The Congress shall create no law that demonstrates a preference for one group of citizens over another. 

Argument

Martin Luther King had a dream.  A dream he eloquently stated during his March on Washington D.C on August 28, 1963, a dream that all men be judged based upon the content of their character and not the color of their skin. Our nation has made great strides as a result of the civil rights movement in the early 1960’s but I fear we are now moving backward.  Why?  It is because of government. 

Regulations promulgated by federal agencies do more to keep divisions based on race alive than they do to help racial divisions by naturally allowing them to be forgotten.  In earlier and similar circumstances Irish Catholics of Boston were despised.  They were called Micks.  The Italians were called WOP or Guinea.   New York remains partly organized into ethnic communities that were originally formed as separate ghettos where people from different countries could safely live among persons of their own kind.  Each ghetto was distrustful of the others.  But something did happen in the 20^th Century that helped these people forget the prejudices of their past and that something was this.  The government made no play to help any ethnic group that was in a minority and as a result people eventually found a way to cooperate and compete with one another.  They traded with each other.  They went to school together.  It soon mattered very little whether you were Polish, Italian, Irish or Jew.  People learned to get along and ultimately they began to call one another friend. 

Contrast this to the situation we have had in America since the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s.   In this instance the government became involved and in the 1970’s the Congress placed Affirmative Action requirements on employers that provided preference of one race over another for hiring forcing employers to sometimes hire unqualified candidates.  Quotas were created that ignored competence and awarded contracts and positions based upon the desire to achieve equity for one group over another.  Government became a venue for selecting winners and losers.  But what did this really do?  Did it not work to create resentment where none may have existed before? 

The problem of racial inequality was a macro problem.  It was a problem based upon a review of the population as a whole and there is no question but that minorities were at a disadvantage as a result of having attended inferior schools and as a result of the many cultural differences between themselves and the majority community.  But the solution government identified was a micro strategy that impacted individuals, not populations.  It was destined to fail and it has consistently failed now for more than thirty years.  Still, it is a federal program that like all others refuses to die.  The firemen in New Haven, CT that prepared for, took and passed an exam that entitled them to promotions they sought were not provided the promotions because the city wanted a different racial makeup of the winners.  It ultimately took a US Supreme Court decision to resolve this on behalf of the firemen but this did not happen before lines were drawn and those who lost on the issue at every level of the court process developed additional animus toward the winner as they progressively won or lost in that process.  Would it not have made more sense for government to have encouraged improvements to schools and to communities and to have encouraged minorities to compete?  The method to resolve any disadvantage should have been identified to the minority population as to work harder and prepare to compete.  Minorities have been effective at doing this on the athletic field but it certainly was not done in the business world.  Instead laws were created to penalize employers and worse, to penalize individual co-workers. 

When applying for jobs today questions are asked of every applicant including the following: 

1.       What is your race?

2.       If you are white, are you Hispanic or are you a member of some other disadvantaged white group?

3.       What is your gender?

In the same breath that we attempt to tell the population that these matters should not matter when competing for employment prospective employers are required to ask these questions with the overall implication that it must matter.  It must matter very much.  The logic of the government is convoluted.  They want the statistics to enable them to determine whether equal opportunities are being provided to minority applicants by individual employers yet at the same time they try to convince the public that there is no quota involved.  If no quota is involved then why do they bother to gather these statistics?  Does not the mere capture of the statistics result in unreasonable pressure on the hiring manager to select a particular individual because of the individuals membership in a particular ethnic, racial or gender group?  It would certainly seem clear that someone in the Equal Opportunity Commission has some idea as to a mix that is acceptable if they are going to use these statistics to identify whether employers have complied with EEO guidelines. 

The Census is another area where race is raised to a level of consequence and one does not have to wonder long to determine why.  Constitutionally the government is required to apportion the 435 seats in the Congress based upon the total population in each state with each state entitled to at least one representative.  Responders are asked to identify their race.  Why is race important and how might it be used?  I worry that it is important to the state legislatures as they exercise their redistricting responsibilities every ten years.  Just as the 435 representatives are apportioned to the states based upon their population, each state with more than one representative must determine district boundaries to define the geographic area to be represented by a single representative.  When drawing these district boundaries legislatures have in the past built districts like one that had a convoluted shape that ran more than a hundred miles long and followed a river bed.  This particular district was no wider than 2 or 3 miles.  What did the people at each end of such a district have in common with each other in the sense of community?  Their only commonality was their membership in a particular race and it was apparent that the only reason for the redistricting as it was done was to ensure that a particular seat would be filled by a member of that particular race in the Congress.  Neither Congress nor individual state legislatures should be assisted in developing districts in a manner that would allow them to pick winners and losers.   

If race truly shouldn’t matter then we must stop the methods used to guarantee a member of a particular race election to the Congress as a representative of an unreasonably drawn district.  The end result is and will always be constant division between the races and the consequence is continued division of America into groups that distrust each other.  Sadly a political advantage is often sought that capitalizes upon these divisions by blaming one group as being responsible for the plight of another.  This further extends the divisions based upon racial makeup and further prevents the melting pot that worked the better part of two centuries from continuing to work.