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Notes -
Right-Libertarian anti-racism policy.
I’m sure you’ve all seen a lot of awful anti-racism/diversity/etc policies put in place by leftists; every thread here features at least some examples.
That said, I really don’t like racism. It is one of the most disgusting instances of collectivist thinking: judging an individual for the actions of a group of people that ostensibly contains him; in this case people get lumped together by skin color.
Suppose you are a billionaire and want to decrease the amount of racism in the world; what decent options do you have?
Suppose you are a CEO of a corporation, what policies do you put in place to ensure there is no discrimination based on skin color in hiring, promotion, etc?
Assuming I live in the United States, partake in litigation against affirmative action. Continue to press on the blatantly racist measures Harvard and other elite institutions have implemented to exclude academically qualified Asian-American and flyover white Americans.
Well, it's going to be hard, because the way EEOC rules work in the United States, I pretty much have to put a thumb on the scale in favor of black candidates. Then once they're hired and (as a cohort) underperform their peers, I have to have HR continue putting a thumb on the scale at each level of promotion, lest I be said to racistly only hiring them, but not promoting them.
Personally, I'd prefer to do away with those measures altogether, but trying to avoid the voracious testers and attorneys of the United States Justice Department isn't easy.
First, I’d appreciate if you pointed me towards a more detailed discussion of these regulations — what do they demand the CEO does; how is the compliance checked; what is the mechanism of enforcement?
Second, what do you think are the policies of the ideal world? Suppose you removed all the affirmative action laws — what do you propose to do next? Surely just doing that is not enough, the pre-affirmative action America wasn’t a place free of racism; in fact, quite the opposite.
There is so much that it's hard to even know where to start. Obviously, the best resource should be the EEOC home page, but you'll find quite a few platitudes that aren't that easy to decipher as an employer. Is there something in particular you're looking for? I'm not being sardonic when I say that compliance is complex and the regulations are many. The punch line is that if your hiring doesn't reflect local demographics, you'd better have an explicit reason or you're guilty, and you might be guilty anyway. You're definitely going to need to keep a record of the race of each of your employees and each candidate that you're interviewing, along with a number of other characteristics.
The requirements and legal actions available are the sort of things that I would think would make a libertarian see red.
I think allowing freedom of association is the least racist policy choice. I do not agree with the Ibram X Kendi position that the cure to past discrimination is future discrimination.
I am not being snarky in my statements above - I think the present state of the United States includes academic and employment discrimination against Asian and white Americans, particularly in favor of black Americans. I doubt there's a perfect equilibrium to be achieved, but think movement in the direction of less racist academic and employment practices would mostly be about mitigating the discrimination against Asian and white Americans. I don't think you can find any prestigious or high paying sector of work in the United States where there isn't a thumb on the scale in favor of black Americans currently.
Yeah, what I would like to see are the concrete stories, requirements, laws, court decisions, etc that would make me see red — it’s the specifics that interest me. I’m well aware of the general argument
Back to the intent of the original post, I don’t intend to argue against the principle of freedom of association — I support it wholeheartedly, and am interested in ideas that reduce racism and at the same time do not go against the spirit of such principle.
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