Discriminations

I’m always on the lookout for odd arguments, and, reading as many defenses of racial discrimination as I do, they are never in short supply. But rarely have I run across a defense of racial preference policies as odd as the one put forward in this editorial in the Muskogee Phoenix, “Public Work Force Should Mirror Public.”

Before getting to its oddity, let me first comment on its lede, the argument in which I suppose is too ubiquitous to describe as odd:

Our public work force should mirror the racial, ethnic and gender makeup of our state.

Why? From what principle, if any, does this desire for racial, ethnic, and gender mirroring derive? Why should Oklahoma’s work force only look like Oklahoma instead of, to pick one alternative, actually being like Oklahoma? Why, that is, should the only qualities worthy of being “mirrored” be ones that show up in a mirror? Why, if mirroring appearance is so important, is it not also important to mirror other important demographic characteristics, such as religion, IQ, educational level, party affiliation, health, etc.? Moreover, does the Muskogee Phoenix believe that everybody who looks alike is alike? Would the Oklahoma work force “mirror” the public if all the Native American workers came from the same tribe? If all the Asian lookalikes were of one national background? If a wholly unrepresentative preponderance of the non-Hispanic, non-black, non-Asian workers came from the same church?

But let us not linger over the part of the Muskogee Phoenix’s argument that, at least by the standard of how widely it is shared, is not odd (all “mirror” arguments are subject to these same questions, and more). Let us instead move to its argument that is more novel:

Public contracts should not be tied to affirmative action. Public contracts should be granted to groups that provide the best services or products at the best price.

But when it comes to employment within our state agencies and offices, our state should seek to give opportunities to those groups that, for one reason or another, are disadvantaged or in the minority.

Aside from those who assume that all government workers are, by definition, less competent than those in the private sector, who knew that the work done under contract for a state is so much more important than the work actually done by the state?

Certainly the reasons why this private and public work, and the workers who do it, should be held to such different standards is not at all self-evident. If, for example, the state of Oklahoma invites bids from contracting firms to build a bridge, it makes sense to give the contract to the firms (not, by the way, the “groups”) who can build the best bridge for the best price. But for reasons I would love to hear the editors of the Muskogee Phoenix attempt to explain, they do not think it important for, say, the engineers hired to work in the Construction Engineering division of the Oklahoma Department of Transportation similarly to be the best qualified. On the contrary, those jobs should be given to “those groups that, for one reason or another, are disadvantaged or in the minority.”

Perhaps the flaw — or one of the flaws — in the Muskogee Phoenix argument here is the assumption that the purpose of public employment is to provide “opportunities” to the hired employees rather than the best services possible to the citizens of the state. Even setting that troublesome assumption aside, however, I’m pretty sure that Oklahoma, like every other state, doesn’t hire “groups” (even the limited groups that the editors recognize as groups), it hires individuals.

The editorial concludes:

Public employment is not just for one race, cultural group or gender.

Public employment should be balanced, and the balance should reflect the greater community at large. That balance always has been attained best by legal protections, and there is no reason to remove those programs in this state.

Perhaps the editors can point to someone, anyone (David Duke, where are you when we need you?) who argues that public employment is for just one race, cultural group (?), or gender. In the absence of anyone making such a ridiculous argument, why waste ink rejecting it?

As for balance, assuming that the Oklahoma Civil Rights Initiative has in fact submitted the required number of valid signatures to place the measure on the ballot, and assuming the absence of Democrats in positions of authority like the ones in Missouri who will do whatever is necessary to keep the measure off the ballot (see here, here, here, and here), the citizens of Oklahoma will get a chance next November to decide whether their state work force should be made up of the best qualified individuals the state can hire or instead be “balanced” to reflect the relative number of members of certain “groups” in the state who share a certain appearance.

If I were a leader of the Oklahoma Civil Rights Initiative, I would copy and disseminate this argument as widely as I could afford. Even though it does so unwittingly (even witlessly) and unintentionally, it provides a strong argument against treating people differently based on their race, ethnicity, or gender.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 1:02 AM | Permalink | Say What? (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Oklahoma is one of the five states targeted for a civil rights petition on the November 2008 ballot to ban race, ethnic, and gender preferences.

As in the other states that have passed similar initiatives (California, Washington, Michigan), those who want to preserve preferential treatment based on those categories have a hard time crafting opposing arguments. A good example comes from this article today summarizing the pending campaigns:

Durrell Hodge, president of the University of Oklahoma's student chapter of the NAACP, said his group has taken an official stance against the initiative but hasn't yet decided what to do about it.

Hodge said he is concerned that people would sign a petition to put the initiative on the ballot and then vote for it without understanding what the measure's effects.

“We need to be on the lookout,” Hodge said. “Their tactics are to get people to sign the petition by putting signs on it saying it stops discriminatory practices.”

