Читать книгу Supplier Diversity For Dummies - Kathey K. Porter - Страница 34

There is a scene in the Lee Daniels movie, The Butler, that shows Washington, D.C., burning after the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968. In that scene Nixon asks his aides what do “they” want? One of the few African American advisers to Nixon told him that Blacks wanted to do business like every other American but were discriminated against in government contracts. That was the supposed seed of supplier diversity.

Issued by President Richard Nixon, this order specifically addressed economic entrepreneurial equality. It provided a framework for developing a national program for minority business enterprises and establishing the Office of Minority Business Enterprise (OMBE) and the Advisory Council for Minority Business Enterprise. Note: In 1977, Executive Order 12007 terminated the Advisory Council for Minority Business Enterprise. OMBE became the Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA). In 2021, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced that the MBDA would be a permanent agency and expanded, and it was elevated with the passage of the Minority Business Development Act of 2021.

Initially, Executive Order 11458 was viewed as a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, the goodwill was short lived because the order didn’t provide language clarifying who can be considered a minority-owned business. This gap left the interpretation of who’d be eligible up to agencies and organizations, so the order had little to no impact on fostering economic inclusion.

Nixon replaced Executive Order 11458 with Executive Order 11625, which attempted to solve the problem of defining who was eligible for these business programs. The order introduced vague language such as “socially and economically disadvantaged persons” and defined minorities as not just Black people but also Puerto Ricans, Spanish-speaking Americans, American Indians, Eskimos, and Aleuts. Many felt this language diluted the initial intention of the executive orders, which was to address the need for social justice for Black Americans. Because of an outcry from women’s rights groups, women were also included in this category and would go on to be classified as minority or disadvantaged, a designation that continues to this day.