Progressive Insurance Sued Over ‘Racist’ Grants
Progressive Insurance is under fire for a program that offers grants only to Black-owned businesses. The company is being sued for expressly prohibiting Whites, Asians and Latinos from applying.
The company, in partnership with grant administration firm Hello Alice, awarded a $25,000 grant to 10 winners for the purchase of a commercial vehicle. But only one race was allowed to qualify for the grants, which were announced on Tuesday.
All 10 of the recipients of the 2023 Driving Small Business Forward grants were Black-owned businesses. Besides the racial qualification, the businesses were required to have 10 or few employees and a turnaround of less than $5 million.
Radical leftists enjoy insisting that reverse racism is not real, but that is merely ignoring reality. A person — any person — who is subjected to discrimination merely for their skin color is a victim of racism.
That’s certainly the position of Nathan Roberts, the owner of Freedom Truck dispatch. He received an email about the grant opportunity from Progressive only to discover that he was ineligible.
The company justified the apparent discrimination by claiming that “studies have shown how inequities [make] it harder for Black entrepreneurs to access capital.”
Conservative activist group America First Legal (AFL), established by former Trump associate Stephen Miller, filed the suit against the insurance giant on Roberts’ behalf.
The suit, filed in Ohio federal court on Wednesday, asserted that the Progressive program is “patently unlawful” for limiting grant winners to only one race.
The complaint by Roberts alleged the scheme was simply “racially discriminatory grantmaking” with a “racially discriminatory requirement” that a person must be Black to qualify.
AFL attorney Gene Hamilton, in an interview with the Daily Mail, described the Roberts case as another blow in the battle against major corporations conducting similar practices. He accused the firms of putting “racial considerations into every aspect of their business operations.”
Roberts, Hamilton declared, is a hard-working small businessman attempting to support himself and his family.
While the opportunity to apply for the grant was attractive, he was denied that chance “solely because of the amount of pigment in his skin.” Hamilton asked the court to declare the grant program illegal and award “nominal” compensation to his client.
