the salt makers

I was talking with Ethan the other day about affirmative action and he tells me that he has no problem with it.  He brought up some excellent anecdotal evidence:  his father works at LSUE and is a professor there.  The only role affirmative action plays in his hiring processes is he is not allowed to discriminate against blacks or minorities.  He always hires the most qualified.

This, I'm sure, happens quite often, but it would be obvious to also say that clearly affirmative action is not necessary in your father's case.  He would still hire the best candidate.  Who wouldn't if they truly cared about their company or school?  

But that is besides the point.  That enactment of affirmative action is the general idea behind it, which I think is good.  While I think that every day it is losing it's relevancy in our society, it can be said that ensuring that only the highest qualified candidate is hired is a good thing.  But unfortunately, that's not how it come out in practice.

Immediately after the introduction of affirmative action there was virtually not increase in minority college or job  recruits.  This was not because, as many liberals would posit, that they were still discriminating.  It was because there simply weren't as many qualified black people as there were whites and Asians.  This led to the modern affirmative action: racial preferences.  They began lowering the standards and hiring less qualified minorities to fulfill their "goals," not "quotas" so that it looked like they weren't discriminating. (Like there's a fucking difference anyway, right?)  For what other reason could there be no increase in minority recruits once it becomes illegal to discriminate?  To admit it is the applicants fault would be to admit cultural inferiority.  You can't do that if you're a multiculturalist.

Needless to say, I'm sure the courts and the ACLU don't have their eye on Ethan's dad at LSUE.  They've got bigger fish to fry.

So, where does this leave us?  I mean, quotas are illegal, right?  So what does this even matter?

The answer: proportional representation.

In 1977 the governments and courts decided just how much racial preferences were warranted.  Here is how the supreme court defined the concept in a 1977 decision:

"It is ordinarily to be expect that nondiscriminatory hiring practices will in time result in a work force more or less representative of the racial and ethnic composition of the population in the community from which the employees are hired."

Here you have the legal and courtly justification for affirmative action and "goals."  If your town is 50% black, you should have 50% black employees, otherwise you're discriminating.  Does that sound legit to you, knowing black high school drop out rates and illegitimacy?  And here is where ACLU steps in.  If you are not proportional, you become a racist organization threatened with a lawsuit.  Why not just hire some underqualified applicants to keep it under wraps, eh?

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Zachary Sonnier