We Need More Black Drug Dealers | Center for Equal Opportunity

According to this Washington Post article, black Maryland state legislators are “planning to propose emergency legislation to address the dearth of minority-owned businesses approved to grow medical marijuana in the state.”

There’s a federal constitutional problem here, though: A predicate for racial preferences in government contracting is a demonstration that there has historically been discrimination in the industry involved. Medical marijuana was legalized in Maryland only a couple of years ago, so one wonders how much discrimination there has been, historically, in an industry that does not yet actually exist.

But never mind all that. “This is a good modern-day civil rights fight,” says Del. Cheryl D. Glenn (D., Baltimore) of the Legislative Black Caucus.

Well, maybe not “good,” but certainly typical.

DOJ Warns Landlords against Refusing to Rent to People with Criminal Records

This month the Justice Department filed a “Statement of Interest” in a housing case, warning landlords that refusing to rent units to people with criminal records can run afoul of the Fair Housing Act. The reason? Because such a refusal can have a “disparate impact” on the basis of race and ethnicity.

I believe this may be the first such filing by the Obama administration since, alas, the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling last year that disparate-impact claims may be brought under the FHA, but it is no surprise. The Court was warned, by my organization and others, that this was a logical consequence of interpreting the Act this way, and HUD guidance from earlier this year contained the same warning for landlords. But Justice Kennedy disappointed us by voting with the four liberals.

It’s easy to come up with hypotheticals of silly rules landlords might have (refusing to rent to someone who ran a stop sign 50 years ago?), but of course the issue is: Who decides whether the rule make sense or not, the person who owns the building or a federal bureaucrat? And of course it makes no sense at all to say that silly rules are fine if they result in no racial or ethnic disproportion, but are of great interest to the federal government if they lead to such politically incorrect imbalances.

Thanks a lot, Justice Kennedy.

Call Your Office, Michelle Alexander – So much for the war on drugs being a thinly disguised racist war on African Americans: The gist of this front-page story in the New York Times is that the war on drugs is increasingly rural/white rather than urban/black.

The Balkanization Administration, Part II – This week the Center for Equal Opportunity filed a short comment, opposing the Obama administration’s proposal to ramp up the use of racial classifications by the federal government. To give you the background, I’m going to reiterate an earlier summary of this bad proposal, and then present you with the comment itself:

If there’s one thing that this country needs more of, it’s racial division. That, at least, seems to be the view of the Obama administration.

As Mike Gonzalez of the Heritage Foundation writes in this Issue Brief posted recently:

On the first day of Congress’s recess, the Obama Administration recommended the most sweeping changes to the nation’s official racial and ethnic categories in decades. The two most significant proposals were creating a new ethno/racial group for people who originate from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and taking from those who identify as Hispanic the option to identify their race. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Notice asked for comments to be submitted within a month—the shortest window possible—for what it described as a “limited revision” of data collection practices. Far from limited, the proposals would have long-term consequences for how one-fifth of all Americans are defined demographically and would create more societal conflict over racial preferences and political gerrymandering. The American people deserve more than a month to debate such significant changes, and Congress must weigh in.

Mr. Gonzalez concludes:

The OMB states that America’s increasing ethnic diversity requires more and more group classifications. An equally practical, and much preferred, policy response would work to smooth out these differences by promoting assimilation, which was the policy approach taken for the first two centuries of the Republic. That approach succeeded in achieving what was thought by many to be impossible: It created a cohesive American population out of many and vastly different peoples.

I should add that the administration has also recently announced that it is pushing ahead with its proposal to encourage the creation of a Native Hawaiian “Indian tribe,” despite Congress’s longstanding refusal to endorse this additional balkanization of our country.
All this in addition to its usual support of racial and ethnic preferences of all kinds, its aggressive use of the “disparate impact” approach to civil-rights enforcement, and its encouragement of racial grievance hustlers in our inner cities.

I remain optimistic about America continuing its remarkable progress toward the realization of its E Pluribus Unum ideal, but increasingly that optimism is possible only if one takes the long view and ignores what’s going on during this administration.

So here’s the brief comment on the Obama administration proposal that we filed this week:

The proposal (specifically, adding “MENA” as a racial category and effectively making “Hispanic” an exclusive racial/ethnic identifier) is a bad idea.

There are costs whenever the government uses racial and ethnic classifications. [See this testimony before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights: https://ceousa.org/attachments/article/1048/CleggStatementMay2002.pdf .] The data collected can be misused — the notice, indeed, contemplates that the data here will facilitate the use of “affirmative action” (that is, racial preferences) and “reviewing … redistricting plans” (that is, mandating racial gerrymandering) — and the very process of collecting the data and requiring Americans to identify themselves along racial and ethnic lines is divisive.

What’s more, any benefits of such data collection are dubious when the categories used are artificial and heterogeneous, as “Hispanic” and “MENA” are. [This point, among many other excellent points, is made by Peter Kirsanow of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights here: http://www.newamericancivilrightsproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/OMB20MENA20racial20classification20comment.10.12.2016.pdf .] If the costs are serious and undeniable, and the benefits are few and marginal, then it makes no sense to go down this road.

In all events, a big step like this away from the principle of E pluribus unum should be undertaken only through Congress. [Once again, this point among other excellent points is found in the discussion here: http://thf-reports.s3.amazonaws.com/2016/IB4614.pdf .]

The federal government itself should not be putting people into racial boxes, nor encouraging other people to do so or to think of their fellow citizens in these terms, nor encouraging individuals themselves to identify as something other than simply “American.”

We need less identity politics, not more.

I also discussed the proposal last week on this Federalist Society teleforum (it lasts about an hour; I come in at the 10:20 mark).

Related posts: