Facts and Fiction of US Minority Relations

I remember a seminar in my 8th grade social studies class where the teacher asked the students to get into groups and come to a consensus on what the Declaration of Independence line "all men are created equal" really means. Questions he posed were "equal before whom?" "what exactly does 'equal' mean?" and most importantly "is it really true?". At the end of the assignment, there were about 1.5 times as many conflicting answers to each question as there were students in the class, and no one could come to any sort of consensus, which was the entire point of the activity.
However, while 20 or so 8th graders were fairly easily convinced that equality is a very loaded word and that it is impossible to achieve based on conflicting ideological definitions, it would seem that the adults of the modern United States are too busy pushing their own idea of equality on everyone else to take the 20 minutes they would need to understand the futility and hypocrisy of this. Let's try to accomplish the opposite.

Contents:
Ideologies of Equality
-Limitations of the Declaration of Independence
Current Laws and Factual Analysis
Interepretation: Causes, Implications, Avenues for Change

Ideology
Most Americans, with the exception of a very small minority of various extremists, claim to support equality as one of their fundamental political principles. However, when asked to define what it means to them, it is difficult to find even two people whose definitions don't conflict in some way. Older ideas of equality claim that it means equal protection by the government and equal rights to participate in it, whereas newer schools of thought often advocate that centuries of inequality dictate that the above can only be achieved if members of historically oppressed groups are given various special privileges, often in the form of having to contribute a lesser share to the collective resource pool and entitlement to greater benefits from it. From there comes a diaspora of conflicting opinions of how to DEFINE who is a member of these groups and who isn't, what contributions and benefits are acceptable as special privileges, and so forth. The menu of possible economic models ranging from full State-run socialism to complete free-market capitalism and everything in between usually involves a component adressing this issue, and contrary to popular belief, most models try to lay legitimate claim that their functionality will result in greater equality, even for the "minority" groups mentioned above, regardless of how they are defined. As always, I will not delve into ideas of whether its "moral" or "fair" to give material preference to someone because their counterpart was legally obstacled from it 100 years ago, because these words are arbitrary and irrelevant. Real measures of equality have to be grounded in numbers and statistics rather than people's various definitions of fairness, and hence we must examine how laws backed by equality ideologies really impact it and society as a whole.

The DoI
Before I move on, I would like to point out the silliness of modern equality concepts quoting the Declaration of Independence. If this is not interesting to you, please skip to the next section. I have discussed in several previous posts that much ideological backing for political agendas falls on scripture, or at least enlightenment documents looking for new definitions of scripture. It is important to remember that the Declaration of Independence, which most American ideologies seeking equality allude to at least in some form, was the epitome of such enlightenment documents. Here are some inconvenient facts:

- The DoI did not establish the American Colonies' independence from the British Monarchy anymore than Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation abolished slavery, or the Confederacy's secession from the Union established its own independence. Each of these documents was a patriotic primer intended to incite a half-decade of armed conflict, and in the two cases where the authoring sides prevailed, they then had the monopoly on force to sign certain provisions into law. Just as Lincoln didn't have the power to enforce his emancipation until he won the Civil War, the Founding Fathers could not enforce their independence until they drove out the British army. Whether or not anyone thought they had legitimate authority in these cases is absolutely irrelevant - authority is derived from force and popular compliance, not ideological legitimacy.

- The DoI holds 0 weight in any US Court. These institutions are legally bound by the Federal and State Constitutions, the earliest of which was written in 1788, 12 years after the DoI.

- The DoI's presents a very vague concept of "all men are created equal." When its same authors put together the first Federal and State constitutions, and the Articles of Confederation before them, they defined their own ideology to justify keeping slavery legally in place, only giving any real property rights to white adult males, and limiting political participation to the members of this last group that owned land.

