As you may remember, Dr. Martin Luther King said this in the summer of 1963:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.

As a side note, I was in Cuba when he gave that speech so did not hear it until we came to the U.S. in the fall of 1964.  The words made a lot of sense to me as I saw the civil rights movement develop from the 1960s to the 1970s.

A judge in Texas dealt a serious blow to the Biden administration by confirming that we don't do racial preferences for preferred races in the U.S.  We judge people by character, not skin color.

This is the story:

The Biden administration's so-called "equity agenda" suffered a major defeat in federal court recently. In a lawsuit challenging the Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA) — a new federal agency dedicated to helping only certain preferred racial groups — a federal judge ruled that the Biden administration cannot discriminate based on race. 

Judge Mark Pittman, a Trump-appointee based in Fort Worth, Texas, delivered a remedial lesson in civics to the administration: "The Constitution demands equal treatment under law." 

While such a statement should be obvious to any American, this was quite a painful blow to the administration. On his first day in office, President Biden declared a "whole of government" approach to racial equity, requiring all his agencies to "affirmatively advance[e] equity." In practice, the equity agenda resulted in a bevy of programs open to some races, but not others. Farmers, restaurant owners, homeowners, small business owners and federal contractors all got billions in federal tax dollars, so long as they belonged to certain racial groups. 

In other words, you cannot discriminate based on race.  Once upon a time, that was a generally accepted principle in the U.S.  However, that was before, when we believed what Dr. King said.

Why did the Biden administration even push this agenda anyway?  My guess is that it was all political.  They allowed a federal agency to push something not approved by Congress knowing that a judge will eventually strike it down.  Then they can blame the judge and systemic racism.

We have reason to be happy today: you can't discriminate based on race!

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Image: Dutch Nationaal Archief.