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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   35217 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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My question now is will this extend to DEI hiring/promoting practices in corporate America. I’m at a mega corp and we practice what certainly looks like racial/gender discrimination (for example leadership teams and # of managers have to comply with HR DEI %’s). I’m honestly not sure how we get away with it when racial/gender discrimination in the workforce is already illegal in the US, but either way would love for this ruling to push companies to reevaluate these policies or even better for another case to make it to SCOTUS around corp DEI policies.

My question now is will this extend to DEI hiring/promoting practices in corporate America.

These are already black-letter illegal. Racial discrimination in employment practices was never considered acceptable, even for the "diversity" fig leaf; note employment and education are covered under different parts of the Civil Rights Act(s). But those implementing the practices and those overseeing them (e.g. at the EEOC, and in the lower courts) don't care.

I've always wondered how corporations are able to get away with setting goals to hire a certain number of female/black/latino people and then publicly celebrate meeting those goals.

Perhaps they could say that it's the result of outreach efforts and not discrimination in the hiring decision itself, but would that fly if a business decided they wanted to conduct outreach efforts exclusively to white men?

Yes, outreach efforts are fine. Eg, if I hire a random selection of every applicant who scores over X percent on my employment test, but only 2 pct of my applicants are Hispanic, there is nothing illegal about advertising my job openings heavily on Telemundo.

As for outreach only to white men, that is also legal if for some reason white men are underrepresented at your company. It would obviously raise some suspicions, because historically such efforts have tended to be intended to exclude non-whites and women, but it is not inherently illegal.

As for outreach only to white men, that is also legal if for some reason white men are underrepresented at your company.

Would it be illegal to continue outreach programs only to certain minority groups if those minority groups happened to be overrepresented at your company?

Presumably.

Also at universities? Thomas sure seems to be fine with HBCUs. Do you think there could be trouble a-brewin' there?

I don’t know that HBCUs discriminate racially in admissions. Rather, I am pretty sure that relatively few non-black students apply. And many are not particularly selective. See data here

Have they been sued over the former?

Yes, the lawsuits just disappear into a morass of procedural obstacles.

When the President of the United States can hire a public employee to the highest court in the land with a brazen declaration that Progressive Racism will be followed to the exclusion of the majority of qualified candidates, it’s probably quixotic to imagine change in your local workplace. Consider Biden the alt-Woodrow Wilson and yourself the alt-target of Wilsonian federalized bigotry. Going by the original timeline, we’re 50 years off from civil rights.

The President has much more free hand there than a rank-and-file bureaucrat. It'd be very hard to sue the President for not nominating me to Supreme Court because I am a white male. It's a very exclusive unique position, and it'd be almost impossible to argue - even if I were an accomplished law scholar, which of course I'm not - that I deserve that particular position, and while the racism here is indeed brazen, formulating a legal policy that would prevent it while not unduly constraining the President's choices would be very non-trivial. On the other hand, university admission or hiring practices or any other governmental action applied en masse is easier to regulate, since it requires some rules, procedures, official criteria, etc. It won't be sustainable if Harvard president had to personally decide on each case. There would be institutional procedures. That's where you can look for discriminatory policies. Of course, it's possible to hide them, and I am sure Harvard will try their best to do just that, but at least they couldn't do it in the open anymore. It's not the victory over racism, but it's a step in denormalizing it, with is a necessary precondition to victory.

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