Unintended Good News

Daniel Howes is a columnist for the Detroit News who thinks that treating everyone equally, i.e., not discriminating on the basis of race, sex, or ethnicity, would be bad for business. He agrees that the argument of those supporting equal treatment — “that discrimination by race and gender is wrong in public hiring, admissions and contracting, that policy should reflect the ideals of the Civil Rights Act and the Declaration of Independence” is “a powerful statement,” but it doesn’t comport with his view of “reality” or the “real world.”

That is he agrees with Jon Barfield (discussed at length here):

“We don’t live in the 1964 Civil Rights Act,” says Jon Barfield, chairman of the Bartech Group, a Livonia staffing company. “We live in the real world. We’ve got to grab people by the lapels and say, ‘Do you understand what will happen if you vote yes — to your son, to the poor kid in Pontiac?’”

Well, yes. We do. No one’s son, or daughter, or poor relation would be held back or pushed ahead because of his or her race, sex, or ethnicity.

It is true that at present that principle is not part of the “real world” of Michigan, that Michigan does not live in, or even by, the the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but the people of Michigan are threatening to change that, and that fact leads to the unintended good news in Howes’s column: his concern, as his headline puts it, that “Affirmative action ban stifles state powerbrokers.” And his lede:

It’s not often that Michigan’s powerbrokers find themselves in a hole, scrambling for money and influence, but that’s exactly where they are in their bid to defeat the affirmative action ban on next month’s ballot….

Big Business bosses oppose Proposal 2 because, they say, it threatens to scuttle efforts to diversify their work forces when their customer base — and the global economy — is diversity writ large. Big Labor and civil rights groups oppose it. Gov. Jennifer Granholm and her challenger, Dick DeVos, oppose it

Let’s hope that those “Big business bosses” and “Big Labor” and “civil rights groups” and other “powerbrokers” stay in the hole they’re in, and that all the money they’re contributing to defeat equality in Michigan (Howes gives some high numbers) isn’t enough to buy their way out.

UPDATE [17 Oct.]

A reader who wishes to remain anonymous sent the follwing letter to Mr. Howes. It is posted here with permission:

Dear Mr. Howes:

Your October 16 column about Proposal 2, the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, omits any mention of the operative words of the ballot proposal — “preferential treatment”. Why is it that in writing about Proposal 2 you in the media never seem able to mention those two simple words? Never mind. I know.

As for the supposed economic necessity of affirmative preferences, David Littman, former chief economist for Comerica, made pretty short work of that ridiculously unmeasurable claim in a recent op-ed piece in the Detroit Free Press:

http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061002/OPINION02/610020306/1068

You write of the efforts of corporate Michigan to raise and spend millions of dollars to maintain a system of preferential treatment in government employment, contracting, and public university admissions. But your account of the corporate efforts to oppose Proposal 2 left unmentioned several relevant issues your readers might want to know about. For instance, how “diverse” are the management suites of the universities that practice affirmative preferences and the corporations spending millions of dollars to defeat Proposal 2? Do these corporations really practice for themselves the “diversity” they seek to impose on others? Let’s consider just one corporation and one university, DTE, the local gas and electric company, and the University of Michigan, champion-in-chief of preferences.

DTE lists its senior management on its website:

http://www.dteenergy.com/news/executives.html

Eyeballing the DTE executive suites leads to this conclusion about its diversity — pretty darn white and pretty darn male.

Of the 37 senior executives listed on the DTE Energy website, over 90% are white, and over 80% are white males. Perhaps, rather than spending its shareholders money to influence diversity in the public sector DTE management ought to instead focus its efforts to improve its own diversity.

An especially appalling lack of diversity can be found in the senior management at … of all places … the University of Michigan. Over 90% of the highest ranking officials of the university are white. (President, Provost, Chief Financial Office, and the VP’s for Medical Affairs, Communications, Development, General Counsel, Government Relations, Research, Secretary of the University. Only the VP for Student Affairs is African American. Even more striking, nearly 95% of the Deans of the University of Michigan’s schools and colleges are white (18/19).

The UofM, apparently, could find no qualified Hispanic or Asian to be a senior executive or a Dean.

One suspects the same demographics exist at every corporation spending money to defeat the MCRI, including the management of the Detroit News and its parent company. They, like DTE Energy and the executive management and upper leadership at the University of Michigan, and so many in the pro-affirmative preference movement really practice “affirmative action for thee, but not for me.”

