Look almost anywhere in America these days and you will find the diversity mania at work, eating away at the nation’s individualist foundations and demanding group equity. Huge bureaucracies do nothing but push this in businesses, educational institutions, and government.
How did we get here? In this enlightening American Mind essay, Professor Thomas Powers explains the legal history.
He writes:
Moreover, civil rights law is not in fact all that hard to understand, so long as one begins in the right place. Just two areas of civil rights law—Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which governs discrimination in employment, and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which regulates sex discrimination in higher education—have done most of the heavy lifting in creating our woke world (with apologies to those who would insist on Title VI). And this can be made simpler still, since Title VII provides the basic terms upon which Title IX is built.
Title VII was actual legislation, but ever since, the momentum has come from aggressive bureaucrats who wanted to expand their remit far beyond what Congress had in mind in 1964, going from a requirement of equal treatment for individuals to equal results for groups. The wedge for that was the notion that “disparate impact” for groups was illegal and called for a host of remedies.
Powers continues:
Understandably, employers sought some way to protect themselves from liability. The answer they received from the EEOC and the federal courts is our fifth expansion: employers must, on their own, take ‘preventive and corrective measures’ to police discrimination in the workplace. Preventive measures include a host of tasks—formulating and publicizing internal company policies, assessing workplace climate, monitoring bias-reporting systems, investigating discrimination and harassment claims, adjudicating appeals, and keeping records. And of course there is the most visible ‘preventive’ measure of all: diversity training.
Read the whole thing. Will it ever be possible to reverse this terrible blunder?
Hat tip: Mark Pulliam