Why I Sued Comcast for Discrimination
Christopher Moses, Wall Street Journal, April 17, 2022
When I started a commercial cleaning business with my wife in 2011, I didn’t imagine that I would be a plaintiff in a race-discrimination lawsuit against a massive corporation.
I’m a Comcast TV customer. Recently I saw a commercial for Comcast RISE, a grant program for small businesses affected by the pandemic. But looking at the application, we quickly learned that it’s open only to minorities and, more recently, women. The only people excluded are white men—which disqualified our business.
This program implies that our business didn’t struggle during the pandemic because of my race and sex. {snip}
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It was my wife’s idea to start All American Clean, and we run it together. But since we file our taxes as a single-member limited-liability company in my name, we are ineligible for Comcast’s grant. If we had filed in my wife’s name, we’d be eligible. But Comcast excludes any business unless a woman or minority person owns 51% or more. So even if we owned equal shares, we wouldn’t be eligible because I am a white man.
On Feb. 22, Comcast announced the sixth round of RISE grants to 1,300 small businesses. There have been some 8,000 recipients across 590 cities and 34 states. That’s thousands of times the company has discriminated based on race and sex.
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