He had to write an essay.
So Joachim began examining his life through the prism of disadvantage. It was new terrain for the 56-year-old Marine Corps veteran and longtime entrepreneur, a man who had instinctively equated success with merit.
As he sat down to write, he thought about his many setbacks: the missed promotions, the bankruptcies, the second jobs he took to make ends meet. No matter how hard he had worked, he now realized, there had always been some resistance, almost like an “invisible force” holding him back.
And then it struck him: “It could have been different if I was not a Black man.”
Joachim was writing the essay because of a decision several weeks earlier by a federal judge in Tennessee. A White woman had challenged the Small Business Administration’s 8(a) Business Development program, one of the government’s defining affirmative action programs, which certifies businesses as “disadvantaged” so they can pursue federal contracts set aside for minority-owned businesses. Last year, more than a dozen agencies disbursed $24.4 billion through the 8(a) pipeline.
Joachim said the program changed the course of his life, allowing him to win more than $32 million in accounting and auditing contracts over the past decade from the departments of Housing and Urban Development, and Transportation, among others. The experience gave him the foundation to pursue other government work and increase his staff to 15.
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But now, the judge said, the program could no longer admit applicants based solely on their racial identity. Instead, every applicant would have to offer a narrative of disadvantage, one that demonstrated how their identity set them back.
Since last June, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down race-based college admissions at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, the nation’s most selective universities have been forced to undergo a similar transformation. Applicants can no longer expect special consideration on the basis of their race, though they can use their personal essays to discuss how race has shaped their experiences.
The Harvard-UNC decision touched off a broader shift in the way institutions approach diversity. In the corporate world and government contracting, as well as higher education, explicit preferences for people of certain races or ethnicities are giving way to processes that focus on the totality of an applicant’s character, said David Glasgow, executive director of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging at New York University.
Glasgow said he expects to “see more of that kind of individualized essay-based assessment, in part because the Supreme Court has foreclosed the more direct demographic approaches.”
For the 4,800 businesses that participate in the 8(a) program, the court ruling last July touched off a frenzy. The SBA trained additional staff to review the essays that were now pouring in from participants. Lawyers hired by applicants to help complete their narratives said the process sowed confusion — and dredged up past trauma.
Nicole Pottroff, a partner at the law firm Koprince McCall Pottroff, said many applicants drew upon such severe experiences as “sexual harassment, blatant racism — things that were very hurtful to the individual telling the story.”
“Most of this is painful,” Pottroff said. “They’re hoping to repress a lot of these memories.”
In his essay, Joachim needed to describe two episodes when he experienced discrimination to establish what the SBA called “chronic and substantial social disadvantage.” Pottroff worked with Joachim to identify the incidents, which could have taken place during his education, his employment or in his business history.
He chose to write about his time in the military.
Joachim wrote that he had been a “Poster Marine” who spit shined his boots every night, kept his hair “high and tight,” and earned his sergeant’s stripes in just under three years — it typically takes four to five — while attending college at night and competing as a power weightlifter. He had been named Marine of the Month, then Service Member of the Year, the essay said.
None of it was enough to qualify him for the officers training program, which would have provided him with a college education and propelled him into the commissioned officer ranks. Instead, he wrote, a White Marine had been selected.
“It was my lifelong dream to be a Marine Officer,” he wrote, “but that dream was crushed because of the color of my skin.”
For his second incident, Joachim wrote about how, about a decade later after discharge, he repeatedly had been passed over for promotions while working as a civilian with the U.S. Army Audit Agency in Germany. White peers moved to bigger roles, he wrote, even though he was sure he performed better.
“Given my success and incredibly (nearly excessive) hard work — race again was the only ‘advantage’ they all had over me at that time,” he wrote. “And apparently that was a significant enough ‘advantage’ to promote them three years before me.”
Joachim had not always seen things this way. It had not occurred to him to blame racism when he was rejected for the officers training program or missed out on promotions.
