Racial Quotas, Speech Codes, and the Thought Police

It’s racially discriminatory to prohibit racial discrimination. That’s the bottom line of a decision issued last Friday, just before the Fourth of July weekend, by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.

The case was brought by an organization called By Any Means Necessary to overturn a state constitutional amendment passed by a 58 percent majority of Michigan voters in November 2006.

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Its chief goal was to ban the racial quotas and preferences long used in admissions by Michigan’s state universities. {snip}

The Sixth Circuit ruling seems unlikely to stand. Its citation of Supreme Court precedents is unpersuasive. The proposition that a state’s voters cannot ban racial discrimination seems palpably absurd.

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The argument for racial quotas and preferences is that every sort of talent and ability is equally distributed among every conceivable category of persons, but that quotas and preferences are needed to identify qualified members of groups that were objects of discrimination in the past.

But the idea of equal distribution of talents and abilities, as Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray showed definitively in their 1994 book The Bell Curve, is simply factually wrong.

The ordinary American knows this–and knows also that that is not a rational basis for discriminating against members of any group. It’s not very hard to understand that beneath any group average there is a wide range of individual abilities.

Why are university and legal elites so determined to preserve racial quotas and preferences? One reason, I suspect, is that they can’t bear to see lower percentages of blacks in the institutions they run than you find in the U.S. Army or many local police departments.

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