Curious

Monday 16 August 2010 - Filed under Dumbassery + Government

I’m certainly not one to easily buy in to the modern day meme in conservatard circles that the only meaningful form of racism left in the US is that of minorities against white people. Outside of anecdotal evidence, it’s mostly pure bullshit seemingly designed to get insecure white guys all riled up about “them” taking over or some such shit. That said, there is enough anecdote mixed with official policy in both government and private industry, such as ongoing affirmative action, to make one wonder how long until we’ll start seeing domestic policy like this over in England. Telegraph:

The two-year scheme at Bristol City Council is only open to candidates from black or ethnic minority backgrounds because the “normal recruitment process was not rectifying” under-representation.

[. . .]

The authority has a total of 9,000 members of staff of which 8,370 are white and 630, or seven per cent, are from ethnic minorities.

Because 12 per cent of Bristol residents come from minority backgrounds the council has begun searching for more employees to redress this imbalance.

This sort of policy, overt racism, is the logical outcome when “diversity” is seen as an end in itself. In other words, while a diverse environment may be a good one, diversity at the expense of competency is idiotic.¹

Let’s try an experiment.

The two-year scheme at Bristol City Council is only open to white candidates because the “normal recruitment process was not rectifying” our desired outcomes.

If this sentence, with minimal changes to nouns from the original above, were to appear concerning the hiring practices of a government agency, people would rightly protest in the street about how the ugly head of racism has once again shown itself. As well we should. Yet, somehow, it’s okay to actively discriminate on the sole basis of being white because the current environment simply has too many white people for their liking. I’m all for a sense of social justice, but real social justice is choosing people for particular positions based solely on their merit, not taking the backwards hiring policy of de facto minority exclusion and turning it on its head in order to somehow “even the playing field”; real social justice is not taking race in to account at all.

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1. Which should under no circumstance be read as a lack of competency being a direct result of diversity. But we must remember that their own hiring standards, which presumably did NOT actively exclude minorities (lest why might they now crave diversity so badly?) did not produce their desired environment of diversity.

2010-08-16  »  madlibertarianguy