Why, you ask, is this a man bites dog story? Because the firm violated federal affirmative action requirements by hiring too many Hispanics, and thus not enough blacks, Asians, Native Americans, and, yes, whites.
A company running a state prison in Florence [Arizona] agreed Thursday to pay $438,626 to end a discrimination case that started two years ago when federal investigators found Hispanics were routinely hired over job candidates from other ethnic groups.
The Corrections Corporation of America, one of the largest private prison firms in the country, will pay 464 former applicants an equal share of the settlement money and hire 16 of the rejected candidates as part of an agreement with the U.S Department of Labor.
….
During a two-year period starting in March 2003, 1,364 qualified job candidates applied for positions. Out of that, the firm hired 109 Hispanics and 124 non-Hispanics, said Deanne Amaden, a spokeswoman for the Labor Department.
“Had full affirmative action been exercised there would have been a larger percentage of non-Hispanics hired for those jobs,” Amaden said.
Today any black who opposes racial preferences is derided as not really black. Tomorrow and beyond, when blacks will make up an increasingly smaller proportion of the pool of those claiming preferential treatment, that tune may change.
Indeed, it should have changed before now. Three years ago, for example, I quoted (here) Keith Murphy, host of a radio talk show in Milwaukee with a mostly black audience:
“It’s still a matter of distrust,” he said. “It’s a feeling among African-Americans that Latinos are coming in and getting the jobs and are getting preferential treatment.”
As I wrote at the time,
I’ve never heard Keith Murphy’s program, and so I don’t know whether he thinks preferences based on race or ethnicity are bad in principle or bad only when they go to Hispanics. His comment, however, exemplifies one of the most corrosive (as well as one of the most predictable) effects of preferences: their unerring ability to turn group against group in a mad scramble for the scraps of favoritism.
Nathan Glazer, back in 1975, before he succumbed in despair to the conclusion that minorities were incapable of achieving success without preferences, warned, presciently, in his book AFFIRMATIVE DISCRIMINATION that preferences could be predicted to produce
a real Balkanization, in which group after group struggles for the benefits of special treatment…. The demand for special treatment will lead to animus against other groups that already have it, by those who think they should have it and don’t.
… and, equally predictably one can add today, resentment on the part of groups who do have it against new groups clamoring for it.
What was a prediction in 1975 has now been reality for many years, and it threatens to get worse if preferences on the basis of race and ethnicity are not eliminated.
Nathan Glazer’s prediction can be echoed in this way: most of us don’t really think we have gotten even unless we have gotten even and then some.