Dodd-Frank “Diversity” | Center for Equal Opportunity

On Friday a number of Obama administration agencies with financial-sector regulatory responsibilities jointly published in the Federal Register a proposed “Policy Statement Establishing Joint Standards for Assessing the Diversity Policies and Practices of Entities Regulated by the Agencies.” The statement comes as a result of Section 342 of the Dodd-Frank legislation, which requires these agencies each to “establish an Office of Minority and Women Inclusion” that, in turn, is to develop diversity and inclusion standards for workplaces and contracting.

The proposed statement is even worse than the bill itself, since it aggressively applies not only to the agencies themselves but also to all those regulated by it, and repeatedly insists on the use of “metrics” and “percentage[s]“ (i.e., numerical quotas) to ensure compliance. And while the statute at least cautions that diversity efforts are to be undertaken “in a manner consistent with the applicable law” (like the Constitution and, presumably, federal civil-rights statutes with texts that are colorblind in their protection against discrimination), there is no such nod in the proposed statement, nor is there any mention of stopping or preventing discrimination — the only possible justification for consideration of race, ethnicity, and sex in hiring, promotion, and contracting.

This provision of the statute was championed most prominently by Representative Maxine Waters (D., Calif.) and has been criticized by the Wall Street Journal, four members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and myself, among others (I also wrote a short summary of Section 342 here, and Christopher Byrnes wrote a much more comprehensive analysis of the statute, here). Comments on the proposed statement are due by Christmas Eve.

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With little fanfare, the federal government has posted its annual compilation of birth data, including out-of-wedlock births. Here’s the bad news (essentially unchanged from last year): Preliminary data indicate that 40.7 percent of all 2012 births were out-of-wedlock, which is appalling, and there are vast differences among racial and ethnic groups. Among non-Hispanic blacks, the figure is highest, at 72.2 percent; for American Indians/Alaska Natives, it’s 66.9 percent; 53.5 percent for Hispanics; 29.4 percent for non-Hispanic whites; and a mere 17.1 percent for Asians/Pacific Islanders.

As I noted last year, it is of course no surprise that the groups with the highest illegitimacy rates are the groups that are struggling economically, educationally, with crime, and so forth. Here’s a modest proposal: Why don’t the NAACP and similar organizations take all the money they use to challenge and complain about the standards that their groups (in the aggregate) don’t meet when it comes to university admissions, selective high-school admissions, school discipline, mortgage loans, police and firefighter tests, felon-disenfranchisement laws, employment policies that look at criminal records, etc., etc., and use that money to figure out ways to bring down the illegitimacy rates that drive all these other disparities?

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Harvard’s Professor Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr. — of “Beer Summit” fame – said last week on Morning Joe that the time has come to rethink affirmative action, replacing racial preferences with nonracial consideration of income instead. This is very similar, by the way, to what President Obama himself said when he was first running for president. Must have slipped his mind afterwards, like when his administration recently defended such racial preferences before the Supreme Court. Still, it’s encouraging that even the bien-pensants seem to be getting a little tired of this nonsense.

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New York City mayoral candidate Bill De Blasio has announced his opposition to relying on tests to determine who is admitted to New York City’s elite high schools; he is unhappy that the current system does not “reflect the city’s diversity.”
Now, I have no objection in principle to considering other indicia of talent besides test scores, but this should not be because of a desire to achieve more racial and ethnic “diversity,” and race and ethnicity should themselves of course not be factors considered.

And I’m not sure that, as a practical matter, it makes sense to change the current system. No selection system is perfect, and one can argue that in theory there would be good things about taking into account more factors than just a student’s score on one test. But there are also many advantages with the current system that will be lost if it is changed: Its simplicity, objectivity, and transparency — great virtues indeed, and just imagine the never-ending fights among groups and parents and students once it is abandoned and a new system has to be fashioned and implemented. The perfect can be the enemy of the good.

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