As a podcast on iTunes, listenable/downloadable onscreen at Taki’s Magazine, or as a transcript here.
Title story this week is the explicit mandating, in a joint ukase from the Departments of Justice and Education (but I’m assuming at Attorney General Eric Holder’s initiative), of racial profiling for purposes of school discipline.
The underlying issue here is that black students are disciplined at much higher rates than nonblacks. The most parsimonious explanation, as with the dramatically higher black crime levels, is innate race differences; but…
Holder of course is having none of that. It's not that he denies high levels of black misbehavior: He says it doesn't matter. What matters is that the numbers for suspensions and other disciplinary measures come out equal.
Here is the relevant passage from the “Dear Colleague” letter sent out by the Justice and Education Departments January 8th. It's on page 11 of the letter.
“Schools also violate Federal law when they evenhandedly implement facially neutral policies and practices that, although not adopted with the intent to discriminate, nonetheless have an unjustified effect of discriminating against students on the basis of race.”
Got that? You have a, quote, “facially neutral policy.” You implement it, quote, “evenhandedly.” You have no, quote, “intent to discriminate.” Yet if the numbers still come out wrong, you've broken the law!
The instruction here is plain: You have to stop implementing that program evenhandedly. You have to practice racial profiling to make the numbers come out right.
You will recognize here the poisonous doctrine of Disparate Impact. If you give a written exam to a mixed-race group of firefighter applicants, and seventy percent of the whites pass the exam but only thirty percent of the blacks do, you have broken a law.
Same thing here. To stay out of trouble with the feds, schools must either go easy on misbehaving blacks or discipline more non-misbehaving whites and Asians. Gotta get the numbers right.
This is federal government policy in the present age. And while Eric Holder is certainly an exceptionally nasty piece of work, it wasn't he who cooked up the evil and innumerate Disparate Impact doctrine. It's been with us in one form or another for forty years, and been upheld by innumerable jurists.
And one of the highest-profile uses of Disparate Impact against municipal firefighter exams was initiated by Alberto Gonzales, George W. Bush's Attorney General.
It's a systemic problem, rooted in some simple logic. The logic is: We can't face the realities of intractable race differences, so we must profile to get the numbers right. All Eric Holder has done is spell it out in print.
The full Radio Derb playbill:
It’s all there at Taki’s Magazine.
