On the Supreme Court, Quotas and Reverse Discrimination

[hkellick]

Let me start by stating where I stand.

Yes, I am White, Male and Middle Class. This means, on average, I am more likely to find a job and more likely to get a raise and a promotion than a Woman or Colored Person. I acknowledge this as the fact that it is.

That said... I believe very strongly in fairness. Denying anyone a promotion simply because of their race or sex is wrong.

That's why I stand against Quotas.

Don't get me wrong. I DO believe that when deciding whether or not a person should be hired or promoted, your race, sex, age, sexuality or religion should simply not enter the picture. They are besides the point. What SHOULD be the point is whether or not you are the right person to get the job/move up in the company. Whether you have the qualifications, the experience, whether you would be the right cog to put into that particular place in the machine.

I also realize as I stated in the second paragraph above that that isn't necessarily true, that people do still account for race, sex, etc. when making these decisions. That's not right either.

But neither is Quotas. The predetermination that a certain percentage of the managers of a company or the employees of a company NEED to be a minority class, whether they're the best person for the job or no.

Looking at the argument the Supremes heard today, the issues as I understood it was that a group of firefighters were offered a chance for a promotion but because none of those who'd been noted as promotion-worthy were colored, the test was thrown out.

This is simply unfair. These were chosen as the best among their company, the people who deserved a promotion but because none of them was colored, they weren't even offered the CHANCE for a promotion? How is this fair? How is this right?

So, I agree with the Supreme Court. This was the right decision. It should not be legal to bar someone from a job or promotion simply because they're 'different', but it also shouldn't be legal to bar someone from a job or promotion simply because they're not. That's just plain nuts!

So.. yeah.
I'm done.

Comments

[john]

But what if there's a business need to reflect the makeup of the community? What then? Arguably, there is in firefighting, as in all public services. As a gay white middle class US/British male I realise it's frustrating that somebody else gets a +5 Sword of Skin Color, but this is one of the things that you and I need to suck it up and start examining our privilege. We start out with a +25% Interview Crit advantage, and a +5 Dex for our higher likelihood of extensive work experience because we are not ourselves bearing children, and all kinds of other stuff.

I totally don't want to derail you with terminology, but you might also want to think about your use of "colored person" -- my understanding is that "person of color" is currently the most inclusive phrase in the US. Here, "ethnic minority" is en vogue. "Colored person" tends to smack of 60s-era segregation to me.

[gblvr]

It's not entirely true to say that none of the firefighters who earned a promotion-level score was a minority; one was Hispanic, while the rest were white.

I agree that it's not fair to throw out the test results for that reason, but doesn't it seem odd to you that almost no minority firefighters scored high enough to earn a promotion? There is a problem there -- whether it's the firefighters themselves not studying enough, or the test being somehow off, something isn't right. I don't see how it's possible that *only* whites (with the exception of the one minority) scored high enough to pass -- statistically, that's not how things work.

[ex_beautyofgr925]

I think john brings up an interesting point - that we don't start on equal playing fields.

One thing of interest... our company has a policy that we like to try to select from small-business and diverse subcontractors, when at all possible. These people are evaluated against other large subtractors in the field for their quality of service and abilities. Often things are just about equal, but the Small Business is given the nudge. Why? Because the playing field is not equal for Small Businesses, and supporting Small Businesses is healthier for competition and diversity, and the quality of product/services in the long run.

Quotas run very much like that, in my opinion.

[zorkian]

The thing that's difficult for me, as a logically minded person, is that it's not really provable at all. I keep thinking of it as: we only see one face of the moon, right? Before we had satellites and spaceships to go behind the moon, we could only speculate what was on the other side.

Privilege feels like that, to me. I can only stand on one side of the coin. There is no possible way I can actually stand on the other side, to see things from the point of view of a woman, person of color, etc. No matter what I do. The best I can hope to achieve is someone telling me what they see, and even then...

Quotas and affirmative action: I used to be entirely against them. Then I started trying to picture it like this: in a perfect world, all people are equal, have equal opportunity, and are never subject to discrimination. In that perfect world, it makes sense that the number of people doing various jobs, working at various companies, etc, would approximate the makeup of the world. I agree with this statement.

Yet, in the world that we have, we end up with a situation that is nowhere - nowhere! - near that arguably perfect world. All I have to do is look around every technology company I've worked at to realize that something is terribly wrong. To me, quotas is a way of saying, "we know that in a perfect world, things would look like X. we know that we do not live in a perfect world. we also know that the problem is too large to be solved with one change, one system, one program. therefore, we will do what we can, where we can, to try to create the world we see as perfect."

Quotas don't fix the problem, no. But they put pressure on various parts of the machine. It's an incentive. If Bill Gates were to create a scholarship program saying that 19 year old people who dropped out of High School, got their GED, and worked at McDonald's for a year got a free ride to WVU, I can promise you that within a year or two, there'd be a bunch of people who fit that exact description at WVU. While that particular example is contrived, in the case of quotas, it's not contrived at all.

Now, my personal jury is still out on whether or not the pressure it puts on the system actually will translate into positive change overall. But there you have it, maybe it makes a little more sense now.

[cesy]

I don't know much about this particular case, but I'd also agree that quotas are very rarely the answer to fix discrimination.

(And I say this knowing that it may well have played a part in me getting into the university I went to.)

Ideally, we'd be able to select the best people for the job, and if those "best people for the job" reflected an institutional bias, you'd fix that at source. But I'm coming at it by analogy from educational selection, where a university should pick the best students, and if that ends up with a biased sample, get better teaching at an earlier stage for the minority students, don't put them onto a course they can't do because they haven't had good enough teaching, however bright they were born.