Of course, that is exactly what it would do.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 12:28 PM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Oklahoma is one of the states targeted for a “Super Tuesday” vote against racial preferences in November 2008. Like the other four targeted states (Arizona, Missouri, Colorado, Nebraska), whether there actually is a vote will depend on whether enough signatures are gathered to put the measure on the ballot and whether the Democrats succeed in their inevitable efforts to keep the measure off the ballot.

Recently the Tulsa World sought responses to the proposed measure, and two of them were quite interesting. Here’s one:

The University of Oklahoma College of Medicine does not have an admissions quota based on race, said Dr. Dewayne Andrews, executive dean. All applicants must meet the minimum admission standards, he said.

This response is doubly unresponsive to the real issues. First, the Oklahoma Civil Rights Initiative says nothing about quotas; it would prevent preferential treatment based on race even in the absence of any formal or informal quota. Second, it is similarly irrelevant whether or not all accepted applicants “meet the minimum admissions standards.” The relevant question is whether some applicants are held to lower standards than others because of their race, gender, or ethnicity.

Dean Andrews, quite noticeably, did not address either of these issues. But his response was almost a model of clarity, if not relevance, compared to the response of the law school dean.

Dean Andy Coats said the University of Oklahoma College of Law attempts to find “the best minority students that can qualify, but we don’t lower the standards to take minorities.”

Coats said if the college had two equally qualified applicant and one was a minority and the other was not, the college would probably accept both candidates.

If we assume for the sake of argument that “equally qualified” means having identical, or close to identical, college grades and LSAT scores, it would be interesting to see a test of the “accept both candidates,” especially at a large school. How would, say, the University of Michigan have been able to handle admitting all whites, Asians, etc., who had the same GPA/LSAT as the preferred minorities with the lowest scores? I suspect it would have turned into an even larger, much larger, law school.

Again, no one doubts that the University of Oklahoma College of Law — or, for that matter, any and all other colleges everywhere — seeks the best minority students it can find, nor would OCRI interfere with that noble effort. But when Dean Coats says “we don’t lower the standards to take minorities,” what inquiring minds want to know is whether, like his colleague, Dean Andrews of the medical school, what he means is only that the law school doesn’t lower the “minimum admissions standards.”

The passage of the Oklahoma Civil Rights Initiative would not interfere in the slightest with the academic freedom of the medical and law schools (and all other schools in the state) to set their admissions standards wherever they please. All it would do is require whatever the standard is to be applied equally to all applicants, without regard to race, gender, or ethnicity.

For most Democrats and all preferentialists, of course, that is asking too much.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 11:52 AM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Arizona and Oklahoma join the party with the launching of drives to put the Arizona Civil Rights Initiative and the Oklahoma Civil Rights Initiative on the 2008 ballot.

UPDATE

Writing earlier today about conflicting confusions in Colorado (here), I noted that some opponents of the new civil rights initiative opposed it because there were no racial preferences to bar while others opposed it because it would reverse and prevent all sorts of good things that depended on bestowing racial preferences.

This confusion must be endemic to preferentialists (unless they are simply following the same script in an effort to obfuscate), for it has now popped up in Arizona.

Arizona Board of Regents spokeswoman Anne Barton said university officials were reviewing the situation. “But in general Arizona public universities do not have any policies in place that would provide a special benefit to a certain race or gender,” Barton said.

However, a legislator who said she opposes Connerly’s initiative said it could affect current university law school admission practices in which an applicant’s race or gender might be considered along with other aspects of their background.

This defense of the “consideration” of race is a ubiquitous preferentialist obfuscation, since what is being defended is not “consideration” of race but rewarding and punishing on the basis of race. What would be the point of “considering” race if it could not be used in any way to help or hinder someone seeking college admission or public employment?

UPDATE II

I had literally just posted the above UPDATE when I saw this article from the Arizona Republic, reconfirming my point. The article begins:

An effort was launched today to ban Arizona governments and universities from considering race, sex, color, ethnicity and national origin in hiring and other decisions.

The affirmative action initiative would prohibit everything from government contracting that gives preference to minority-owned businesses to public universities that consider race in student admissions....

First, the measure would not, could not, “prohibit ... public universities that consider race”; it would prohibit public universities from considering race. But let’s avoid grammatical nit-picking and move to what passes for substance. In stating that the Arizona Civil Rights Initiative would prohibit everything from giving racial preferences to considering race, the reporter insinuates that ACRI would ban a whole range of things. But, as I’ve just argued above, there is no distance at all between giving preference based on race and considering race! It’s the same thing, and it’s the only one thing that would be banned.

In another common oddity of the defense of preferences, as reported in the Arizona Republic article, “Rep. Chad Campbell, D-Phoenix, called the measure “just another divisive initiative.”

So, dividing people on the basis of their race and ethnicity, helping some and hindering others because of their skin color, is unifying, but a measure requiring the state to treat all its citizens without regard to their race, ethnicity, or gender is “divisive”?

Do preferentialists ever listen to themselves or each other? Do they have any idea how weird their “divisive” argument sounds? No, not sounds. Is.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 6:28 PM | Permalink | Say What? (8) | TrackBacks (0)