Civil Rights Don’t Get a California Exemption

On September 10, Defending Education filed a federal civil rights complaint against Oakland Unified School District, accusing two of its programs, Latino Men & Boys and Latina Mentoring & Achievement, of handing out tutoring, mentoring, health support, and cash stipends to students of one race and sex while turning everyone else away. One program reportedly distributed about $3,000 in stipends and “milestones” during the 2024-25 school year. The other carries a reported $430,000 price tag, funneled through a nonprofit partner, The Unity Council. Both allegedly ran on federal money, which is precisely why Title VI and Title IX apply.

I’ve spent 30-plus years advising fiduciaries on who gets what benefit and why, and testifying as an expert witness when someone gets that allocation wrong. So, when I read that a public school district might be handing out cash based on a kid’s ethnicity, my first reaction wasn’t shock. It was a recognition of the DEI culture that rewards certain races over others.

Here’s my thesis: A federally funded school district in Oakland doesn’t get to read the Fourteenth Amendment differently than a district in Boise or Biloxi. Civil rights aren’t a states’ rights matter, and they don’t stop at the Sierra Nevadas. If Title VI means a school can’t deny a Black student a benefit because of his race, it means the same thing when the excluded student is White, Asian, or anything else. The statute doesn’t grade on a curve for zip code or voter registration.

The legal theory here isn’t complicated, whatever the euphemisms attached to it. Justice Antonin Scalia spent a career arguing the Constitution is colorblind by design, not by accident, and the Supreme Court caught up to him in 2023. In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the Court held that race-conscious government action is presumptively unconstitutional unless it survives strict scrutiny, recognizing only two interests narrow enough to qualify: remedying a government actor’s own specific, proven past discrimination, and preventing an imminent safety threat in a prison. “Diversity” didn’t make the cut. Neither did “equity,” a word doing a great deal of unexamined work in Oakland’s program descriptions. Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley has made the same point repeatedly: intent doesn’t launder a racial classification. A benefit sorted by race is a benefit sorted by race, whether the sorting hand belongs to a segregationist school board in 1962 or an equity office in 2026.

None of this means Oakland’s underlying diagnosis is wrong. Plenty of Latino boys in that district are struggling, and a district that notices and wants to help deserves credit for paying attention. But the fix doesn’t require a racial gate. Tie the benefit to something real and measurable, chronic absenteeism, credit deficiency, English-learner status, foster or homeless placement, and you serve the same population without excluding a single kid because of race or sex. Oakland had that option. It chose the race gate instead, then reportedly attached cash to it, which converts a curriculum debate into a straightforward exclusionary claim.

It’s true that a complaint isn’t a finding. The Office for Civil Rights hasn’t ruled on anything yet, and Oakland is entitled to the same due process any accused party gets: an investigation, a factual record, and a chance to explain whether these were hard eligibility walls or loosely worded outreach priorities. If OCR substantiates the allegations, the likely outcome isn’t a funding apocalypse. Title VI and Title IX both require a hearing, a finding that voluntary compliance failed, and a thirty-day congressional notice before a single federal dollar gets cut off. History says Oakland signs a resolution agreement, rewrites its eligibility language, and opens the program to everyone who needs it, a mild remedy for a district that, per the complaint, ran a cash-benefit program with a race requirement for at least three straight school years.

I don’t come at this as a bystander. My kids are being raised Jewish, I was raised Catholic, and I trace part of my mother’s family to the Algonquin. I’ve spent time advocating with indigenous community leaders, and I have real sympathy for populations that got a genuinely raw deal from history. None of that sympathy survives contact with a policy that solves an old injustice by manufacturing a new one, sorted by the same blunt instrument, race, just pointed in a different direction. The military teaches us that the only color that matters is the insignia on your collar, and I lived it coaching youth sports: the door stays open for whoever shows up and puts in the work. Oakland’s programs, as described in the complaint, ran the opposite rule, in a district serving roughly 34,000 kids that shouldn’t need a federal investigator to explain that to it.

That’s the real stake here, and it’s bigger than Oakland. If a wealthy, deep-blue district can run race-exclusive stipend programs for years on federal money before anyone files a complaint, the message to every other district is that civil rights enforcement depends on your area code and your congressional delegation’s politics. That’s a national problem, because the next district testing the same theory might be in your town, not Oakland’s, and the law needs to mean the same thing whether Sacramento or Tallahassee signs the paycheck.

Parents everywhere have a simple next move: file a public records request for your own district’s “affinity,” “achievement,” or “mentoring” program eligibility criteria and see who’s on the list and who isn’t. Congress has an equally simple one: tie routine Title VI compliance audits to Title I funding disbursements so districts get checked before four years pass, not after a watchdog group does OCR’s job for it. The Fourteenth Amendment already settled this argument. Oakland just needs the memo, and it needs to arrive the same way it would in any other state in the union.