Reverse Racism?
November 27th, 2005 ~ Posted in: GeneralApparently, the Canadian government was considering putting a strange hiring policy in place in one of their departments: only females and minorities would be hired for a period of time no shorter than 6 months. Of course, they had to back down on this proposal, due to public outcry. There’s a discussion going on about it at k5.
Predictably, some folk are drawing parallels between this policy and affirmative action policies. I don’t think it’s fair to AA to compare it to such a discriminatory policy. Under AA, a minority or female applicant is given preference over an equally competent white male. Under the proposed hiring policy, totally incompentent minority applicants would have been given infinitely more consideration than superlatively qualified white males. How could one possibly miss the important difference here? AA guarantees the best applicant gets the job, with race/sex only being referred to in the case of a tie, while the other policy appeals to race/sex first, and then capability.
As I see it, there are four reasons for disliking AA: a belief that AA encourages sloth on the part of minorities, a belief that AA doesn’t select the best candidate for the job, a belief that AA introduces an unfair bias against whites, or an aversion to ‘invasive’ social policies. The latter, I can’t argue with– I am a little against AA on that account myself; however, not enough so that I think the invasiveness of the policy outweighs its social benefits– but the first three are groundless worries. First, as I stated above, AA selects minorities over whites only when they are equally qualified, so minorities have to work just as hard as whites; this eliminates the first two concerns. As for introducing a bias against whites, I think that’s seeing the glass half empty instead of half full: the point of AA is to introduce a counterweight to society’s inclination to favor the majority, which can only be done by introducing a bias towards the minority in some way. I think AA, with its ceteris paribus clause, is the best way of introducing such a bias.
3 Responses to “Reverse Racism?”
December 1st, 2005 at 2:49 am
If AA is only giving preference to minorities in the case of equally competent candidates, I guess I’m alright with that. It always seemed to me that (incorrectly?) that blatantly discriminatory practices like quotas and such fell under the AA umbrella though.
December 4th, 2005 at 6:20 pm
There is a problem with the whole “equally competent” thing, since I doubt that candidates can really be ranked in descending order of competence. Still, hiring decisions are made on the basis of doing so as best we can, so I guess we accept that we can approximate the order well enough to make a suitable choice of who is best. In fact, though, candidates tend to clump in bunches, any one of whom is a particular bunch is essentially as good as any other. In that sense, we end up looking at candidates in the #1 clump. That’s where other criteria like AA can reasonably come into play. I ragged on this a bit in my post “The myth of #1″.
December 21st, 2005 at 3:34 am
“AA” can mean a lot of things. Most often the label is applied to various devices to put a thumb on the scale in compensation for the extra obstacles that the target groups face. Originally, I’m told, it merely meant special efforts (hence “affirmative” as an opposite of passive) to make minority candidates aware of the opening, e.g. advertising in minority-oriented media.
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