LEGAL AND ACADEMIC EQUALITY NONSENSE
The left's fruitless
obsession with eliminating "racial disparities."
August 4, 2015
A particular act or policy might not have a discriminatory intent,
but that doesn't let you off the hook. If it has a disproportionately negative
impact on so-called protected classes, it is said to have a disparate impact
and risks being prohibited by law. The uninformed assumption made by judges,
lawyers and academics is that but for the fact of racial and sex
discrimination, we all would be distributed across occupations, educational
backgrounds and other socio-economic characteristics according to our percentages
in the population. Such a vision is absolute nonsense. There is no evidence,
anywhere, at any time, that but for the fact of discrimination, there would be
proportional representation among various socio-economic characteristics. Let's
look at some disproportionalities, with an eye toward discovering the causes
and then deciding what to do about them.
If one were to list the world's top 30 violinists of the 20th
century, at least 25 of them would be of Jewish ancestry. Another disparity is
that despite the fact that Jews are less than 3 percent of the U.S. population
and a mere 0.2 percent of the world's population, during the 20th century, Jews
were 35 percent of American and 22 percent of the world's Nobel Prize winners.
Are Jews taking violin excellence and Nobel Prizes that belong to other
ethnicities? If America's diversity worshippers see underrepresentation as
probative of racial discrimination, what do they propose be done about
overrepresentation?
Overrepresentation may be seen as denial of opportunity. For
example, blacks are 13 percent of our population but about 80 percent of
professional basketball players and 65 percent of professional football players
and among the highest-paid players in both sports. By stark contrast, blacks
are only 2 percent of the NHL's professional ice hockey players. Basketball,
football and ice hockey represent gross racial disparities and as such come
nowhere close to "looking like America." Do these statistics mean
that the owners of multibillion-dollar basketball and football operations are
nice guys and ice hockey owners are racists? By the way, just because blacks
are 65 percent of professional football players, let's not lull ourselves into
complacency.
When's the last time you saw a black NFL kicker or punter?
There are even geographical disparities. Not a single player in
the NHL's history can boast of having been born and raised in Hawaii, Louisiana
or Mississippi. Geographical disparities are not only limited to ice hockey.
The population statistics for North and South Dakota, Iowa, Maine, Montana and
Vermont show that not even 1 percent of their population is black. In states
such as Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, blacks are overrepresented. When such
racial disparities were found in schooling, the remedy was busing. I'll tell
you one thing; I'm not moving to Montana. It's too cold.
Geographical disparities don't only apply to the U.S.
Historically, none of the world's greatest seamen has been born and raised in a
Himalayan nation, such as Nepal and Bhutan, or a sub-Saharan nation of Africa.
They mostly have been from Scandinavia, other parts of Europe, East Asia or the
South Pacific.
Being a man, I find another disproportionality particularly
disturbing. According to a recent study conducted by Bond University in
Australia, sharks are nine times likelier to attack and kill men than they are
women. Such a disproportionality leads to only one conclusion: Sharks are
sexist. Another disturbing sex disparity is that despite the fact that men are
50 percent of the population and so are women, men are struck by lightning six
times as often as women. Of those killed by lightning, 82 percent are men. I
wonder what whoever is in charge of lightning has against men.
Differences are seen by many as signs of inequality. Nobel
laureate Milton Friedman put it best: "A society that puts equality before
freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get
a high degree of both." Equality in conjunction with the general rules of
law is the only kind of equality conducive to liberty that can be secured
without destroying liberty. (End of
article)
(I took this fine article by Walter
Williams from frontpage.com. For a long
time now I have thought that one of the major issues of the 20th
century was that of overrepresentation, and, unfortunately, it appears to be a
major issue of the 20th. Read
the first part of this article again, and imagine that you are a German in the
1920s. How can Jews be so prominent
among the violinists? It must be because
the judges are Jewish. Or are paid by
Jews. How else explain the
overrepresentation if all people are equal.
If all are equal, then Jews, less than 1% of the population of Germany
in 1930, must be manipulating the system somehow, through corruption, some
way. National Socialism was the attempt
to restore equality for the 99%. The Occupy-Wall-Street
crowd with their attacks on the 1% were all too similar to the Nazi
approach. If you like the Williams
article, I urge you to read my article, on this blog, as to why liberals cannot
understand the holocaust. See “What
Caused the Holocaust?” In 1930s Europe,
the targets of the quest against the oppressive overrepresented, the 1%, the
targets were the Jews, and they became the victims of the spirit of equality. In multicultural America, the new targets are
white men.---Hugh Murray)
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