The Public Policy I Diversity's Deep Roots
Frum, David
Diversity's Deep Roots by David Frum A professor I know who teaches at a small liberal arts college tests his students' adherence to the doctrines of "diversity" by writing three questions on the...
...It may saddle them with workforces somewhat less competent than those they could attract if they hired without regard to race or sex...
...it bars them because it wants to, and unless somebody forces it to stop, it will go on barring them...
...Wilson, the regents of the University of California voted in July by a 14-10 margin to do away with their David Frum is the author of Dead Right (New Republic/BasicBooks) and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute...
...Meanwhile, though, American life will continue to be poisoned by the racial allocation of opportunities...
...The city of Richmond's order to city contractors to subcontract at least 30 percent of all municipal contracts to minority-owned firms—a policy over-ruled by the Supreme Court in the 1983 case City of Richmond v. J. A. Croson Co.—was voted by a city council itself dominated by minority-group councilors...
...What do blacks know that whites don't...
...In Griggs, Chief Justice Warren Burger had ruled—with no dissents—that the 1964 Civil Rights Act prevented an employer from requiring that job applicants possess a high school diploma and write an IQ test, if the effect of those requirements would be to disqualify disproportionate numbers of blacks...
...Presidential counselor Abner Mikva hastily disavowed Panetta's threat...
...These companies have by now promoted an entire generation of managers who believe in diversity hiring—indeed, at the most enthusiastic practitioners of affirmative action, like Corning, a manager's hopes of promotion very largely depend on his diversity record...
...This is not "reverse discrimination"—it is plain, old-fashioned discrimination in favor of one's own...
...That, however, will leave intact the regulations adopted by the innumerable federal regulatory agencies—from the Federal Reserve to the Federal Aviation Administration—that have added "diversity" to the list of things they check in the companies under their supervision...
...Affirmative action some time ago ceased to be a gift that sensitive whites bestow upon minorities, and evolved into an ethnic spoils system minorities confer upon themselves...
...Indeed, the Supreme Court's 1977 Bakke decision (involving admissions criteria to the medical school at the University of California's Davis campus) forbade state universities and other state agencies to use race as thedecisive factor in awarding benefits...
...And even if some future president were to take the trouble to fill vacancies at these agencies as they gradually appeared, with officials pledged to reform their policies, the vast bulk of the affirmative-action regime would still remain in place...
...The affirmative action regime won't be ended with the stroke of a pen, but only after a long, arduous struggle...
...More nods, more scribbling...
...Still, nobody ever seems to accomplish much by pointing out this ideology's ugly antecedents and implications...
...Unless the employer is a federal contractor—in which case he will be bound by executive orders requiring affirmative action...
...More: it's become the livelihood of an entire industry—litigators, consultants, bureaucrats, college administrators, corporate vice presidents...
...law that any employment requirement that has the effect of disadvantaging a favored group amounts to discrimination, 54 The American Spectator October 1995 regardless of the employer's intent—unless the employer can prove to the satisfaction of a federal judge that the requirement is indispensable to the success of the employer's business...
...It required barely one full news cycle for Leon Panetta, President Clinton's chief of staff and a former California congressman, to announce that, yes indeed, the Clinton administration would do all in its power to ensure that implementing the new policy would lose the university money...
...But the following year, feeling guilty for all the bad feeling caused by his appointment of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, he signed an essentially identical law...
...v. Atonio, held that disproportionate impact alone did not prove discrimination...
...The University of California's administrators and teachers—who overwhelmingly oppose the new no-favoritism policy—have delightedly gone to work "reviewing" California's preference programs...
...nine-campus system's flagrant use of race and sex in admissions...
...Race and sex preferences are the product of literally thousands of mutually reinforcing federal executive orders, bureaucratic enforcement actions, private lawsuits, state and local laws and ordinances, and individual policies of corporations and universities...
...They hope to invoke the federal threat to exempt as many affirmative-action programs as possible from the regents' vote...
...In the eyes of the eager chancellors at UC Berkeley and UC Los Angeles, the $400 million the university collects from Washington for student financial aid represents a final, desperate argument for retaining quotas...
...Pete Wilson have proposed to do—will likely prove as easy as scraping wax off broadloom...
