Seventeen Republican attorneys general sent a letter to Apple, warning it that its programs excluding white and Asian men could be illegal.
Apple’s “Entrepreneur Camp” is designed exclusively for minorities and women.
According to the AGs, “Apple has chosen to bar founders and developers from applying for the program if they are men who do not identify as women and are also white, Asian, Middle Eastern and Northern African, or Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander. Apple explains that it has fashioned this segregated program because it wants to support ‘underrepresented’ individuals in technology.”disc
The Republicans wrote that the program “reflects a troubling fixation on race and sex—and looks to run afoul of anti-discrimination laws.”
“Given how you sell your products in our States—and recruit developers, engineers, and others from our States, too—we cannot give tacit approval to your methods. Indeed, by hosting some of these camps remotely, we think Apple is effectively exporting discrimination to our States,” they asserted.
“If Apple wants to open the doors to underrepresented persons, we can conceive of plenty of ways to do so without engaging in ugly race- and sex-based classifications,” the attorneys general added. “It could target those who don’t hail from elite educational institutions. It could target those from lower socio-economic classes. It could target persons from parts of our country that haven’t yet experienced a boom in app development.”
“What Apple may not do is choose the worst of all options—an option that promises social advancement but instead sows only social division.”
West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey led the letter and was joined by the AGs of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Texas.
Last week, Apple announced that it was accepting applications for its “Entrepreneur Camp,” which “supports underrepresented founders and developers, and encourages the pipeline and longevity of these entrepreneurs in technology.”
“Applications are now open for female,* Black, Hispanic/Latinx, and Indigenous founders and developers,” the company wrote, noting that it “believes that gender expression is a fundamental right.”
