Friday, July 3, 2009
One of the absurdities of having racial quotas, preferences, or the like in school enrollment or job hiring is how does one define any race? Since there is no satisfactory way, attaining minority status is nearly always a matter of self-identification! So if someone is say, one-eighth of some minority race (and, of course, even that may not be easily determined), one may still declare that he or she is of that race and thereby obtain all of the benefits that may accrue to being of that minority. The fact that there is no exacting way of defining one as being a member of a certain race adds to the argument that there should not be any race-based tests for hiring or school enrollment.
Rather than use some form of racial preferences for undergraduate college enrollment, it can be argued that some preferences be given to children of very low-income parents (easily defined) on the grounds that they are usually disadvantaged by growing up in poverty. In addition to finessing the racial definition problem, that would also eliminate the undesirable result of colleges and universities competing for high-achieving minority children of well-off parents. These children do not need financial aid or enrollment preferences and are not disadvantaged in any way.
At the same time we should do our best to upgrade the elementary and secondary school education of communities with generalized low income levels. In better-off school districts, programs should be instituted which would give special assistance to students from poor families. In short we should do all we reasonably can to level the playing field for educational opportunities, but only using parental income history as the measure of being disadvantaged. However, as noted elsewhere in this blog, our national policy of allowing increasing numbers of poor, little educated immigrants to live and work in this country has meant that the effects of any public programs, including those involving education, designed to improve the lot of our disadvantaged citizens are going to be diluted by the addition of the new immigrant poor and their children.
For employment, the messy question of defining race should be avoided by allowing the policy of hiring on merit alone. No public or private employer should have to fear legal consequences as a result of hiring from without or promoting from within whomever they believe is the most qualified candidate for any job in question. Similarly, graduate schools should be permitted to recruit on ability alone.
Employees are protected against employment discrimination by existing laws which permit them to bring suit against employers who overlook solid minority job candidates in favor less qualified non-minority candidates. Many attorneys will take such cases on contingency basis giving the poor even more protection against racial discrimination.
Using the above approaches also avoids the related messy issue of somehow determining which races are “disadvantaged” minority races and the relative disadvantage for each.