“I never saw myself as disadvantaged,” he said. “To me, it was America. You roll your sleeves up and you work hard, and you get there.”
But writing the essay forced him to examine his life through a different lens. He found the idea that his skin color may have contributed to his many setbacks upsetting. It upended his belief that success was just a matter of hard work and perseverance.
The anecdotes in his essay, he wrote, “are just the tip of the iceberg as to the racism and social disadvantage I have faced in this country from the early days of my youth, through my education and career, and through my business history.”
Joachim was 15 when he first landed in the United States in 1984, traveling from Dominica with five siblings to reunite with their father in Brooklyn. Any fears he had about his new country were quickly overtaken by excitement, and the sense of limitless possibility it could bring. Because he wasn’t yet a U.S. citizen and college was out of reach, Joachim enlisted in the Marine Corps.
Friends who served with Joachim at Camp Lejeune, N.C., described him as a “hard charger” and a “Marine’s Marine.”
“He was always number one,” said Wayne Jackson, one of Joachim’s roommates. “He was the rabbit that everybody chased.”
Jackson, who is Black, said racism was a “reality” in the Marines when he served, though he believes the branch has since made progress. Another roommate, Jimmy Tran, agreed, noting that his peers often ribbed him about his Vietnamese heritage.
Still, both said making the leap from enlisted man to officer would have been difficult for anyone, no matter how talented. And Joachim faced an especially big hurdle, they said, because he did not have a college degree at the time.
By 1995, having received his U.S. citizenship in the military, Joachim decided to return to civilian life. He sold perfume, first in Virginia Beach and then in Mobile, Ala., for a multilevel marketing company, but went bankrupt after his operation collapsed. He worked at a fast-food chain while also loading trucks at a Coca-Cola warehouse.
In all of his endeavors, Joachim was intent on becoming “financially free” and going into business for himself, said his ex-wife, April Joachim.
He got a step closer to that goal in 1998, when he earned a business administration degree from the University of Dubuque in Iowa and went straight to work for the Army Audit Agency in Germany. Though he eventually was made a supervisor and led teams that audited the efficiency of military supply routes during conflicts in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, his career plateaued.
In 2004, his work with the audit agency took him to Fort Monroe, Va., where he began selling homes on the side. Taking his cues from Robert Kiyosaki, the real estate guru known for his get-rich-quick seminars, Joachim decided it was time to work for himself. He resigned from the Army Audit Agency and started his own accounting firm, as well as a mortgage company.
Then in 2008, the housing market crashed, ushering in the Great Recession. With his business underwater, Joachim filed for bankruptcy. He managed to find some accounting work for struggling small businesses, while also stocking shelves overnight at Walmart.
As the economy began to recover, Joachim found work for a contractor serving the U.S. Coast Guard, which eventually awarded him a subcontract. It was the break he needed, the launchpad to qualify for the 8(a) program, which “put me in a position to compete” by giving him access to the initial contracts he would need to build credibility with government agencies and fellow contractors, he said.
Suddenly contracts were easier to come by. His accounting firm, the Joachim Group, flourished. He settled on 10 acres in Southern Virginia and sent his son and daughter to college.
In his essay, Joachim reflected on that turnaround.
“The 8(a) Program is one of the only things in my life that has even remotely worked to begin to level the playing field for me as a man in a historically white man’s business world,” he wrote.
Affirmative action programs like 8(a) were designed to recognize past discrimination and “try to make up for that in some ways — without sticking it in your face,” he said. But the process of writing the essay — of having to relive those painful experiences — “forces you to focus on that and think of yourself as a second-class citizen.”
Five days after submitting his essay last August, the SBA accepted it, allowing Joachim to remain in the program for a 10th and final year.
Last month, he “graduated” from 8(a). From now on, the government will no longer classify him as “disadvantaged.”
Now, it’s “sink or swim,” he said. “And, by golly, we’re going to swim