Massachusetts now discriminates against white males who want to start a non-profit

In Massachusetts, you can start a non-profit with a board that is 100% women and/or designated minority members, but the board can’t be more than 49% white male.

For nearly a decade, my brother and I have helped thousands of cats and dogs return home. With the help of our followers, I used the New Bedford Guide and New Bedford Pet Detective Facebook pages to reunite missing pets with their owners. I feel we’ve done a lot of good for the community and decided to look into starting a non-profit to raise funds to boost the posts on Facebook and potentially add a paid person to assist. We’ve never taken a penny and have dedicated countless of hours to the cause.

After two minutes of research and to my surprise, white males can’t be the majority of a new non-profit in Massachusetts. To start a non-profit, we’d have to give up complete control of the cause to other people because we are white men.

On the official Commonwealth of Massachusetts Non-Profit page, it states the following requirements:

Massachusetts defines a qualifying minority group as:

– American Indian or Native American
– Asian
– Black
– Eskimo
– Hispanic

This means women of any ethnicity can be 100% of a non-profit board in Massachusetts, but if you are a man, you must be Native American Indian, Asian, black, Eskimo, or Hispanic to be the majority of a board. Again, to be clear, if you are a white male that wants to start a non-profit in Massachusetts, you’ll need to recruit women or qualified minorities to control it.

One has to ask, what if Massachusetts decided men of any ethnicity could control a non-profit board, but black women could not make up 50% or more of a board and would need to recruit white men to start it? You’d correctly be outraged. But this is Massachusetts, where you can discriminate based on race and sex, as long as it’s white males who are the target.