Analyzing Current Laws

Many battles have been fought by various minorities and their advocates - ethnic and racial groups, women, sexual and gender minorities, a variety of disabled groups including the mentally ill, various occupational and economic class alliances, and so forth - to have the proprietary rights and participation in politics expanded to them that were reserved for white male landowners in the original United States, and it is difficult to say that the statutes have really accomplished this. Legally, traditional minority statuses cannot imply being barred from voting or running for office, for example; and while fraudulent transactions aimed to strip people of this right are difficult to dismiss as excesses, they are equally difficult to attach a discrimination label to. If a bureaucrat or political organization is bent on fraudulently preventing a politician from being elected, it makes sense to disenfranchise anyone that might vote for him, even if he has the predominant support of one minority or another. Cases where one minority is his sole support and no part of that minority opposes him are virtually non-existant. However, there are still fully legally mandated restrictions on the rights mentioned above based on status. For example, immigrants permanently living within the United States, legal or illegal, are barred from voting until they become citizens, and also on the disenfranchised list with them are various categories of the mentally disabled, citizens under the age of 18, and inmates in state and federal prisons. Arguments that any of these groups may have alterior motives or allegiances, or don't have a developed enough sense of morality, and hence cannot be trusted with the choice carry 0 scientific weight. Even if the allegations are true, using such arguments to determine voting eligibility is inherently discrimination, and they are WORD FOR WORD the arguments that were used to disenfranchise every other minority that is now allowed to vote (commoners, women, blacks, etc.), up to and including the British Aristocracy's traditional Medieval philosophy that only aristocrats qualify. These people's motives, their cultural backing, their age, their mental development, and so forth DO NOT exempt them from being affected by public policy - they are subject to criminal prosecution, they pay taxes and receive tax-funded services, and so on - so how any notion of equality can justify their non-representation is a bit of an enigma. Their status also makes a poor predictor of incapacity, as non-citizen permanent residents may still be loyal and have the US's interests in mind, people don't magically mature the day they turn 18, and so forth - these categories are blunt instruments at best.

Proprietary rights can even more easily be said to have lingering disciminative laws, the foremost example of these being the issue of homosexual couples. There are various different ideological concepts of marriage, but LEGALLY, it is a status that entitles everyone with it to a variety of important property rights - joint ownership, custody of children, immigration, exemption from inheritance taxes, and so forth. The compromise of "unions" does not guarantee these same rights, because unlike marriages which are licensed by one government authority and recognized by all others in the world unless they pass a specific exemption law, unions limit legal recognition to the extent of the issuing authority. This debate ultimately runs into a previously unaccounted for integration of religion and state, because religious authorities have the power to grant a legal status, and hence mandating them to grant it to homosexuals would force them to accept the legitimacy of their marriages. In the 21st century, in a country that lays such heavy claim to progress in equality, this is quite a sad excuse for an obstacle to what is denial of proprietary rights based on minority status regardless of how its approached. Laws to reconcile this have to be based on the goal of truly equal proprietary rights, but activists on both sides of the debate are densely obsessed with arbitrary concepts like changes to the definition of the word "marriage" and "religious recognition," perpetuating an unwinnable battle of conflicting ideologies that ultimately leaves a sizeable minority economically disenfranchised.

However, just as equality before the law is still far from achieved by it, it is important to notice that in a variety of domains, laws aiming or at least claiming to achieve it have reached fairly damaging levels of diminishing results. Anti-discrimination laws in various civil codes such as labor, tenancy and offering of services are perhaps the most evident example. Affirmative Action statutes for education and government employment are another. None of these laws make discrimination a crime punishable under the justice system, but they do make it grounds for civil lawsuits and for rulings such as punitive damages or mandated reversal of employment or tenancy decisions. The intention of these laws is a form of the above described special privilege for various historically oppressed minorities to allow them to achieve economic equality to the descendents of a privileged majority. Proponents claim that without them, discriminative organizations could keep ethnic minorities from moving into their neighborhoods or any minorities from joining vocational organizations such as unions, the minorities' higher propensity for poverty and lack of access to resources would reduce their chances of acquiring higher education and better-paid employment, and so forth. In my opinion, and the opinion of most Americans, these are noble ideological causes, but the problem is what they accomplish in functional practice.

