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There's a plaintiff's counsel I deal with frequently who will occasionally send out exhibits ahead of a deposition, and all the points she wants to emphasize will be highlighted, and I very quickly learned two things: 1. It's really easy for your eyes to go straight to the highlighted portions, and 2. It's just as important that you read what isn't highlighted. If you're trying to create right-wing ragebait for a targeted audience, it helps if you can not only direct readers to the most inflammatory sounding parts of a document but also omit 3 of the 5 pages included in that document, lest some smartass actually reads the whole thing and comes to the incorrect conclusion. It also helps that the document wasn't intended for the public but for a specific audience and thus omits crucial context that the target audience would be familiar with, though I can forgive Ms. Collin for that because I doubt that she took the time to familiarize herself with that context either.
Getting down to the nitty gritty, as Ms. Collin so helpfully highlighted, the policy provides that:
She did not, however, highlight the following definition:
In other words, this isn't a wide-ranging justification requirement for hiring white men; it only applies to job categories in which there is underrepresentation. And underrepresentation isn't based on the minority population as a whole, but on the estimated number of qualified minority applicants in a particular geographic region. To see what this actually means, though, you would have to look to the DHS Affirmative Action Plan, which the document's intended audience would almost certainly be familiar with. There, you'll find that there are seven job categories, that protected groups are divided into three broad categories: Women, disabled people, and minorities. This gives us 21 data points for determining whether there is underrepresentation, of which four actually show it as such; Minorities are underrepresented in three categories (supervisors/administrators, skilled crafts, and service maintenance) and women in one (paraprofessionals). There are no categories that underrepresent disabled people. There is no underrepresentation in the technician, professional, or administrative support categories. When you look at the statistical breakdowns, it is clear that these targets are dispassionate and completely unidealistic. There are approximately zero women currently employed in the skilled craft category (plumbers, electricians, etc.), but since the estimated number of qualified women in this category is zero, there is no target, and you thus don't need to justify hiring a man. For the service maintenance, on the other hand, there is a minority hiring target, even though these are the kind of low-level service jobs that minorities were historically relegated to in the past. The upshot is that you need justification for hiring a white janitor over a black one but not for hiring a white attorney over a black one.
And this says nothing of the fact that the justification involved doesn't even have to be that persuasive. If you look at page three of the document (which Ms. Collin didn't provide), it provides a laudry list of acceptable justifications, with the caveat that the list isn't exhaustive. The point of the process isn't to force the issue of hiring more minorities in jobs where they can't cut it, it's to to make hiring managers take a second thought about why they're hiring one candidate over another. The canonical conservative argument against AA is that it substitutes racial preferences for merit, but such arguments are always made without any understanding of how AA works in practice. All this policy does is say that if you think the white guy is the best man for the job, in the limited cases where AA even applies, you should be able to explain why he's the best man for the job. If you're incapable of doing that, then one wonders why you picked the guy in the first place.
You can feel free to disagree with the merits of the policy; I was merely pointing out that it's much different than the Tweet you posted implies. But that's all collateral to the real point, which is whether such a policy is evidence of a wokeness epidemic. The key here is page five, which Ms. Collins did not provide for us, though even if she did it's unlikely that anyone would recognize its significance. It well within the references and statutory authority and all the other housekeeping stuff that appears at the end of these kinds of directives, and contains but one item before the signature line:
If one actually examines the referenced document, they will discover an Affirmative Action Implementation Policy implemented in 2014 that contains the following provision:
In other words, this NEW policy that goes into effect next month is actually just an elaboration of a policy that's actually been around for over a decade. It gets even better, though; the 2014 Affirmative Action Implementation Policy is the third revision of a policy that initially went into effect in 2002. I couldn't find a copy of the 2002 policy so I don't know if it contained the above language in it, but I suspect it contained something substantially similar, as I was able to find an Affirmative Action Plan from 2004 from the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic development that contains a documentation packet with a form asking substantially the same questions as are required in this "new" plan, i.e. asking the hiring manager to justify hiring a non-affirmative candidate. And those requirements appear to have been stricter, as they indicate that the non-affirmative hire must be substantially (emphasis in original) more qualified than the minority candidate, while the new guidance contains no such provision.
To this effect, it's hard to see how you've given any evidence that "wokeness" has increased in any meaningful way in recent years. And yeah, I know the Biden's EEOC filed a bunch of diparate impact suits. But that doesn't say much; the EEOC has been doing that for decades. And before that they were filing pattern discrimination suits whose effects were much more severe than making a police department use a different test. In 1974 nine steel companies entered a consent decree by which they would grant minority candidates practically automatic seniority when it came to bidding into skilled positions as compensation for past discriminatory hiring practices. What this meant in effect was that if you were a white guy working in the labor pool for years with the hope that you'd eventually be able to bid into an apprenticeship to be a pipefitter or something, you'd get stepped over by a black guy who had been there for a year and got first priority. I don't hear many people talking about the wokeness of the Nixon Administration, though.
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