In his famous I Have a Dream speech in 1963, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. looked to “a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
What would King think of efforts to award jobs, promotions, and contracts on skin color rather than on merit?
It’s a critical question to ask in 2021. After all, we’re witnessing a disturbing nationwide movement to weaponize race and make employment decisions based on skin color under the imprimatur of “equity” and “anti-racism.” Consider the Boulder City Council’s recently adopted Racial Equity Plan. Though vague, it seems to prioritize race over, or at least alongside, professional qualifications when making municipal decisions. “The Racial Equity Plan is a living road map that will guide the City of Boulder government through the process of prioritizing goals, specifying details, and assigning resources to achieve meaningful change,” according to the city website.
Similar to other historic identity-based movements, racially based employment practices may only be the beginning of more radical abridgments of rights to come.
“Racial equity will mean that people have to give up comfort and power,” said Boulder activist Liz Marasco at a recent public hearing on the plan. “But let’s not fool ourselves. That doesn’t mean we force people to sit in training [sessions]. It means money, and it means land.”
Such racial equity movements are attempts to overcome what proponents see as institutionalized racism. But is identity politics the best way to achieve the nation’s founding goal of liberty and justice for all? Or would a renewed commitment to King’s vision of judging people as individuals, based on their unique characters and skills, be a more just approach?
No one is disputing that racial injustices still occur. Research suggests, for example, that hiring managers often discriminate against minority applicants. Black job applicants whose resumes included ethnic information received callbacks 60% less often than those who scrubbed their resumes of racial clues, according to a 2016 Harvard Business School study.
Yet the problem with trying to address these injustices with equity solutions is that they perpetuate the problem they’re trying to solve: racial preference. So-called “anti-racism” initiatives don’t just try to root out racism — for example, by advocating for racially blind interview callback decisions — but they try to swing the historical racial pendulum in the other direction to discriminate against white or Asian people. Similar to racism, identity politics and equity initiatives are collectivist ideologies that subjugate individual attributes for tribalism. Most equity movements would unfairly give former President Barack Obama’s daughters preference over the daughter of a West Virginian coal miner, for example.
These social justice movements also often discriminate against Asians and Jews, who have also faced historical racial injustices but disproportionately excel scholastically and economically. Princeton University research found that Asian students must score, on average, 450 points higher than black students on the SAT, which has a total of 1,600 possible points, to get into the same university.
That bears noting because basing hiring and promotion decisions on race may even be illegal. The Civil Rights Act “prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin.” Anti-racism, to favor a given race, is still discrimination.
These questions about the effectiveness and morality of equity movements will be addressed in a debate hosted by the Steamboat Institute and Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization on Monday at the University of Colorado, Boulder. The event, “Liberty and Justice for All: A Conversation on Social Justice and Identity Politics,” features Jason Riley, a columnist and editorial board member at the Wall Street Journal, and Donna Brazile, a veteran Democratic Party strategist. It will be livestreamed from 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. on Mountain time.
People in the United States are more divided than at any point in modern history. Identity politics, relentlessly hawked by race merchants and the media, only furthers this divide, pitting groups against each other. It’s time to be honest and address whether equity movements similar to Boulder’s will alleviate racism or perpetuate the division based on skin color that King so nobly sought to overcome.
Jennifer Schubert-Akin is the chairman, CEO, and co-founder of the Steamboat Institute.
