House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers of Michigan is outraged about the dozen staffers who accompanied U.S. Agency for International Development Director Rajiv Shah to a recent meeting on Capitol Hill. You should understand, though, that Conyers was not upset because Shah brought too many staffers along for the meeting with the 42 members of the Congressional Black Caucus. Nor was he upset because any of those staffers displayed a lack of competence. No, Conyers was “alarmed and chagrined” because, as he told Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a subsequent letter, “none of the approximately dozen staff he brought with him were African American.”
Conyers further informed Clinton that “this is so serious an error in judgment that it warrants his immediate demotion to a subordinate position at AID.” That Conyers expects Clinton and her boss in the White House not only to demote Shah, but also to hand out federal jobs on the basis of skin color was made clear in his declaration in the same letter that “it is well known that there has long been an under-representation of minorities in key positions within the State Department. I am confident this administration will immediately begin addressing this problem.”
The Michigan Democrat has thus unintentionally cast a glaring light on a key aspect of what is wrong in Washington — too often, skin color counts more than competence. Conyers is far from alone in demanding that important jobs in the federal government be given to individuals because their skin color fits somebody’s idea of the right racial mix of government workers, not because they are most qualified.
Federal officials reflexively claim people are employed in the federal civil service solely on the basis of merit principles, but the reality is government personnel management practices are besotted with multicultural obsessions about recruiting and promoting a work force that “looks like America.” There are legions of human resources specialists, personnel directors, and employment lawyers devoted to keeping the bureaucratic wheels of diversity grinding. This is reverse discrimination, pure and simple.
It should be clear to all reasonable people that the vast majority of Americans today reject the racism that denies jobs to individuals because their skin is the “wrong” color or, for that matter, because their gender, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, or economic status is deemed unacceptable by some arbitrary measure. The noble objective of the 1964 Civil Rights Act has been fulfilled in moving America beyond such considerations to a place where the only issue would be whether an individual is the most qualified for a given job. Thanks to the mentality epitomized by Conyers, our government keeps being dragged back into the past.
