Perhaps our most disturbing legal doctrine, one perfectly designed to further the racial “Balkanization” of American society and thereby exacerbate racial divisions, is “disparate impact.”
At the heart of the disparate impact doctrine is the illogical idea that any racial disparities must be the consequence of racist practices. The underlying assumption is that in a world free of racism, every racial group would be equally represented in a proportionate sense in everything; hence, any place this “natural” outcome doesn’t occur has to be tainted by discrimination.
Of course the real purpose behind the left’s employment of disparate impact is to force companies, colleges, city governments and other organizations to protect themselves from lawsuits by employing quota systems that give preference to some groups (blacks and Hispanics) over others(whites and Asians). The broader purpose is to win votes and acquire political power by inciting racial grievances and more generally stirring up the racial pot.
If, for example, giving the same exam and using a common grading system for everyone who wants to be a firefighter in Philadelphia leads to too few black firefighters in Philadelphia, then a different and less rigorous exam and grading system must be used so that more black applicants qualify, such that, in the end, if 40percent of the population of Philadelphia is black, then so too will be 40 percent of the firefighters. Or conversely, a more difficult exam must be given to whites so that fewer pass, or perhaps an even more difficult one still to Asians so that their passage rate is the same as for other groups.
Disparate impact therefore engages in reverse logic to implement social engineering. It assumes an inherently implausible ideal-precise proportionate representation for all groups-and then uses the failure of that ideal to emerge in practice to mandate various schemes designed to produce it. There need not be any actual evidence of racism or racist intent at work; any outcomes that aren’t “proportionate” are sufficient to assume its presence. Thus, the only evidence needed to prove that the test a police department uses in hiring is racist is data showing that blacks or Hispanics don’t do as well on it as other groups.
It takes only a few moments of reflection to realize that this is all absurd, since at no point in human history has there ever existed anything even closely resembling such idealized proportionate representation in any endeavor, whatever methodology one uses in comparing or defining groups.
Since the logic of a given principle is best discovered through its extrapolation, one can imagine a future National Basketball Association (NBA) in which, by applying the disparate impact principle, each team is required to have more Asians, Hispanics and whites and a lot fewer blacks so that they “look more like America.” After all, disparate impact logic tells us that a league in which one racial group (blacks) comprise 80 percent of the members must be inherently racist, even if white and Asians guys “can’t jump.” In a similar sense, we could see law enforcement officials deliberately refuse to arrest black suspects or even arrest whites at random who aren’t suspected of anything just to get balance in the racial bean count.
No one with a functioning mind would embrace such schemes, but the Obama administration has just launched its latest disparate impact campaign nonetheless. Attorney General Eric Holder has now sent guidelines to the nation’s school districts warning them that any practices which produce a “disparate impact” in school discipline regarding blacks and Hispanics will be closely scrutinized and likely taken as evidence of racism.
The ostensible problem is that black students are disciplined far more frequently than other students; to an extent higher than their percentage of the overall student population would suggest. But rather than conclude that this flows from young black males misbehaving more frequently than, say, young Asian females, and looking for ways to improve black student behavior (and thereby provide the kind of orderly school environment in which all groups, black students included, can make progress), the politically useful charge of racism is flung instead.
The great irony in all this is, of course, that a charge of covert racism without evidence is used to mandate a solution consisting of overt, genuine racism-a deliberate system of preferences based on pigmentation to produce a desired racial outcome. By such logic it would be necessary to discriminate against Asians (and Jews, as once was the case) in college admissions because they tend to do (and apparently behave) better in school than blacks and Hispanics do.
Thus have liberals stumbled on an almost perfect political-spoils mechanism-a way of leveling accusations of racism that is inherently “non-falsifiable” and which requires no actual evidence of racist intent, but also compels as a remedy the bestowal of government-sanctioned benefits upon key subgroups of the liberal base at the expense of other groups.
That it also comes at the expense of logic and justice apparently doesn’t matter to progressives like Barack Obama and Holder. So who are the real racists now?
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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial, Pages 11 on 01/27/2014