To equate compensating for centuries of racist, sexist, etc policies that artificially and deliberately suppressed the success of different races, genders, and

To equate compensating for centuries of racist, sexist, etc policies that artificially and deliberately suppressed the success of different races, genders, and other groups to corporate subsidies is unequivocally bullshit. A better comparison if you really insist on comparing treatment of companies to actual people would be to take two identical companies working in the same market. Force one of them to close. After the second has been established for a few hundred years, allow the one you shut down to reopen, but tell them that they can't charge more than 50% of the price of the established firm, and also say that suppliers don't have to provide goods to that firm, and if they do then those suppliers don't have to provide goods at the same level of quality. Those suppliers also charge more, for the lower quality goods. To be safe, you also don't allow the company to build anywhere near existing commercial or industrial zones, so they also have to pay more for shipping and transit, despite being less conveniently placed. After a while you say "ok, you can sell to everyone and we aren't going to limit what you can charge, etc". Then you turn around and say "see everything is equal now". Of course by this point entire industries are built around the version of the product sold by the established firm, the established firm has more resources, the subsidiaries of the established firm have more resources, as do their subsidiaries, because all those subsidiaries have been getting the same preferential treatment. Meanwhile the historically penalized firm has been given a bad rap because the quality of a lower quality of goods, because they got worse materials to start with, they couldn't afford the same quality of workers (in fact they were functionally prohibited from employing the best). Now people say "of course we pay less for goods from that company, they're lower quality". It may be a true statement, but the reason isn't because the company is fundamentally flawed, just that the established company has had unending advantages, and those advantages continue to apply even after the original penalties were removed. Of course this is a gross simplification of what actually happened to the victims of the various repressive laws and policies of various countries, because again, companies are not people.