
segregation.
In Tulsa, Biden calls for passage of his infrastructure proposal, saying it would provide a $10 billion fund that communities such as Greenwood could tap for revitalisation, an official said. Another element of the plan would retrofit transportation infrastructure to reconnect neighborhoods that had been divided by highways.