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Notes -
The Supreme Court is expected to rule in June on Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, and is expected to strike down racial preferences in college admissions. The looming decision is starting to worry people in the DEI industry.
This Supreme Court case could spell the beginning of the end for affirmative action. It’s a looming crisis for corporate America (use reader mode to unmask the article. Paywalled version here).
There's some funny stuff in the article too, for anyone who's wise enough to not bring up politics or religion at work:
If the legal landscape does change, this is a chance to empirically test Richard Hanania's thesis that Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law. If the majority of woke supporters (at least within institutions) are supporters only because of civil rights law, then support for wokeness could turn pretty quickly.
I would be happy to let corporations discriminate at will, as long as there's no law requiring them to discriminate in a particular direction. Let woke capital duke it out with meritocratic techbros and see which kind of company performs better. There's a lot of iffy research out there claiming that diversity has benefits for team performance etc. but this would be the true test. I'd expect the equilibrium to be a diversity of companies with different hiring policies based on their company goals and the purpose of each job role. Maybe for engineers and accountants meritocracy is best, while for public-facing roles the workers should be chosen by their appeal to customers, including by matching customers' race and other currently-protected characteristics.
I'm almost certain that Hanania has the pathophysiology correct. His mistake is in thinking that this makes the problem easier rather than impossible. The Civil Rights Act is probably the singular most beloved act of congress in American history, maybe not by up-or-down popularity vote, but certainly by intensity-weighted metrics like "number of people who are willing to die to preserve it." Legislative repeal is a non-starter. Judicial review seems promising at first -- the Roberts Court espouses all the principles of freedom and limited government required to overturn the law on a pure legal basis -- but should they touch the cornerstone of modern American legal and ethical theory that is the Civil Rights Act of 1964 they would get packed within a month. Anyone hoping for Republican senate support should expect the John McCain Experience.
it does not help also that it has 11 titles. good luck undoing all of that
As Hanania has pointed out (gee we've been talking about him a lot lately), you don't need to repeal any of the titles.
The language of the titles is not the problem. It is the wild interpretations of the titles by activist rulesmakers in the executive branch that has led to government overreach. One could solve the problem in the executive branch without involving Congress at all.
One thing that makes me pessimistic is that even putatively conservative justices like Gorsuch are capable of penning decisions like Bostock that continue to expand the breadth and authority of Civil Rights Law to regulate things that no one involved in creating the act could have even dreamed of. We all would have been better off if the original act had basically just said, "this is intended to benefit black Americans because they got the shit end of the stick historically, but has nothing to do with anyone else ever".
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