Arian Simone spent three years watching federal judges decide whether she could give money to Black women, and on October 6, 2026 she published what she concluded.
Simone is chief executive and co-founder of the Fearless Fund, an Atlanta venture capital firm she launched in 2019 with other women of color to invest in businesses led by women of color. Its Strivers Grant Contest handed $20,000 to Black women who owned small businesses. In August 2023 the American Alliance for Equal Rights, a conservative group led by Edward Blum, sued over it, arguing that a grant open only to Black women violated Section 1981 of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, a law written to protect freed people from discrimination in private contracts.
An appeals court issued a preliminary injunction in June 2024. The case settled that September and the contest ended for good.
What Simone took from it was a pattern she says she could see in the paperwork.
“You can literally see that every time we had a ruling, every Trump-appointed judge ruled against us, and every Obama and Clinton-appointed judge ruled for us,” she said. “And I said, ‘This cannot be a coincidence by any means.'”
She describes the opposition as organized and funded rather than spontaneous. “This was actually a movement that people were funding,” she said. “They had raised $1.5 billion to come against us.” That figure is hers.
Her book, “Fearless Freedom: A Manifesto for Unlocking Wealth and Equality for All,” is published by Penguin Random House, with a foreword by Ben Crump and an afterword by Stacey Abrams. She began writing it around 2022, before the lawsuit existed.
“I started writing this book around 2022, getting solutions for economic justice because I work in the space of reducing the wealth gap,” she said. “It became even more necessary after I went through a federal court case, and that for me was important because we were the first case of the anti DEI war.”
The fund did not fold. The Fearless Global Initiative launched in September 2025 and Fearless Fund Africa in March 2026.
With the midterms on November 3, she is blunt about what she thinks is on the line, and equally blunt that the audience she is addressing does not need the briefing.
“To be very frank, Black women are aware of what’s at stake with the election. We turn out more than any other voters,” she said. “Black women are aware. Black women have been aware.”
She calls November the most consequential election in our lifetime. She also says the fix is not heroic.
“I think if everybody literally does a little, no one has to do a lot,” she said. “We have such a long way to go. But this actually is achievable.”
