It turns out that the corporate “celebration of diversity” is not only unfair, divisive, inefficient, illogical, immoral, and illegal — it doesn’t work very well by its own terms, according to the Harvard Business Review.
So here’s a crazy idea: How about if companies announced that from now on people were going to be judged as individuals and that nobody would be given any preference or suffer any discrimination on the basis of skin color, national origin, or sex? They could make clear that this applied to men and women, minorities and non-minorities alike. Might that possibly be a good way to advance nondiscrimination against women and minorities, but also reassure men and nonminorities that they wouldn’t be discriminated against either — just the objectives the article touts?
Affirmative Action for Air-Traffic Controllers? — Surely I can’t be serious, right? I’m afraid so, but fortunately our frequently ally, the Mountain States Legal Foundation, is on the case. And don’t call me “Shirley.”
MLB to Make Hiring Spanish-Language Interpreters Mandatory — According to this Washington Post story, “Major League Baseball and the players union sent a memo to all 30 teams informing them that, beginning this 2016 season, they must hire a full-time Spanish language interpreter for players.” How about requiring English-language classes in addition to — or instead of — the interpreters? Isn’t learning English what we would expect for any other professional who expected to spend a lot of time working here and dealing with other Americans?
FBI Physical Standards in the Fourth Circuit – Here’s an interesting article, describing a court of appeals decision that upheld an FBI special-agent requirement that men, but not women, be able to do 30 push-ups.
I have mixed feelings about this. If the point of the test is to make sure that special agents are generally physically fit, which the FBI argued and the court believed, then having different requirements for men and women makes sense. But if the point is to make sure that special agents have a certain level of physical strength so that they can beat up bad guys, then not so much. (For lawyer aficionados of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, by the way, my offhand reaction is that the court would have been better off saying that there’s a “bona fide occupational qualification” — or “BFOQ” — justifying the “sex-norming” here.) The unanimous panel was all Democrat-appointed, by the way, and the district judge who had ruled the other way was a Reagan appointee — not that elections matter, of course.
Of course, what may be lurking in the background here is a fear by the FBI that requiring men and women to pass the same test may have a “disparate impact” on women, and as all right-thinking people know, the “disparate impact” approach to civil-rights enforcement is fundamentally unsound. It’s also possible that the FBI just wants to have politically correct numbers, and that’s also too bad — just as it’s too bad that the Obama administration is forcing the Marines to give women ground combat roles despite research demonstrating that this will make the Marines less effective there. More on that here.
Cardinals Caught Twice – The University of Louisville has gotten caught twice recently with over-the-top political correctness: running a “whites-need-not-apply” ad for a faculty position and overtly politicizing its law school. So that’s twice it has done publicly what most universities do only secretly: discriminate in hiring and run a left-wing law school. Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, but more and more academics confuse the two.
Déjà Vu and the Sanders–Clinton Race/Crime Exchange – The discussion of race during Sunday night’s debate, especially with regard to crime, was disturbing but not surprising, following as it did the standard leftist script — and since the two candidates said pretty much the same things they had said before, and which I have commented on before.
So, just briefly: Senator Sanders bemoaned a “broken criminal-justice system,” “institutional racism,” and the way that police routinely “terrorize” and “bully” black people. Secretary Clinton repeatedly called for an end to “mass incarceration” and “systemic racism” (seeing the latter not only in the criminal justice system but in health care and all kinds of other places, too). And Sanders again added that police departments must look like their communities (quotas, anyone?).
And, once more, the dog that didn’t bark is that there was no mention of the fact that 71 percent of African Americans are born out of wedlock, and it is the implosion of the black family that is most to blame for the continuing (and in many cases growing) racial disparities in this country — in crime, poverty, unemployment, substance abuse, and so on. The simple fact is that imprisonment rates reflect crime rates, and to characterize our police and prosecutors as systematically racist is false, divisive, and demagogic, and a call for less aggressive policing is the last thing that law-abiding people in high-crime areas want.
