I understood the arguments in favor of such programs as remedial of decades of discrimination and centuries of slavery. Not that my ancestors— red dirt farmers, coal miners, drovers, welders— had benefitted a great deal from any social injustice. One of my grandfathers manufactured concrete blocks by hand, until he got a job as a forklift operator. The other repaired long-haul tractor trailer trucks. Others had it harder still, but this sort of race-based remediation was at best a blunt instrument that didn’t much treat the problem.
But what always confused me was how it wasn’t just illegal. It seemed to be, following from the principles. Yet every institution practiced some version of it, especially the government.
Maybe it’s illegal after all.
3 comments:
Every time I see a story like this, I can’t help but think that somewhere deep in the bowels of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division there is at least one office drone taking notes so that when future conditions are ripe they can hammer these companies with a suit for disparate-impact discrimination.
IANAL on this but my gut reaction is this has been "legal" because of reasoning very similar to the *actual* holding in Brown v. Board which (per Steve Hayward of Powerline) is that education facilities divided by race do not violate civil rights because the government can't make distinctions by race but because of the negative stigma attached to having distinctly black schools. (It was also strictly limited to education facilities, not any other government function). Effectively over time the idea that discrimination is fine so long as it works to the advantage of non-whites has expanded and filtered into pretty much every area of civil rights law, aided as well by the concept of 'disparate impact' which mandates quotas in all but name.
I think William Jacobsen's Equal Protection Project has been having considerable success in going after the more egregious post-George Floyd programs that don't make race and sex one factor (even if as you note they are *the* deciding factor) but are explicitly qualified for one ethnic group.
Steve Hsu, who was Dean of Research at Michigan State has fought against this because it is indeed illegal, as he kept reminding various departments. It gets reported, including to the legislatures who passed the laws and fund the place, but nothing happens. He believes that just as the liberals only want a visible show of diversity, the conservatives only want to pose as being against reverse racism. Neither wants to actually do anything.
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