If you want to lay water pipes for Austin Energy, the city forces you to engage in racism. Austin Energy is contracting someone to lay $10 million of water pipe under city streets, and wants the subcontractors sorted by race and sex to the hundredth of a percent. Black-owned subcontractors are supposed to get 2.04% of the work. Hispanic-owned, 5.86%. Women-owned, 2.30%. If a contractor misses those numbers then they have to prove they contacted all 270 minority- and women-owned firms on the City's list. If they get the paperwork wrong their bid gets thrown out. Federal civil rights law (and the US Constitution) bar governments from treating people differently by race or sex, so the bid packet includes the standard legal language: contractors "shall not discriminate on the basis of race or gender." Then it hands them the mandatory race and gender requirements? Austin's justification is its 2022 study that (checks notes) found Black, Hispanic, Asian, and women-owned firms were already getting more city contract money than expected. A federal judge shut down Houston's version of this program on July 28, and Austin nevertheless posted this job a month later.