More on the long history of affirmative action/DEI in the US. These excerpts are from Chapter 5 of the 1992 book "Paved With Good Intentions," and cover affirmative action outside of education and employment. The 1978 Community Reinvestment Act forced banks into giving subsidized loans to nonwhites.
When broadcasting licenses change, citizens can challenge the racial bona fides of their hiring policy, allowing black activists to extort money and jobs through threat of lawsuit.
There are tax breaks for selling broadcasting stations to nonwhites, in the tens of millions of dollars.
Special economic zones with tax privileges and other benefits in black neighborhoods, plus affirmative action in the GOP (running nonwhites in safe seats).
Many public and some private pension funds preferentially invest in nonwhite-owned businesses, or require contractors to have racial preferences for their own contractors.
It is the law that real estate ads must show a certain number of black faces. Even newspapers for real estate ads placed by others not having enough blacks,
The Voting Rights Act requires special gerrymandered racial districts for minorities. New York has a local version of the same.
Employers have been sued for asking about employees credit ratings (disparate impact). Louisiana was forced to hire black judges. Michigan threatened to withhold funds in 1989 if the Detroit orchestra did not end blind auditions and hire more blacks.
A New Jersey town had a sensible enough law that only residents could be hired for public positions. Insanely, the NAACP successfully sued them to force them to hire according to the demographics of the surrounding counties because too few blacks lived in the town itself.
Education discourse: to close the gaps, teach blacks first and let the black students teach to everyone else. Surprised this wasn't resurrected for the Floyd era.
California Highway Patrol advertised job vacancies in Mexico to meet race quotas for Hispanics.
Racial shakedowns of moviemaking in NYC and tourism in Miami.
Blacks threatening bloodshed and terrorism if blacks are not hired as police chiefs or given $100M.
The saga of Kansas City, Missouri's magnet school, where a federal judge gave himself the right to impose massive taxes to make the magnet school so luxurious more whites would attend (for integration purposes). Supreme Court ruled judges could levy taxes for racial purposes.
Thread on affirmative action in Brazil. In 2012, Brazil began mandating that 50% of seats in all programs offered by federal universities should be distributed via affirmative action to the following three groups: public school grads, the poor, and blacks/Indians.
Affirmative action also applies to government jobs in Brazil. 20% were reserved for blacks until 2025 when this was increased to 30%. This applies to all government organizations as well as public companies and mixed-capital state-run companies.
One effect of this has been to make race much more salient in Brazil. For most of the 20th century, Brazil had a reputation for being a post-racial state with little racial conflict. Affirmative action changed this, as there are now concrete racial privileges to be won.
Thread with excerpts from the 1976 essay "On Meritocracy and Equality." I want to clear up some misconceptions around the idea of "meritocracy." The word was initially coined as a *pejorative* in 1958 to describe presently-existing Anglo-American society.
What characterized WWII and postwar Anglo-American society that made the word "meritocracy" appropriate? That talent (as measured by heavily genetic IQ) and technical skill, rather than hereditary privilege or some other mechanism, led to status and wealth.
But by 1976, this had already been successfully attacked and overthrown by the New Left/Civil Rights state, which replaced talent with hereditary privilege (race, sex) as the ideal arbiter of status.
Thread on California NGOs. Who works for and leads California NGOs? Mostly women, who are very starkly overrepresented in nonprofit employment and leadership.
Direct government funding is 30% of nonprofit revenue; the rest is tax-advantaged.
NGOs are effectively para-statal; a huge fraction of government services (eg 32% of Medi-Cal) are administered by them and a large chunk of their revenue is tax revenue. They then lobby the govt for ever more $$$ for their causes.
The California Racial Justice Act of 2020 allows defendants (in practice, blacks and Hispanics) to claim racial discrimination and overturn convictions explicitly in the absence of intentional discrimination, off of disparate impact alone.
Supposed discrimination can be used to reverse a judgment even if said "racial bias" is harmless and did not actually impact the decision.
Successes of the racial justice act: getting murderous gang members lower sentences because they are black and blacks are more likely to be charged as gang members [because they are more likely to be gang members].
In 2022, 45% of high schoolers polled say they were taught that "America is built on stolen land" in class at school, and another 22% heard it from an adult there.
Students taught all of the "critical social justice" (CSJ) concepts were in fact more likely to agree with them; among those taught "America is built on stolen land" 73% agreed.
Among those students taught 5 CSJ concepts, 75% believed whites are responsible for the inferior social position of black people and 44% support preferential hiring and promotion of blacks.
Thread with excerpts from Boris Sax's "Stealing Fire", a book of the author reckoning with his discovery (after his father's death) that his father, Saville Sax, had been a major Soviet atomic spy, stealing important info on the A-bomb and likely the H-bomb and going unpunished.
The author was initially devastated, but eventually relieved at this discovery as partly explaining his father's awful lifetime behavior (living in black slums, beating his wife and kids, torturing dogs, never getting a stable job, dropping out of Harvard twice).
Saville's mother (author's paternal grandmother) was a Jewish immigrant from Russia. According to the author, she, like many Jews, became a Communist as a way to partly recreate an idealized version of her Russian village without the Ukrainian pogromists in America.