Civil Rights Division Reshaped And Directed To Pursue Disparate Impact Cases Aggressively

Fulfilling the wet dreams of liberals and the worst fears of conservatives, the Obama Justice Department is hiring 50 additional lawyers in the Civil Rights Division while shifting its focus to disparate impact enforcement. “As part of this shift,” the New York Times reports,

the Obama administration is planning a major revival of high-impact civil rights enforcement against policies, in areas ranging from housing to hiring, where statistics show that minorities fare disproportionately poorly. President George W. Bush’s appointees had discouraged such tactics, preferring to focus on individual cases in which there is evidence of intentional discrimination.

This shift is an effort to restructure American society by requiring racial proportionality everywhere, and hence it destroys any basis for believing that Obama would be a post-racial president, putting bitterly controversial racial politics behind us.

As I discussed here and here, Obama believes the United States is afflicted with pervasive “structural inequality,” a disease for which aggressive “disparate impact” enforcement leading to racial proportionality is the cure.

As I argued here, the liberal solution to “structural inequality” is to regard “all employment policies or practices … that have a disparate impact as by definition discriminatory by virtue of their disparate impact alone,” and now the Civil Rights Division is gearing up to impose that solution. In July, the Times reports,

the division’s acting head, Loretta King, sent a memorandum to every federal agency urging more aggressive enforcement of regulations that forbid recipients of taxpayer money from policies that have a disparate impact on minorities.

But perhaps there’s a silver lining to this otherwise ominous cloud over the principle holding that everyone has a right to be treated without regard to race: since it seems that virtually everything has “a disparate impact on minorities,” maybe this new, perverse civil rights enforcement policy can impose some restraint on the currently unrestrained distribution of taxpayer money to just about anybody for just about anything

UPDATE [9:15 A.M.]

Roger Clegg, as usual, puts it better. After noting that the turn to disparate impact is “disturbing … but not surprising,” he writes:

Disparate-impact lawsuits challenge practices that lead to statistically worse results for a particular minority group (or women) relative to other racial groups (or men), without alleging that the practice is actually discriminatory in its terms, design, or application — that is, is actually “discrimination” at all, by any reasonable definition of the term. Such lawsuits result in (a) the abandonment or watering down of perfectly legitimate selection devices (like tests), or (b) the adoption of surreptitious quotas (to avoid the disparate impact in the first place), or (c) both. So Democratic administrations, which tend to like quotas more than productivity, have always had a penchant for using this approach that Republican administrations have generally lacked. See my testimony before the Senate and House a couple of years ago at their respective oversight hearings for the Division.

So the issues raised by the Obama administration’s civil-rights policies will be important, but they will not be surprising or even new. Here, as elsewhere, it’s just the usual liberal nonsense, warmed over and worse.