The first problem is that, with the exception of gender, minority statuses are extremely difficult to verify in any reasonable way, and discriminative motives behind any authority decisions are almost impossible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. In the case of Affirmative Action, no state or federal statute specifies any verification criteria for who is and isn't considered a member of the beneficiary minority. Furthermore, many such statutes specifically FORBID such verification. Hence, just as in the 19th century openly discriminative laws gave people who were 1/8 white incentives to claim to be white, and other minorities such as homosexuals to hide their identity; modern laws give people who are 1/8 black or hispanic incentives to check this box on college and employment applications to give themselves an edge over others, or heterosexuals with some limited bisexual tendencies (or none at all!) to claim to be homosexual for the same reason, and then rant and rave "discrimination!" if anyone dares to question what they indicate. Similarly, in labor or tenancy situations, employers or landlords who are prejudiced against a minority are hardly restricted from acting on those prejudices in their decisions, as they are usually faced with a multitude of candidates and can pretty easily make the case that another candidate was a better fit without admitting to racism or discrimination. However, employers and landlords without such prejudices may run into difficulty discharging or evicting objectively problematic employees or tenants who happen to belong to a minority if they decide to take the incentive of using that status to challenge the decision based on discrimination.

Another problem is that, on an individual level, minority status often makes for a piss-poor predictor of actual economic disadvantage requiring help. For example, it is easy to point out statistically that black or hispanic children in CA are far more likely to attend underfunded government secondary schools with poor academic records than white children. However, this statistic is irrelevant for supporting Affirmative Action because nothing in the statute specifies the beneficiaries should come from such schools, and quotas for accepted minorities for higher education or government jobs easily allow the majority of such acceptances to meet the ethnic criteria but come from a more privileged financial background, and it makes sense that their background makes them match other acceptance criteria better than their poverty-stricken counterparts. The quotas, in turn, are often based on demographics and minority population percentages, which makes it difficult to set the quotas so high that the system is forced to benefit actual underprivileged minority individuals without running into a well-grounded accusation of discriminating in the opposite direction.

The inherent silliness of trying to verify people's ethnic backgrounds or their sexual orientations and determine whether these really make them underprivileged in an individual sense not withstanding, the statistics make it clear (and I'll be glad to link to some for those interested) that these laws have ridiculous costs in terms of inefficiency that far outweigh their benefits in terms of equality. It makes little sense to allude to ideologies of discrimination being "immoral," or private entrepreneurs having an inalienable right to discriminate against whomever they choose as it is their private business: both of these are normative discussions that cannot hope to fall back on science. The problem with these laws is that they accomplish very little in terms of actually curbing discrimination, but create a plethora of unaccounted-for costs that then fall on the economy and are bared by everyone in society. If a minority member from a privileged economic background uses that status to acquire the edge he needs to compete with an otherwise better qualified non-minority counterpart to be accepted to college or hired in a government job, he often then finds that the people who set those qualification criteria were reluctant to accept him because, based on academic or vocational preparation rather than minority status, he really ISN'T qualified. He then ends up either dropping out or quitting/losing the job, the costs of defaulted student loans, lost tuition revenue, re-starting the hiring and training process, and so forth, falling upon the taxpayers. I'm not making the insipid argument that minorities are inherently less qualified; on the contrary, the commonality of this occurrence as colleges and government institutions struggle to meet Affirmative Action quotas and are forced to accept/hire underqualified applicants is a HUGE indicator of the continued prevelance of inequality in terms of access to education and training, but Affirmative Action makes for an ineffective and costly solution. The costs are even more evident in the private sector. Private entrepreneurs who are reluctant to or unable to discharge an errant employee or customer because they fear the backlash of being accused of discrimination are forced to pass the costs of non-confrontation onto their consumers to stay in business, and in some cases this may actually exacerbate discrimination in the cases of reluctance to hire or offer services to minorities, as this is nearly impossible to prove as a motive upon initiation, but they may be costly to discharge should they prove errant, even if the entrepreneur holds no ideological bias.

