Racial discrimination in employment is illegal. But somebody forgot to tell Minneapolis Public Schools and the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers.
It has emerged that in March, the district signed a contract with MFT stating that when schools need to cut staff, white teachers must be laid off first, before “educators of color.” In addition, when schools restore laid-off staff, the educators of color must be reinstated before white ones.
This agreement is almost certainly illegal under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act — after all, racial discrimination by governments went out with segregation. But it goes much further as an illustration of the moral fiber of the organizations and people involved in drawing it up and signing it.
It is difficult to say which is the greater villain in this situation — the school district that cares so little about children that it would set such a poor and racist example or the union that cares so little about its white members that it would allow flagrant employment discrimination against them. Quite frankly, those members ought to stop paying dues or at least demand a special “white” rate since both their employer and their union treat them as second-class citizens.
Unfortunately, racism has come back into fashion for the so-called anti-racist adherents of critical race theory, whose specious rationalizations have cropped up in the school district’s defense of its odious behavior. The new trend is to claim that racial discrimination can right past wrongs committed by people long dead against other people long dead. The truth is, this sort of discrimination never rights any wrongs; it only creates new ones.
In an ideal world, where teachers unions are not an ever-present and malevolent force destroying education, teacher layoffs would be conducted based on merit and performance alone. But if they have to be conducted based on seniority, the way unions typically insist, then they must be conducted fairly for everyone.
This is not some silly debate over whether to be “colorblind” or “color-sensitive.” This is really about whether government and other employers owe respect to their workers. Government especially must treat people as individuals with agency, not as mere rungs on the ladder of some deterministic hierarchy of victimhood.
In a free and democratic society, such racial hierarchies can never be respected. They debase individual human beings who have God-given rights. They also create despicable spectacles, such as the Biden administration’s unconscionable Supreme Court defense of anti-Asian discrimination in university admissions. They give rise to the tortured logic of liberals who claim that Asians should just sit back and enjoy being discriminated against.
In 2007, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts famously wrote that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” His words are as true today as they were 15 years ago.
