In a majority African-American city like New Orleans what logic does it take for the ruling political party to use minority / disadvantaged set asides to award contracts to African-American firms.

The logic behind set asides was to help those businesses that might not be able to compete equally in the normal political and business arena. In New Orleans this would now be the Asian and Hispanic firms not the African Americans.

Government needs to just cut this nonsense out of its operation. Even if it takes a constitutional amendment we need to assert the idea of equal treatment of citizens under law. All the citizens, under all the laws, all the time, deserve to be treated equally by their governments.