Wednesday, July 25, 2012
Academic intelligentsia, their media, government and
corporate enthusiasts worship at the altar of diversity. Despite budget
squeezes, universities have created diversity positions, such as director of
diversity and inclusion, manager of diversity recruitment, associate dean for
diversity, vice president of diversity and perhaps minister of diversity. This
is all part of a quest to get college campuses, corporate offices and
government agencies to "look like America."
For them, part of looking like America means race
proportionality. For example, if blacks are 13 percent of the population, they
should be 13 percent of college students and professors, corporate managers and
government employees. Law professors, courts and social scientists have long
held that gross statistical disparities are evidence of a pattern and practice
of discrimination. Behind this vision is the stupid notion that but for the
fact of discrimination, we'd be distributed proportionately by race across
incomes, education, occupations and other outcomes. There's no evidence from anywhere
on earth or any time in human history that shows that but for discrimination,
there would be proportional representation and an absence of gross statistical
disparities, by race, sex, height or any other human characteristic.
Nonetheless, much of our thinking, legislation and public policy is based upon
proportionality being the norm. Let's run a few gross disparities by you, and
you decide whether they represent what the courts call a pattern and practice
of discrimination and, if so, what corrective action you would propose.
Jews are not even 1 percent of the world's population and
only 3 percent of the U.S. population, but they are 20 percent of the world's
Nobel Prize winners and 39 percent of U.S. Nobel laureates. That's a gross
statistical disparity, but are the Nobel committees discriminating against the
rest of us? By the way, in the Weimar Republic, Jews were only 1 percent of the
German population, but they were 10 percent of the country's doctors and
dentists, 17 percent of its lawyers and a large percentage of its scientific
community. Jews won 27 percent of Nobel Prizes won by Germans.
Nearly 80 percent of the players in the National
Basketball Association in 2011 were black, and 17 percent were white, but if
that disparity is disconcerting, Asians were only 1 percent. Compounding the
racial disparity, the highest-paid NBA players are black. That gross disparity
works the other way in the National Hockey League, in which less than 3 percent
of the players are black. Blacks are 66 percent of NFL and AFL professional
football players, but among the 34 percent of other players, there's not a
single Japanese player. Though the percentage of black professional baseball
players has fallen to 9 percent, there are gross disparities in achievement. Four
out of the five highest career home run hitters were black, and of the eight
times more than 100 bases were stolen in a season, all were by blacks.
How does one explain these gross sports disparities?
Might it be that the owners of these multibillion-dollar professional
basketball, football and baseball teams are pro-black and that those of the NHL
and major industries are racists?
There are some other disparities that might bother the
diversity people. Asians routinely get the highest scores on the math portion
of the SAT, whereas blacks get the lowest. Men are about 50 percent of the
population, and so are women, but there's the gross injustice that men are
struck by lightning six times as often as women. The population statistics for
South Dakota, Iowa, Maine, Montana and Vermont show that not even 1 percent of
their population is black. On the other hand, in states such as Georgia,
Alabama and Mississippi, blacks are overrepresented.
Finally, there's a disparity that might figure heavily in
the upcoming presidential election. Twenty-four out of the 43 U.S. presidents
have been 5 feet 11 inches or taller, above our population's average height.
That is not an outcome that would be expected if there were not voter
discrimination based upon height. Mitt Romney is 6 feet 2 inches tall, and
Barack Obama is 6 feet 1 inch.
No comments:
Post a Comment