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The first major court case on disparate impact. Here, it's standing in for educated white voters who hate affirmative action.
At this time, I would like to steelman disparate-impact legislation.
Some people decide that they don't want to hire (or sell to, or admit to their schools) black people (or women or Chinese people or Irish people...), but are forbidden by law from having such a policy. They then impose a standard that many white people can meet, few black people can meet, and that they most likely wouldn't give a rat's arse about if it were un-correlated with race, and in some cases didn't give a rat's arse about when they were allowed to discriminate openly. (Sometimes they go further, and enforce a zero-tolerance standard on black people while ignoring violations by white people.) The government than comes in and says "That sounds like a whites-only sign with extra steps; I thought we had made it perfectly clear that you are not allowed to do that! What part of 'do not discriminate on the basis of race' did you not understand?"
In practice, though, disparate impact is often used not only for concealed racism, but for any policies that does not produce the desired ratios, where desired means "at least as many nonwhites as the population that we're drawing from." But that can mean that simple hiring based on competence means that people can fall below the definitely-not-quotas, and so they would be legally vulnerable.
In theory, it's a nice feature to capture concealed racism. In practice, it's a generic cudgel that can be used to punish ordinary behavior, should you get out of line. And legally (assuming we're talking about Title VI here), it's a complete fabrication, and is used to make people break the text of the law itself.
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Oh, certainly. I was not identifying as a 'Griggs Republican' myself. I tend to think that the idea of disparate impact can be followed off a cliff (e.g. Kendi-style arguments that any inequalities in outcome are evidence of unequal treatment), but at the same time, it's obviously true that facially neutral policies can be chosen and applied strategically in order to achieve a discriminatory outcome.
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Do you genuinely believe that businesses do not have a preference for intelligent employees over non-intelligent employees? Like, all else being equal I can’t think of any reason (except maybe that smart employees are likely to expect/demand higher pay and better working conditions) to not value intelligence as a factor in hiring. If less black people are meeting that standard, that’s unfortunately on them.
No, I was attempting to present the strongest possible case for disparate-impact laws. Thus, in the situation I described, the standard wasn't 'must be more mentally capable than McNamara's 100,000' so much as 'must have 'professional-looking' (i. e. white) hairstyle' or 'must be able to lift 50 pounds' for a desk job that won't involve lifting anything heavier than a full cup of coffee.
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But then it turns out they apply a wholly different standard when discrimination against white people is involved (linked in a top level post) and your steelman collapses into a pile of rust.
Um, I think you might have linked the wrong case. Ames alleges that she was discriminated against for being straight, not for being white. I'm not even 100% sure she is white.
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