This functional model does away with the fairy-tale idea that a political system has the capacity to eliminate discrimination against minorities, at least in any instant manner, and posits based on observational studies that the costs of excessive regulation to overall economic efficiency far outweigh its benefits to minority rights. As usual, the liberal argument of "if it changes one life, its worthwhile" belongs in a fantasy novel, not any political science paper, because quite simply, nothing effects only one life; and it is equally silly to believe that the grievous impact on overall economic effiency DOESN'T disproportinately affect the same underprivileged minorities these laws intend to help.


Analyzing Causes, Implications, and Methods of Impact

So, having simplified the realities of equality and minority relations issues to scientifically proven impacts rather than ideological rhetoric, let's examine the implications of what seems like an epidemic of blindness to the former and unhealthy obsession with the latter in the US, and possible contributors to it.

Allow me to demonstrate this ignorance epidemic with an example from current events. An incident has been in the news for the last few weeks surrounding a UCSD student publication, and past incidents involving this same organization, called the Koala. In their February issue, this publication printed a variety of very gratuitously racist material aimed at black students and black people in general, and also announced that, in association with a few other organizations, it would be hosting an event called the "Compton Cookout" to 'celebrate' Black History Month, which would have a "ghetto" dress code and other related themes. The Black Student Union responded with a protest which was covered by local news. The news report alluded to black students being the "smallest minority at UCSD with roughly 2% enrollment," and alleged that the Koala was a racist organization and called for hate crimes. The members of the protesting group in turn complained on camera that their student fees were being used to fund this organization. The incident's media coverage quickly snowballed into the national spotlight, with organizations like the NAACP condemning the publication as racist and despicable and calling for government action to sanction it, and resulting statements from various levels of CA State officials agreeing with the condemnations and promising corrective action.

The Koala's funding at UCSD was suspended pending the investigation, but it also exists on other campuses and has enough readership to allow it to operate by selling advertisement, so rather than hang their heads in shame and wither, the members reveled in the negative fame in Howard Stern fashion, and have continued to publish, hold events, and so forth. Moreover, the incident sparked flatout hysteria at a number of UC Campuses, not the least of these being a noose found in the UCSD library which was immediately reported on by the media to have had racist implications, although a minority student later admitted to having left it there, with motivations still unclear. The only alleged attempt at any kind of balance by the media was the interviewing by various outlets of some lawyers and constitutional scholars who affirmed that, stupid and offensive as such expression is, it is clearly protected under the First Amendment. Whether this really qualifies as balance or compounding bias is questionable, as the media did not make any comments on these affirmations but painted them against a background of ridiculous hysteria-baiting misinformation, so it can just as easily be interpreted as a suggestion that the First Amendment is obsolete or needs to have additional limitations.

Before we analyze the implications of this example, here are a few facts that the mainstream media conveniently omitted from their reports:

1. The Koala openly admits to a goal of entertainment by gratuitous offense. They use every possible racial, religious, sexual and miscellaneous slur and prejudice in print to such excess that an examination of any 5 or 6 issues makes it obvious that they are equal-opportunity offenders and if taken seriously, must hate every single living person on this planet, including themselves as just about every possible minority is represented within their own membership. Some of their content qualifies as important political satire - like Sacha Cohen's work, - but the majority of it is admittedly low-brow humor on par with a disturbing party joke intended to make everyone cringe.

2. The Koala has been around for over a decade, and just about every special organization at UCSD - Union of Jewish Students, MEChA, the Muslim Student Association, Campus Crusade for Christ, Queer People of Color, etc. - has taken a turn protesting, claiming public offense, and so forth in response to an issue or expression aimed at the constituency it claims to represent.

3. This is AT LEAST the 8th time they have had their funding suspended, their charter put in question, their actions investigated by campus authorities, etc. as a result of similar incidents. To date, they remain one of the oldest and most widely-read campus publications at UCSD (the only one to have verifiably operated on advertising revenue for months when unfunded by the campus), and no lynchings or other hate-violence have occured on any UC Campus in relation to any of their publications.

4. The Black Student Union's protest consisted of roughly 20 students - the organization's core membership and one or two non-black students who joined in. Simple math indicates that, minority or not, 20 students is NOT 2% of UCSD's student population, which totals between 30,000 and 40,000.

