Today the Los Angeles Times publishes a letter critical of the recent Richard Sander OpEd on affirmative action, discussed here, by John D. Trasvina, the Western States Regional Director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. He fears that Sander’s research and evidence — that affirmative action actually harms blacks more than it benefits them — “might lead some to call for its prohibition,” which Trasvina claims “would be the wrong course to take.”
By way of argument, Trasvina refers to a study that
examined the impact that Proposition 209’s ban on affirmative action had on women in construction trades in California….
The [Discrimination Research Center] report found that the slow but steady prior increase in women’s representation in carpentry, electrical and plumbing jobs and apprenticeship programs stopped after Proposition 209 was enacted. Men, on the other hand, increased both their numbers and percentage of the blue-collar workforce.
Whether the steps taken backward by tradeswomen necessarily portend the same result for African American law school applicants in a post-affirmative action world remains to be seen.
Does Trasvina mean to argue that barring racial and gender preferences, which is what Prop. 209 did, led to an upsurge of gender discrimination in the construction trades? If so, were he and his office and the central office of the Civil Rights Commission asleep at the switch for not calling attention to this travesty? Have the EEOC or any individual plaintiffs filed suits alleging employment discrimination? Indeed, is there any evidence at all of an increase in discrimination in the construction trades besides the claim that the “slow but steady increase” in women’s representation in those trades has stopped?
In the absence of any such evidence, isn’t it possible that all of the women who are interested in, available for, and qualified for work as carpenters, electricians, and plumbers already have jobs?
More fundamentally, if what Mr. Trasvina regards as an underrepresentation of women in construction trades is not a result of employer discrimination, is this alleged underrepresentation really a problem at all? What proportion of plumbers, carpenters, and electricians should be women, and by whose criteria? In short, if women are not being kept out of this field, why should government policy encourage more to go into it? Why would more women working as plumbers necessarily be better for society than whatever they would be working at without government intervention? If women decide on their own not to be a carpenter or an electrician, why are those “steps taken backward”?
Mr. Trasvina says he doesn’t know whether these “steps taken backward” will be duplicated in higher education. “Nonetheless,” he says,
enhancing student support programs rather than walking away from efforts to open doors to higher education better reflects a broad national consensus that the nation as a whole benefits with increases in minority attorneys, doctors, teachers and other professionals.
But it’s clear that Mr. Trasvina doesn’t really want “open doors” at all, or at least not doors open equally to all. He wants some people pushed and pulled through those doors on the basis of their race. Nor does he address the obvious point that for every additional black lawyer there is one less potential black doctor or teacher or other professional, which results in bidding wars for qualified blacks not only among colleges and professional schools but between different professions.
I believe there is “a broad national consensus” that the nation benefits from having more minority doctors, lawyers, etc. (but not plumbers or electricians?), but there is a much broader consensus opposing preferences based on race or gender.
Of course, the liberal solution to not enough women wanting to take construction jobs would be to force them (and further penalize businesses for not hiring people who do not want to work from them), right?
I suspect that at least some liberals support racial quotas for blacks because they believe that blacks are, on average, substantially inferior to whites with respect to intelligence. On this reasoning, without quotas, there would be very few blacks in the professions and in leadership positions, with negative results for social peace.
Now the question is: what if my hypothetical liberals are right? Wouldn’t racial quotas be justified as the cost of racial harmony? (Or, if not racial quotas, then some preferential treatment to make sure there were significant numbers of black lawyers and doctors, etc.) The Chinese in Malaysia accept that country’s quota system for Malays, I believe, on that argument. This is analogous to one of the justifications I have heard for the (limited) welfare state: it’s either a safety net or continual unrest among the poor, so buy them off.