He had to write an essay.
So Joaquim began looking at his life through the prism of adverse circumstances, new territory for the 56-year-old Marine veteran and longtime entrepreneur who instinctively equates success with merit.
As he began to write, he thought about his many setbacks: the missed promotions, the bankruptcy, the second jobs he’d taken to make ends meet. No matter how hard he worked, he realized, there was always some resistance, like an “invisible force” holding him back.
Then he realized, “If I wasn’t black, maybe things would have been different.”
Joachim wrote the essay in response to a ruling a few weeks ago by a federal judge in Tennessee in a case in which a white woman challenged the Small Business Administration’s 8(a) business development program, one of the government’s signature affirmative action programs that designates businesses as “disadvantaged” and allows them to pursue federal contracts reserved for minority-owned businesses. Last year, more than a dozen government agencies spent $24.4 billion through the 8(a) pipeline.
Joaquim said the program changed his life, helping him secure more than $32 million in accounting and auditing contracts over the past decade from agencies including the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Transportation, and that the experience helped him land other government jobs and grow his staff to 15 people.
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But the judge said that going forward, the program could no longer accept applicants based solely on their racial identity, and instead all applicants must submit a statement of adverse circumstances showing how their identity is a disadvantage.
The nation’s most prestigious universities are being forced to make similar reforms after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down race-based college admissions practices at Harvard and the University of North Carolina last June. Applicants can no longer expect special consideration based on race, but they can discuss in a personal essay how race has affected their experience.
The Harvard and North Carolina decisions sparked a broader shift in how diversity is approached: in business, government contracting and higher education, processes that explicitly favor people of certain races or ethnicities are being replaced by diversity-focused processes. David Glasgow, executive director of New York University’s Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging, said selections are made based on the applicant’s overall character.
“Now that the Supreme Court has banned more direct demographic approaches, we’ll likely see more of these types of individualized, essay-based assessments,” Glasgow said.
For the 4,800 companies in the 8(a) program, the ruling last July caused uproar, and the SBA hired more staff to review the essays that were pouring in from participants. Lawyers who applicants had hired to help them complete the essays said the process was confusing and unearthed past trauma.
Nicole Potroff, a partner at the law firm Coprince McCall Potroff, said many applicants cited serious experiences in their testimonials, including “sexual harassment, blatant racism and other things that are very traumatic for the person telling the story”.
“Most of it is painful,” Pottroff said, “and they want to repress a lot of these memories.”
In his essay, Joakim was required to describe two episodes in which he experienced discrimination to establish what the SBA calls “chronic and significant social disadvantage.” Pottroff worked with Joakim to identify incidents that may have occurred in his education, employment or business history.
He chose to write about his time in the military.
Joakim wrote that he was a “poster Marine,” shining his shoes every night, wearing his hair “high and tight,” competing as a power weightlifter while attending night college, and earning the rank of sergeant in just under three years (it usually takes four or five). He was named Marine of the Month and then Service Member of the Year, according to the essay.
None of them were good enough to qualify for the officer training program that would have given them a college education and allowed them to advance to officer cadet status. White Marines were selected instead, he wrote.
“It had been my lifelong dream to become a naval officer,” he wrote, “but that dream was shattered because of the color of my skin.”
Second, about a decade after his discharge, while working as a civilian for the U.S. Army Inspection Service in Germany, Joachim wrote that he was repeatedly passed over for promotion in favor of white colleagues who were given larger positions, despite his belief that he had performed better.
“Given my success and incredible (almost excessive) effort, the only ‘advantage’ they had over me at the time was that I was racing again,” he wrote, “and apparently that was enough of an ‘advantage’ to get them promoted three years ahead of me.”
Joachim didn’t always see things this way: When he was denied admission to an officer training program or passed over for promotion, he wasn’t tempted to blame racism.
“I never thought of myself as at a disadvantage,” he says. “To me, that was America: If you roll up your sleeves and work hard, you can get there.”
But writing the essay forced him to look at his life in a different light. He was unsettled by the idea that the color of his skin might have been the cause of so many of his setbacks. It upended his belief that success was just a matter of hard work and perseverance.
He wrote that the anecdotes in the essay “are just the tip of the iceberg of the racism and social disadvantage I have faced in this country since my youth, throughout my education, my career and my business history.”
Joaquim was 15 when he first landed in the United States in 1984, traveling with his five siblings from the Dominican Republic to reunite with his father in Brooklyn. His anxiety about his new country was quickly replaced by excitement and a sense of limitless possibilities it offered. Not yet a U.S. citizen and unable to attend college, Joaquim enlisted in the Marines.
Friends who served with Joachim at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina described him as a “fierce challenger” and “a Marine’s Marine.”
“He was always No. 1,” said Wayne Jackson, one of Joakim’s roommates. “He was the rabbit that everyone was chasing.”
Jackson, who is black, said racism was a “real thing” when he was in the Marines but that he thinks the Corps has made progress since then. His other roommate, Jimmy Tran, agreed, noting that his peers often teased him about his Vietnamese heritage.
Still, they said, the transition from NCO to commissioned officer would have been difficult for anyone, no matter how talented, and Joachim faced an especially big hurdle because he didn’t have a college degree at the time.
By 1995, After gaining U.S. citizenship through the military, Joaquim decided to return to civilian life, first selling perfume for a pyramid scheme in Virginia Beach and then Mobile, Alabama, but the business collapsed and he went bankrupt. He also worked for a fast-food chain and loaded trucks at a Coca-Cola warehouse.
His ex-wife, April Joaquim, said Joaquim was keen to become “financially free” in all his endeavours and to start his own business.
He came one step closer to that goal in 1998 when he graduated with a business degree from the University of Dubuque in Iowa and landed a job with the Army Audit Office in Germany. He was eventually named a supervisor and led a team that audited the efficiency of military supply routes during conflicts in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq, but his career stalled.
In 2004, his job with the audit agency took him to Fort Monroe, Virginia, where he began selling homes on the side. Inspired by real estate guru Robert Kiyosaki, known for his get-rich-quick seminars, Joakim decided it was time to strike out on his own. He left the Army audit agency and started his own accounting firm and mortgage company.
Then in 2008, the housing market collapsed and the Great Recession began. His business collapsed and Joachim filed for bankruptcy. He managed to find an accounting job for struggling small businesses while also working at Walmart restocking shelves at night.
As the economy began to recover, Joaquim found work with a U.S. Coast Guard contractor and eventually won a subcontract. It was the opportunity he needed, he said, and the starting point to get through the 8(a) program, “putting me in a position to compete” by winning that first contract he needed to build credibility with government agencies and other contractors.
Suddenly, contracts were easier to come by and his accounting firm, Joachim Group, thrived. He settled on 10 acres in southern Virginia and sent his son and daughter to college.
In his essay, Joachim reflected on that turning point.
“The 8(a) program is one of the few things in my life that has even remotely helped to begin to level the playing field for me, a man, in the historically white, male business world,” he wrote.
Affirmative action programs like 8(a) are designed to acknowledge past discrimination and “try to make up for it in some way, rather than shoving it in your face,” he said, but the process of writing the essay — having to relive those painful experiences — “forces you to focus on it and think of yourself as a second-class citizen.”
Five days after submitting his essay last August, the SBA accepted it, allowing Joakim to remain in the program for his 10th and final year.
Last month, he “graduated” from 8(a) – the government will no longer classify him as “disadvantaged.”
Now it’s “sink or swim,” he said, “and we’re going to swim.”