What can we learn from this incident about the implications of minority and equality-related hysteria and ignorance? First, it is difficult to blame the State or UC officials for their condemning responses. They are politicians already burdened by a difficult economic situation which makes them very unpopular, and seeing as the protestors are vocal and the media spreads their message like the wind spreads Polio, it is a rational decision by them to try to preserve their PR by agreeing with it. Similarly, as discussed in an earlier post, it is somewhat difficult to blame the media for their biased reporting; seeing as media conglomerates are private corporations driven by profit and not some fairy-tale idea of "responsible journalism," and quite simply, accusations of racism and hysteria sell ads almost as well as racist jokes sell ads for the Koala. Finally, some limited blame can be placed on the whistle-blower organizations, but it is hard to paint them as the ultimate culprits. The members of the BSU and NAACP have every right to protest and be outraged; their only culpability is their ludicrous claim to represent an offended minority, as simple demographics on the number of minority students will indicate how few of them actually participate in such events and furthermore, make it very difficult to believe that the publication could retain such popularity if every minority these organizations claim to represent were really "outraged" and "offended". However, these organizations also have their own incentives for misrepresentation, because just like the government and the media, they are self-interested and driven not by their fairy-tale charters, but by the desire to remain in existence and in confidence in a society with a rapidly declining - although still strongly present - market for their services.

The culpability ultimately falls on the ignorance of the general public for its epidemic inability to separate facts from misinformation. This constitutes the belief in the government's neutrality and commitment to service and the trust of the mainstream media to report the news rather than manipulate them for profit, as adressed in previous posts, but of special relevance to this post is the equally ridiculous belief that organizations like the NAACP genuinely REPRESENT minorities. In truth, nothing perpetuates discrimination more than the obsolete advocacy of these organizations; and if you're gasping in response to that statement, ask yourself two questions:

1. What organization "represents" the interests of any conventional majority, such as white people or males?

2. What organization can clearly be agreed upon as the primary representative of any of the minorities I listed above still actively disenfranchised by LAWS rather than cultural prejudices supposedly outlawed, such as homosexuals, illegal immigrants, or minors?

The answer to question 2 is that there are a MYRIAD of such organizations, but they largely disagree with each other on effective advocacy and representation, and are too busy engaging in actual advocacy (lawsuits, organization, etc.) to come on TV and accuse everyone who disagrees with them of discrimination. This is the trademark of organizations engaged in real advocacy trying to genuinely represent minorities, they all have conflicting opinions and few people agree on who really represents the minorities. This was true for minorities such as blacks and women in the heyday of their own civil rights struggles decades ago as well.

The answer to the first question is far more relevant. There ARE organizations who claim to represent majorities in light of what they refer to as reverse-racist oppression, such as David Duke with his NAAWP and the lunatic fundamentalist who founded www.godhatesfags.com. But, with the exception of their very small number of supporters, the overwhelming majority of the American people see these "leaders" for what they really are - inbred half-wits stuck in an outdated mindset with no concept of modern science. Few of the people they claim to represent would agree they represent them, and more importantly, few people they promote discrimination against would agree that they in fact represent the views of any majority. The problem with our society's mindset is that the people we readily accept as conventional minority leaders, particularly black leaders, are in fact that minority's equivalents of David Duke; and its not that they call themselves representatives, its that the general public *accepts* them as such even if the minorities don't necessarily hold that view. Are President Obama, Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Thurgood Marshall, 4-Star General and former Commander of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State Colin Powell, former Sec. of State Condi Rice, media personality Larry Elder, conservative politician Alan Keyes, comedian Bill Cosby, religious leader Dr. Jeremiah Wright, and a variety of other extremely successful, wealthy, and well-known black people who don't make a living peddling racist hysteria like its going out of style not BLACK? Isn't it just a tad racist, then, to ignore these people's success and rational approach to politics and limit our scope of representation to a bunch of drug-addicted, scandalous, inarticulate, violence-advocating sociopaths like Kanye West, 50 Cent, "Reverend" Jesse Jackson, and Islamic Fundamentalist with a flavor of Black Militance Louis Farakhan? Why do we call it discrimination when the idiots who idolize these "leaders'" philosophy of drug-dealing and violence justified by racial inequality end up in prison? Its not racism when equally socially ept skinhead ciminals end up in prison following the suggestions of David Duke. Its not equality when black people who follow the examples of Clarence Thomas or Dr. Jeremiah end up successful entrepreneurs or professionals, even if they don't land fame or a spot on Supreme Court, and even if they agree - as I do - that discrimination is still rampant and destructive in the US, but don't see the petty crime advocated by 50 Cent as a solution. The only reason David Duke or Louis Farakhan aren't locked up is that they are celebrities and have the resources to legally shield them from the repercussions of their sociopathic behavior; people who hold to the same line of thinking but can't afford $1,000/day lawyers aren't so lucky.

