Citing her office’s opposition race-based decision-making by both public and private entities, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is calling on Attorney General Ashley Moody to investigate three Florida venture capital firms that it claims support white-owned businesses over those owned by people of other races.
“Such application of the law would be the natural extension of your office’s race-neutral thinking and efforts,” writes Derwyn Bunton, chief legal officer for the SPLC, in the letter sent to Moody on Aug. 5. “Specifically, this letter suggests that your office turn its focus on financial institutions, and particularly venture capital funds, operating within Florida.”
The three venture capital firms that the group wants Moody’s office to investigate are Weatherford Partners, Krillion Ventures, and Newgate Capital Partners.
Moody filed a complaint with the Florida Commission on Human Relations in May to investigate Starbucks for hiring practices that she said “appear to discriminate on the basis of race.” She cited information on the coffee giant’s website regarding “annual inclusion and diversity goals,” which call for “achieving Black, Indigenous, and People of Color representation of at least 30% at all corporate levels and at least 40% of all retail and manufacturing roles by 2025.”
“The Starbucks policies described above appear on their face to be racial quotas,” Moody wrote in that complaint. “They set specific race-based employment targets. And to the extent Starbucks suggests that these are merely aspirational ‘goals,’ and not quotas, that claim would be hard to square with Starbucks’s decision to tie executive compensation to meeting those targets.”
In her complaint, Moody cites the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College , in which the high court ruled that race-conscious affirmative action in college admissions is unconstitutional.
Moody’s complaint says that while that case addressed government policies, the Supreme Court also addressed claims under federal civil rights laws, which, according to the complaint, apply in many cases to private employers.
Moody was one of 18 attorneys general who joined Oklahoma in an amicus brief supporting that lawsuit, asserting that data from colleges where race-conscious admissions were banned “show that schools can maintain diversity and academic competitiveness without it.”
The SPLC is based in Alabama and focuses on the South. The organization has filed similar letters with attorneys general in Georgia and Louisiana over the past week. Scott McCoy, the SPLC’s deputy legal director, said the purpose of the letter isn’t to “target” the three venture capital firms that the group says it wants Moody to investigate.
“The point here is to call on the attorney generals of the three states to scrutinize what could be considered as white favoritism in this context as vigorously as they oppose affirmative action for people of color,” McCoy said on a Zoom call on Monday.
“And so the people at the VC firms that have been identified here are firms that we looked at their founding and their leadership and they are all white, and then we looked at portfolio companies that they have funded, at least the ones that they have identified that they have funded on their websites, and then looked at those companies’ founders and their leaderships, and what we found was that those companies were also white-founded and white-led.”
Screenshot of Scott McCoy, deputy legal director for the Southern Poverty Law Center from Zoom call on August 12, 2024.
McCoy said the point is not “necessarily” to accuse the VC firms or the companies they funded of intentional racism. “But if these attorney generals want us all to live in a world in which organizations that attempt to rectify years, decades, centuries of systemic racism, when certain companies try to do that, this gives Attorney General Moody pause and causes her to say, ‘Wait a minute. That’s not right, that’s racism.’”
“We’re just saying that, if that’s what your position is going to be, then if you want to live in that world, then you need to also pay attention to what looks like could be white favoritism, particularly in this context” he added.
“And in the letter, whether it’s in the student admissions context or even with Starbucks, AG Moody called them out for trying to create a diverse workforce, and somehow that gives her pause, and in her view, discrimination. Okay, if you want to take that position, we think you should be investigating these concerns in these other contexts as well.”
The Phoenix reached out to Moody’s office for comment late on Monday but did not receive a response.
The Phoenix also reached out to Weatherford Capital and Newgate Capital Partners for comment, but did not receive a response. Attempts to speak with someone at Krillion Ventures were unsuccessful, as emails to their website were bounced back and a listed phone number was greeted with a disconnected message.
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