Fixing Discrimination

For John, BLUF:  How do we rebalance long term discrimination, and do it without creating reverse discrimination.  This Summer the English Touring Opera demonstrated that it didn't have the solution to hand.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Ripping Off the Veil

Here is the sub-headline:

A British classical music organization exposes the sordid business behind all racial-preference regimes.

From City Journal,by Journalist Heather MacDonald, 19 September 2021.

Here is the lede plus three:

Racial preferences have been almost impossible to dislodge because their human costs are usually hidden.  College admissions officers don’t inform rejected student applicants that they were turned down to make room for diversity admits.  An HR office does not tell job seekers or the company’s own employees that they were not hired or promoted because they would add nothing to the company’s diversity metrics.  The rejected applicants may suspect that they didn’t get a desired position because of a racial preference, but they can rarely be 100 percent sure.

The offstage nature of these tradeoffs allows preference proponents to deny that diversity decisions entail a zero-sum calculus.  In 2019, a U.S. district court judge upheld Harvard’s racial-admissions preferences after a lengthy trial.  In her opinion, Judge Allison Burroughs insisted that race is only a positive factor, and never a negative factor, in Harvard’s admissions process. Such a claim is specious.  The only reason that institutions implement racial preferences in the first place is that there are not enough qualified applicants among non-Asian minorities to achieve a racially proportionate student body or workforce under a meritocratic selection system.  Hiring a diversity candidate under a preference regime almost always means not hiring a more qualified non-diverse candidate.  The former’s gain is inevitably the latter’s loss.

Now a British classical music organization has inadvertently ripped the veil off the diversity arithmetic, and the consequences may be far-reaching.  Earlier this month, the English Touring Opera told nearly half its orchestral musicians that it would not be renewing their contracts for the 2022 season because it has “prioritised increased diversity in the orchestra.”  In other words, as a bunch of white guys you must be cleared out so that we can boost the collective melanin levels among our musicians.   Your talent does not matter; your skin color does.

Here, at last, were concrete, publicly identified victims of a preference regime.  The reaction was swift.  Since the Sunday Times broke the story, the English Touring Opera has been thrown on the defensive.  Arts Council England, a government arts funder and the opera company’s main patron, is backpedaling on its aggressive promotion of diversity after the company claimed that it was only following the Council’s mandates in terminating the white musicians.  It turns out that the public has little stomach for watching the diversity sausage be made.

This is relevant to Lowell in that our School System needs to have a more racially and ethnically diverse student facing organization.  However, firing Caucasians to make room for others just creates a new problem.  One solution would be to hire more teachers and para-professionals, which would allow for smaller classs sizes and perhaps a better learning environment.  It would seem the money is not there.  Thus, we need to ponder and be creative.

Send your suggestions to me.

In the mean time, perhaps this current economic upheavel will provide an opportunity for organizations big and small, private and public, to hire various people to fill their employee shortages and the more obvious examples of long term hiring practices will be wiped away.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff