6.  Disparate Impact &  🖤 💣 Affirmative-Action

The numbers – always with the numbers. Not enough people of color here, not enough women there. Pay no attention to professional sports, or all those fields dominated by women.  Welcome to the “disparate impact” tunnel-vision special-olympics sweepstakes, where you might win a quota-based free ride – if, of course, you qualify as a victim

"New York Destroyed by Earthquake; Women and Minorities Hit Hardest." – Joe Sobran

Way back in 1971 a very liberal, very activist Supreme Court (the same court that found hidden in the “penumbras” of the Constitution a right to have an abortion) decided it was unfair for a company to require that job applicants have a high school diploma -- unless the company could prove the job required such knowledge as a diploma supposedly conveyed.  The reason?  Too many blacks didn’t have diplomas and were thus, the Court reasoned, being discriminated against.  The diploma requirement had a “disparate impact” on blacks. 

Now, a high school diploma was a fairly good indicator of what kind of employee you were hiring – particularly in terms of responsibility and perseverance.  This remained true even if the job was no more complex than loading boxes onto trucks.  And, the diploma was also a testament to basic skills like reading --  and finally,  the diploma requirement offered businesses the possibility of hiring people who, though initially “over-qualified-for-loading-boxes”, might be capable of advancing within the company.   

But the leftist, activist -- legislate-from-the-bench Supreme Court wanted more blacks employed - period.  So the court basically said – “No need to examine closely the reasons for this abysmal lack of black high school graduates – let’s keep it simple – the diploma requirement is racist."  This decision would have profound reverberations that still shake, rattle, and roil our country.

That Griggs v. Duke Power decision enshrined into constitutional law the “disparate impact” supposition, which then quickly got boiled down to a simple formula – if a business didn’t have proper “numbers”, it must be racism (or sexism).  Employers were in danger of federal action (or boycotting) if the racial or gender makeup of their employees didn’t reflect the proper “diversity”.  Yes -- it was quota time.

Thus was created the great Identity Politics can-o-worms that now permeates our society, where the treatment of citizens is not at all – as ML King dreamed – colorblind, but is in fact rooted in just the opposite concept – color coded.  A business now runs afoul of the government if it doesn’t treat people differently based on race, sex, etc.  

So . . . this disparate impact quota-sledgehammer – the weapon of choice for race activists -- once again raised its heavy head in New Haven in 2003, when the city refused to promote white firefighters because no blacks qualified for promotion on the department's exam – even though the written test had been carefully crafted to be bias-free.  Eventually the white firefighters sued, and the Supreme Court -- barely (5-4) -- decided in their favor -- decided they had been discriminated against because of their race.  As plain-as-day obvious as this race discrimination was, the four liberal justices -- of course -- disagreed.   

Truth be told (which almost never happens in matters of race), the test hasn’t been invented – from the SAT to LSAT to the GRE to a high school math test to a 4th grade reading test – where blacks don’t do significantly worse than whites.  Since the Left is chain-link locked into the belief that blacks could not possibly be responsible for their outcomes in society, the Left must inevitably find hidden racism lurking in tests.  If this logic is followed, "disparate impact" tunnel-vision points directly at discarding all exams for promotion that dont "make the numbers" -- exams which, according to the NAACP are an "antiquated method of measuring leadership". 

No, the NAACP believes "excelling on the job" is how leaders should be chosen.   Allow me to point out, in the New Haven case, how profoundly fallacious – and dangerous -- this premise is:

In reality, this throw-out-the-test mentality has led to a lowering of standards and expectations for blacks in many walks of life – particularly in education.  Since I don’t know of any human endeavor whereby someone acquires the ability to jump higher by having the bar lowered, this seems yet another example of leftist “let’s pretend” social policy exacerbating rather than helping a condition. 

So here we are in our modern Double Standard Olympics – where our government and our elite universities award their medals using different standards for different competitors.  Does anyone out there really believe Sonya Sotomayor or Elena Kagan are the most brilliant legal minds available for the Court?  

We now give out Pulitzers, National Book Awards, Oscars, Nobel Prizes – even seats on our hallowed Supreme Court -- based on some muddy feel-good mixture of talent combined with consideration of the nominee’s sex, ethnic background, sexual preference, etc. etc. 

For my employed white leftist friends – a proposition:  If you truly believe it is acceptable – and right -- to have someone turned down for a job because they are white, how ‘bout giving your job to some deserving minority member?  Then you’ll have demonstrated that you are willing to suffer the same consequence – the same “remedy” – that you have so righteously forced upon someone else.  And then you can go out looking for another job in some workplace that doesn’t already have too many whites.