The United States of Racial Quotas and Preferences

On Tuesday, six days into Joe Biden’s administration, it became clear why Susan Rice, hitherto a foreign policy specialist, was named director of the Domestic Policy Council. Rice — unconfirmable for a Cabinet post after her unembarrassed Sunday show lying about the Benghazi terrorist attack — ventured into the White House press room to preview Biden’s “equity” initiative.

With one possible exception, the specific policies announced were less important than the word “equity,” invoked 19 times by Rice and nine by Biden. Ending federal private prison contracts, and strengthening relations with and combating “xenophobia” against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, are small potatoes as federal policies.

Not so, perhaps, with the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing initiative, started under former President Barack Obama, repealed under former President Donald Trump and now due for spirited revival. The idea is for the feds to reverse local zoning laws and plant low-income housing in suburbs deemed insufficiently diverse.

Actually, racial discrimination in housing has been reduced since the 1968 federal Fair Housing Act, to the point that in metropolitan areas from Washington to Atlanta to Los Angeles, most blacks now live in suburbs, not in the central cities to which they were tightly confined in postwar America.

But for Rice and Biden, “equity” requires not equality of opportunity but equality of results. That’s one of the fundamental tenets of critical race theory training banned by outgoing Trumpites and reinstated by Biden on day one.

A lower-than-population percentage of blacks in any desirable category, explains critical race theorist Ibram X. Kendi, must be the result of “systemic racism” (a term Rice used twice and Biden six times Tuesday). If you don’t agree, you’re guilty of “white fragility” and you must be a “white supremacist.”

As Andrew Sullivan trenchantly observes, “to achieve ‘equity’ you have to first take away equality for individuals who were born in the wrong identity group. Equity means treating individuals unequally so that groups are equal.” This is exactly contrary to the central thrust of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It could easily be judged, in particular cases, to violate the 14th Amendment. {snip}
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{snip} What we’re being promised is racial quotas and preferences in every conceivable program, in every possible corner of American life.

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