A couple of weeks ago I heard a rumor that politicians were attempting to insert racial preferences into the financial regulation bill. As it turns out, the facts have been confirmed. Included in the bill are provisions to authorize the creation of “Offices of Minority and Women Inclusion” in new financial regulatory offices.
From John Rosenberg’s blog, quoting the bill:
“Dodd-Frank’s Section 342 states that race and gender employment ratios must be observed by all government agencies that regulate the financial sector, as well as private financial institutions that do business with the government.”
Employment ratios, for the uninitiated, are quotas. As the Wall Street Journal pointed out, the federal government already discriminates on the basis of race, so a new bill requiring racial discrimination seems redundant.
Such is the state of race in America. Minorities complaining about strained race relations, especially the kind fueled by race-based government favors and set-asides, will find no assistance from their elected officials. Leftist politicians codify race-based preferential treatment, which unavoidably entails race-based discrimination. In allowing such practices, we give these same politicians power to discriminate against blacks.
In his brief in the Brown v. Board of Education case, Thurgood Marshall, then executive director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and future Supreme Court justice, wrote in 1954:
“Distinctions by race are so evil, so arbitrary and invidious that a state, bound to defend the equal protection of the laws must not invoke them in any public sphere.”
Say what you will about individuals making distinctions by race, choosing to associated only with certain races in their private time. I don’t consider this evil or invidious. When the state does it, that’s an entirely different matter. Preferences proponents just can’t get this through their heads.
“We the people” are products of various backgrounds and ethnicities. “We the people” work to pay to support the government for the good of all. “We the people” should demand no less than to be treated equally and judged as individual citizens of the state. It was a noble and necessary battle to prohibit the state from the “evil…arbitrary and invidious” practice of treating citizens differently based on the color of their skin.
And that principle holds no matter who is on the receiving end of the ill treatment.
My aim in writing and speaking against racial preferences isn’t to convince people to ignore differences between groups. I want people to understand that despite how we may feel about different races or how concerned we may be about racial disparities, it should not be within the state’s power to enact laws and set government policy that make distinctions by race.
The movement to radically change how this country dealt with race was gutsy, valiant, and long overdue. Pushing for and supporting the very thing fought against makes a mockery of those who summoned the courage to stand against unequal treatment. Nothing, not even racial disparities, justifies permitting our government to enact laws and set policy that grant preferences to individuals based on their membership in a racial group.
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Interestingly enough, after all the advanced warning on Section 342 of the House Bill, precious little was reported on whether or not that section survived the Senate’s trimming.
Apparently it did.
It’s unfortunate that outlets like the WSJ and others didn’t focus on that in their critiques of the final “fatally flawed” financial regulation Bill.
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