Sometimes a turn of phrase that you’ve seen hundreds of times suddenly seems significant, revealing assumptions that are so buried, or common, that they’re no longer noticed. Here’s one I just noticed in a routine article about an audit of a Broward County (Fla.) airport project:
Last week, an article in the South Florida Sun Sentinel reports, the auditor charged that the construction managers “failed to track whether an airport contractor was complying with county affirmative action goals.”
How do you comply, or fail to comply, with a goal? You can fail to reach a goal, but if you have an obligation to reach the goal, it’s not really a goal at all.
When I was in the corporate world, “sales goals” and “sales quotas” for salespersons were synonymous. A new sales manager would come in and call them “goals,” then the next sales manager would come in and call them “quotas.” Nobody ever doubted that “goals” and “quotas” were the same thing.
Well, that’s it. If you’re going to race-norm, go ahead and say you’re race-norming. I’m still not convinced that’s the way to go.
I put together some statistics that I noticed recently. Students in our city schools average between 17 and 18 on the ACT. The national average is between 20 and 21, so the school administrators say we’ve got some catching up to do. The thing is, the student population is 90% black, and as I have read elsewhere, the national average for black kids is between 17 and 18. So if we’re going to race-norm, the administrators would be justified in sitting back and saying that our schools are doing as well as could be expected. Instead, they’re full of ideas about how to improve the schools, as they should be. Due to initiatives recently put in place, test scores for the lower-grade kids have risen. When those kids get to the point of taking the ACT, they may very well test higher than the norm for black kids. Then we’ll need a new, higher norm, and that will be a happy day. The point is, you never know what you can do till you try. Holding black kids to a lower standard, as AA does, may seem like the compassionate thing to do, but I believe it hurts the black population in the long run.
In the context of official racial policies, what are your goals is not exactly a question, when one party is threatening violent aggression, and the other is being made to understand that they have been given orders. The question in that case is only whether places can get away with not filling their quotas. When a certain party in Germany told businesses or schools that they had quotas or goals to fulfill, in terms of positions for members of that party, there would be no doubt as to who was the victim of the state aggression. In America, though, there is an all-but-unchallenged pretense that the potential recipients of racial patronage enforced by public intervention, are the victims, if they do not get such a position. In that sense, moral culture has deteriorated even from what was common in Germany in the time of the dictatorship’s establishment.