From the intro to Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier’s complaint against Starbucks: “1. All racial discrimination, even for supposedly benign purposes, is invidious and unlawful. 2. Defendant Starbucks Coffee Company, however, has refused to abide by this legal and moral commitment to equality. For the past five years and continuing to the present day, Defendant has excluded or disfavored nonminorities in numerous employment practices and programs. 3. Defendant has: (1) established racial quotas and goals for hiring; (2) paid employees different wages because of their race; (3) tied executive compensation to participation in race-based mentorship programs open only to persons of certain favored races and race-based retention rates of employees; and (4) excluded people of disfavored races from networking and mentorship opportunities.”

“4. But civil rights protections extend to everyone—both minorities and nonminorities. 5. A desire to promote “diversity” does not give Defendant a free pass to discriminate against persons of certain disfavored races (that is, white people, and until last year, multiracial and Asian people). Doing so violates Florida civil rights law,” the lawsuit, filed Wednesday in a Florida court, continued.

It’s almost like Uthmeier and other right wing ideologues are opposed to the last few decades of institutional efforts to correct systemic racism embedded in many aspects of American life. In fact, maybe a criteria for evaluating such civil complaints and tweets by dudes like Matt Walsh and Chris Rufo should first and foremost consider what the original intent of the policy they’re opposing was and extrapolate it to an unrelated issue. For example, pick increased taxes on cigarettes, legislated state-by-state over the last few decades to decrease lung cancer and emphysema. Kind of hard to argue that overall public health over the last few decades has not been improved by fewer people smoking two packs a day. It also helped that corporate actors like Starbucks went along and banned smoking in their establishments. Lot of overlap between political and private sector leaders who have been both anti-smoking and anti-racism. The Venn Diagram’s pretty much a complete circle.

Then also take into account the reality that the Black and Latino American middle classes are larger than they were in 1995 and, importantly, that the gap between them and the white middle class has shrunk as well. That’s where your head should be at when you evaluate this lawsuit.