As stated before, statistically speaking, far fewer black people think of these people as their leaders than non-blacks who associate them with that title, just like most Muslims are NOT supporters of Osama Bin Laden, most women don't side with nutball feminist activists, and so forth, but mainstream opinion makes an epidemic fallacy of assuming the opposite, and this has abysmal effects. For one, it contributes to the tyranny of the inefficient laws described above, often adding an incentive for associated bureaucracies to jump on board with the hysteria-baiting to ensure their job security. More importantly, however, it can tie the government's hands in serving the interests of the population as a whole AND actually exacerbate hate violence, such as when Islamic Fundamentalist groups claim to represent all Muslims and spark the government pandering to their interests resulting in confused commoners engaging in violence against peaceful Muslim Americans, who mostly leave their home countries to escape these very same sociopaths that claim to represent them. It is no secret that during the Cold War, the largest contributions to the western effort to stem and contain the spread of Communism were made by escaped dissidents from places like Cuba, North Korea, and the USSR - if they agreed with the sociopaths in charge in those places, they would never have left.


Conclusion

I in no way endorse the notion that the United States has done away with cultural epithets of prejudice and discrimination or fixed the inequality decades of it have created, simple statistical analysis on the economic status of minorities proves how stupid that argument is. I am merely pointing out that the various economic policies aimed at fixing these problems have failed colossally; they have the potential to actually create discrimination and violence, but more importantly they perpetuate nominal equality at the cost of extreme inefficiency - inefficiency that of course lays most heavily on the same minorities it tries to help due to their unfair access to resources. (I will possibly discuss alternate solutions in a later post, please don't make the assumption that I subscribe to the notion that repealing these policies without any other changes would fix the problem, but this post is about values and attitudes rather than economics.) The driving force behind the perpetuation of said policies is the idiotic assumption that the organizations who scream bloody murder every time these policies are challenged actually represent some disaffected minority. This confusion threatens free expression - a legal threat is far-fetched as there is no precedent for finding expression illegal solely by virtue of offensiveness - but the general mentality of being afraid to offend because organizations like the NAACP will make you look like a racist in the eyes of the masses contributes to the abysmal institution of political correctness, which limits both government and private organizations in their attempts to find real solutions to inequality. These organizations have every right to exist and to be vocal, but the mass belief that they represent minorities makes their rhetoric a vehicle for steering public policy to benefit their core membership and in some cases associated bureaucracies, which constitutes a tiny special interest. Although some of these organizations are self-interested to a criminal extent, as we have seen in certain examples, such behavior is present in most societies with freedom of expression and trying to put legal limits on it would have far greater costs than the ones associated with it. The government and the media are hard to find culpable, as they are reasonably self-interested and have no choice if they want to stay in business but to react to the confused market of public opinion. If you want to disenfranchise special interests like the NAACP, the answer is to peel yourself away from mainstream media outlets and find reliable information regarding the society that surrounds you, then contact your local, state and federal representatives and tell them that if they don't get their priorities straight and start serving YOU and not some band of criminals that convinces people of their own sainthood, then you will fire them and elect someone that can. This won't put the organizations out of business, just as the KKK still exists 145 years after the end of the Civil War, but it will make them a laughing stock rather than any sort of moral authority, putting them in their rightful place in society.