"If the senator can find ... any language which provides that an employer will have to hire on the basis of percentage or quota related to color, race, religion, or national origin," Humphrey memorably vowed, "I will start eating the pages one after another, because it is not in there."
But it wasn't long before the law's plain meaning was turned inside out. In 1965 President Lyndon Johnson issued Executive Order 11246, which mandated "affirmative action" in government contracting — a directive that eventually grew into an elaborate skein of racial preferences, quotas, set-asides, and "diversity, equity, and inclusion" (DEI) policies that compelled discrimination for the sake of racial balance. Over time, liberal policy makers and civil rights organizations went from upholding color blindness as the highest aspiration of a racially just society — Martin Luther King's storied dream — to disparaging it as bigotry in disguise.
Thus it became the consensus on the Democratic left in recent decades that discrimination by race was the only way to overcome racial inequity. Any racial imbalance or statistical underrepresentation was taken as proof of "systemic" racial bigotry — even if no actual racial animus could be detected. In the words of Boston University's Ibram X. Kendi, a leading exponent of such thinking, "As an antiracist, when I see racial disparities, I see racism."
Racial preferences in government hiring, contracting, and spending reached obsessive levels during the presidency of Joe Biden. His inaugural address four years ago was studded with references to "systemic racism," "growing inequity," "white supremacy," and "a cry for racial justice." On his first day in office, he issued an executive order that doubled down on "advancing racial equity" and "closing racial gaps" by promoting race-conscious DEI mandates through "an ambitious whole-of-government equity agenda."
Now that agenda has been overturned. Good riddance to it.
In his first two days back in the White House, President Trump signed several sweeping executive orders banning affirmative action, racial preferences, and DEI policies in federal employment and contracting. He explicitly rescinded LBJ's Executive Order 11246 — a dramatic rejection of the racial identity politics of recent decades and reaffirmation of the great civil rights ideal: color blindness.
In left-leaning precincts, Trump's move to dismantle racial preferences has unsurprisingly generated a degree of hysteria. "When does he bring back segregated water fountains?" was journalist John Harwood's unhinged reaction, while Harvard law professor Noah Feldman charged the new president with delivering "the death blow to diversity."
In reality, the Trump administration is reviving the old commitment to a color-blind society that was the dream of civil rights heroes from Frederick Douglass to Bayard Rustin to Zora Neale Hurston. The principle underscored by Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP in a 1948 Supreme Court brief — that "classifications and distinctions based on race or color have no moral or legal validity in our society" — is the principle the president's executive orders are meant to restore.
As noted, much of the intellectual justification for affirmative action rests on the assumption that racial disparities must be caused by racial bigotry. The planted axiom of the DEI racial spoils system is that if members of a racial group constitute X percent of the public, they ought to constitute X percent of any setting or segment in society. Thus, to again quote Kendi, "if Black people make up 13.2 percent of the US population, then Black people should make up ... somewhere close to 13 percent of Americans sitting in prisons, somewhere close to owning 13 percent of US wealth."
But that's a fallacy. Disparities between groups are often wholly benign, as the writer and podcaster Coleman Hughes pointed out last year in his compelling book The End of Race Politics. Such disparities have existed throughout human history and are often a reflection not of bigotry or unfairness but of cultural or other differences that have nothing to do with race.
For instance, Hughes wrote, "consider the cultural differences between Blacks of American descent and Blacks of Caribbean descent" living in New York City. While both demographic groups belong to the same race, those of Caribbean background "were more likely to express disapproval of drug use ... and more likely to condone strict parenting.... Caribbean Blacks also earned more money than American Blacks, were more likely to be employed, and less likely to be teenage mothers — despite living in equally segregated neighborhoods."
The point, as Hughes stresses, isn't to pass moral judgment on any group. Rather, it is to show the inanity of automatically attributing any disparities between groups to prejudice, systemic or otherwise.
It's a point people intuitively grasp in many contexts. Black athletes account for more than 70 percent of NBA players, but no one attributes that disparity to anti-white racism. Around 93 percent of all prison inmates are men, but no one sees that as proof of rampant discrimination against males. Nor does anyone blame bigotry for the fact that while China is home to less than 18 percent of the global population, an estimated 80 percent of all pianists worldwide are Chinese.
What is true in those cases is true broadly. Though racism and discrimination certainly exist, they don't come close to elucidating the myriad statistical disparities between groups. The majority of such disparities cannot be explained by bigotry, systemic racism, or unfairness, writes Hughes. Demographic and cultural differences are almost always more illuminating.
At the heart of the vast diversity-industrial complex that arose over the past few decades was a refusal to acknowledge such differences. The DEI worldview was that government should mandate not equality of opportunity for individuals but equality of outcome for groups. Most Americans have never shared that view. Even in deep-blue California, for example, voters twice rejected racial preferences. When the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions, polls found that nearly 70 percent of the US public approved of the decision.
Trump, who was inaugurated on Martin Luther King Day, has moved quickly and forcefully to reestablish as the law of the land the color-blind principle for which MLK lived and died. If he succeeds, Americans of every color and political stripe will be better off.
Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.
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