...The same is true of AT&T, Corning Glass, Ford, and the other major corporations lauded for their leadership in diversity hiring...
...Today, it remains U.S...
...No single enactment or statute created affirmative action...
...And so long as that conviction persists, Congress can repeal all the statutes it wants: applicants for jobs and colleges are still going to be ticking off those little boxes identifying themselves as white, black, Hispanic, or Asian/Pacific Islanders...
...After Congress repeals the 1991 act, the next Republican president can rescind the relevant executive orders...
...171 The American Spectator October 1995 55...
...As Californians will soon discover...
...Employers who have previously been sued for alleged discrimination, either privately or by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and who have accepted an affirmative-action scheme as part of the "consent decree" that settled the case, stay bound by the terms of that decree in perpetuity...
...N or is this just a matter of white guilt...
...If the "abolition" of affirmative action means simply the repeal of laws and the canceling of executive orders, nobody should expect the preferential hiring and admissions practices of American governments, corporations, and universities to change swiftly...
...Not quite: In 1990 Congress adopted a new civil rights law re-establishing the Griggs rule...
...In 1989 the Supreme Court effectively over-ruled the 1971 court decision that opened the way to contemporary race preferences, Griggs v. Duke Power Co...
...Game over for diversity hiring...
...America's CEOs, governors, mayors, and university presidents will not readily surrender their conviction that they are doing the right thing—that their race consciousness somehow serves the true interests of the nation...
...Fine, you may say next...
...True, the University of California could plausibly argue that it wasn't exactly breaking the law—the murky plurality decision in Bakke allowed schools and state agencies to attach at least some weight to race...
...To a startling degree, top management at large companies has internalized racial preference as a crucial personal belief, as part of what it means to be an ethical employer...
...Affirmative action may cost them money...
...They attached, however, one caveat: the vote would only stand so long as the new policy did not lose the university federal money—a serious concern, since it receives $4.6 billion from Washington annually...
...State and local governments and agencies will continue to be bound by affirmative-action laws and regulations of their own...
...0 kay, you may say, all that advocates of equality before the law need do is repeal the 1991 Civil Rights Act...
...Affirmative action has ceased to be a public policy...
...Diversity's Deep Roots by David Frum A professor I know who teaches at a small liberal arts college tests his students' adherence to the doctrines of "diversity" by writing three questions on the blackboard at the beginning of term: "What do women know that men don't...
...Remember, too, that some employers and virtually all universities will want to maintain their affirmative-action programs...
...Prodded by Gov...
...President Bush vetoed it...
...And so they will, sort of...
...This transformation of affirmative action into a politicized form of ethnicself-help represents the real weakness of the view expressed by some conservatives that affirmative action should be acceptable so long as it is "voluntary...
...A s the California example shows, even the most blatant racial and sexual quotas have again and again proved unkillable, despite their monstrous unpopularity...
...Never mind...
...The students nod enthusiastically and start scribbling in their notebooks...
...But that only underscores the point: the school was indulging in a policy of its own choosing, without much attention to federal law, in obedience to pressures from its local constituency and ideological imperatives of its own...
...The 1989 case, Wards Cove Packing Co...
...It may even generate damaging ill will between beneficiaries of preferences and victims of them...
...Forgive the vulgar comparison, but "abolishing" affirmative action—as Republicans like California Gov...
...The University of California doesn't bar better-qualified Asians in favor of less-qualified Hispanics because the federal government forces it to...
...And corporations hoping to win municipal and state contracts, acquire cable systems, or avoid hostile regulatory decisions must factor it into their planning...
...Scrap the law and, with Griggs out of the way, employers will regain the freedom to hire the best person for the job, regardless of race or sex...
...it's become an ideology...
...Never mind again that it hardly seems likely that the federal government would take back the $2.4 billion it pays the University of California to run the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore laboratories, or the $600 million it reimburses the university's hospitals for treating Medicare and Medicaid patients...
...But affirmative action also serves important institutional interests within these firms...
...Those who dissented decamped long ago...
...Screech—bang...
...In time, of course, firms and schools that practice affirmative action will lose ground to those that hire and admit by merit...
...What do Germans know that Jews don't...
Vol. 28 • October 1995 • No. 10