It is very unlikely that the elites like those represented by DTE, the University of Michigan, One United Michigan, and opinion shapers at the Detroit News will ever suffer themselves the burden of the policies they promote. These elites are quite content to let the burden of affirmative action fall disproportionately hard as it does on blue collar and gray collar working class whites, Asians, and other non-preferreds (both male and female) who aspire to government employment as police officers, firefighters, secretaries, and clerks either for themselves or perhaps for their children. So long as it is under-class whites and Asians who are at greatest risk for being passed over for admission to prestigious state universities in favor of less qualified minorities then corporate executives and columnists are content to promote discriminatory preference policies.

I recommend to you the dissenting opinion of Judge Boggs of the Sixth Circuit in the Grutter case. He explained the class and economic issues overarching affirmative preferences succinctly:

[I]t can hardly be doubted that, on average, those students who are admitted to Michigan Law School despite the policies in question will have been more favorably situated, economically and socially, than those such as the plaintiff whose chances of admission have been reduced or eliminated by those policies.

Similarly, because academic credentials are significantly correlated with parental income, social status, and education, the malign effects of discriminatory policies like the Law School’s will rarely fall upon the children of the educators who craft them or the judges who rule upon them [or the corporate executives and journalists who advocate for them]. The statistical region where those policies really bite, and where people like Barbara Grutter are excluded from equal consideration based on their race, are areas likely to be more heavily populated by persons whose income, ethnicity, social standing, and religious preferences are not those of the academic, legislative, and judicial decision-makers who support those policies. Thus Michigan’s policy can not be seen simply as a good-hearted effort by one group to forego opportunities for itself for the greater good.

So too it is with these corporate executives. Their defense of preferential treatment in hiring would be much more credible if it were also accompanied by their own resignations and calls to their former employers to promote a qualified minority into their now-vacant jobs. But one never seems to hear of a pro-preference university professor, corporate executive or journalist, offering to surrender his or her own job or their own child’s place at an elite, highly selective university so that a lesser qualified minority applicant could attend instead.

Couldn’t help but notice that neither you nor any white journalist at the Detroit News have felt personally compelled to open a slot to increase opportunities for a minority journalist.

In your column you quote Jon E. Barfield, chairman of the Bartech Group. The Bartech Group website informs that the company was founded in 1969 by Mr. Barfield’s father, John W. Barfield. It was one of several companies that the senior Mr. Barfield founded; some of which he then sold to large conglomerates such as International Telephone & Telegraph (IT&T) and MascoTech.

So, in short, Jon E. Barfield, promoter of race preferences, inherited the multi-million dollar company he heads; a legacy preference if you will.

We can reasonably infer that Jon E. Barfield, as the son of a successful industrialist, was himself raised in relative affluence. Which then begs the question: what educational or economic disadvantage did Jon E. Barfield himself suffer that warranted giving him any preference in college or law school admissions? Under the current race preference scheme he defends Mr. Barfield and his children receive the same race preference in university admissions or public employment or public contracting as does the poorest inner city black and MORE preference than the poorest white or Asian child. This immoral equation begs an essential question — what economic or social disadvantage did these Barfields suffer that justifies giving them such preferential treatment? What societal or individual wrong is righted by giving race preferences to the second and third generations of affluential Barfields — to the children and GRANDCHILDREN of millionaires?

Mr. Howes, this is the system you defend. Do you think it is fair? Perhaps in some future column you might make the case to your readers why Mr. Barfield or his children should be given a race preference.

Nor is Mr. Barfield’s defense of the affirmative preference status quo altruistic since Jon E. Barfield and his company appear to have a substantial financial stake in maintaining the status quo of race-based preference programs, at least in the private sector. A 1999 article in the Wall Street Journal described in some detail how the growth of the Bartech Group substantially benefited from corporate affirmative preference programs:

http://www.startupjournal.com/howto/minorityissues/199908110939-thomas.html?refresh=on

The Bartech Group owes its considerable success to exploiting the competitive advantage it obtains from being designated an automotive “minority supplier.” The Wall Street Journal reported that: “Mr. Barfield saw his minority status as just another business tool, “another arrow in the marketing quiver,”…

http://www.startupjournal.com/howto/minorityissues/199908110939-thomas.html

The fact of Mr. Barfield’s race — what he so cavalierly described as merely an “another arrow in his marketing quiver” — is what our nation’s horrific history teaches us is a fact of any of our persons that should never matter when others make decisions about us.

Whether there is a legitimate business need for “diversity” among auto vendors is certainly subject to debate, but it is a debate for another letter. The Ford Motor Company or General Motors, as private companies, are free to practice all the affirmative preference they want subject to the non-discrimination laws. The free market and the shareholders will ultimately decide the rightness or wrongness of that business judgment. (Though one wonders if that is not already happening to some degree as the market share of U.S. auto manufacturers continues its free fall. Just how much does Toyota really trouble itself over the racial “diversity” of its brake lining suppliers?)

But the state practicing affirmative race and gender preferences is a very different thing.

So far he has not received a response.