Posted on 09/10/2003 11:29:24 AM PDT by Alia
Thomas Sowell, the famous economist and writer, has written eloquently about the ways that people of different racial and economic backgrounds gravitate to different professions and neighborhoods. It's as natural as the sun coming up in the morning and as typical in the United States as it is in Indonesia or Albania.
No one is shocked that many donut stores in Southern California are owned by Cambodians. Or that motels are owned disproportionately by people of Indian descent, or that Indians also are well represented in the computer programming field. Basketball has long been the province of black Americans, although an onslaught of white European players is changing the complexion of the National Basketball Association. As one Jewish magazine once bragged, of course Jews dominate Hollywood. Human beings are not inanimate objects. They do not disperse themselves equally across every profession and every part of the globe. For reasons of culture, family, belief systems, happenstance and opportunity, different peoples do different things in different ways. Equality is desirable in law, but an impossibility in other areas of life.
My wife's relatives were coal miners in Poland, so when the time came to flee that depressed land, they fled to western Pennsylvania, where there were large deposits of coal to be mined - and lots of other Polish relatives and friends waiting to greet them. That's not odd. Odd would have been them moving to Italian South Philadelphia and opening up a pizzeria or to German Milwaukee to brew beer.
This reality is common sense to an 8 year old, but is impossible to grasp among America's liberal elites. If the population is not spread out evenly, if everyone is not paid exactly the same amount of money, if all groups of people aren't perfectly represented in every field or suffer every disease at the same rate, then something is terribly wrong.
They are egalitarians, and like all egalitarians want to use government to change the way we all live.
To these race-mongers, disparities must be the result of discrimination. Government must count the beans and make sure they fall evenly across the floor. Something must be done, lives must be rearranged, tax dollars must be spent. Otherwise, society just doesn't care.
This kind of thinking is nonsensical, but it also is lucrative. Many organizations get big government grants to analyze disparities based on race, sex, ethnicity, religious background, sexual orientation. They get newspaper headlines screaming about said disparities. Entrepreneurs always look out for new disparities to harumph about.
It's an endless cycle.
No one is ever responsible for his or her own choices. Everything is a matter of discrimination or unfairness. Everything can be fixed by government effort. Everything will be better if only the planners favor the under-represented over the over-represented. No one is anything more than the sum total of his/her/its skin color, surname and genitalia.
Some people get sick of this. They think that individuals should be treated as individuals. They think that discriminating against one group in, say, college admissions to benefit another group harms individuals and is therefore immoral. Such discrimination, even if it is justified on behalf of a popular cause, causes tensions between those groups. It undermines the traditional American precept of equality before the law.
In 1996 in California, a group of these people passed an initiative called Proposition 209. Its contents were simple: "The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting."
Although their goal was to treat everyone equally and fairly, supporters were depicted as callous hate-mongers by those who benefit from the system that gives special privileges to the children of those with the most political power. Nevertheless, the believers in equality won the day, even though colleges and government officials still circumvent the initiative's language.
Now some (but not all) of those same people, along with new believers in that same idea, are taking their campaign further. They ask: "In this most multicultural of all societies, why should the government count people based on race or ethnicity? Doesn't this fixation on race and ethnicity only cause harm and division?"
Supporters of a new initiative, called Proposition 54, fear that, if California continues along its present group-based course, then society will become Balkanized, with hostile groups battling one another for the spoils the government has to offer.
Like Prop. 209, the initiative is simple. According to the summary by the attorney general, Prop. 54 "Amends the Constitution to prohibit state and local governments from using race, ethnicity, color or national origin to classify current or prospective students, contractors or employees in public education, contracting or employment operations."
No more racial and ethnic bean-counting by government agencies, except with regard to law enforcement and medical matters. Private companies, of course, can collect whatever data they want. Information on gender is exempt from the initiative.
The same organizations who benefit from America's preferences system are aghast. They are claiming the initiative will stop medical research, even though medical research is specifically exempted. Gubernatorial candidate Cruz Bustamante, who as a youth was involved in an ethnic separatist group, has come out strongly against Prop. 54. So has Arnold Schwarzenegger. So have all the other forces of what columnist Joseph Sobran calls Organized Touchiness. Expect a barrage of misleading TV ads.
But most California voters, I suppose, are likely to support it. Most of us are tired of the endless fixation on surnames and color. Most of us are ready to treat one another as individuals. Most of us know that quotas and special privileges, even if they are called by non-offensive names such as "affirmative action," are unfair and divisive. Most of us are ready for Prop. 54. At least I hope so.
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