by Portfolio Armor
Disparate Impact Makes America Dumber And More Dangerous In our last post ("We Shouldn't Have To Live Like This") we shared Kevin Dolan's thoughts about how an aspect of civil rights law, Disparate Impact, made America's cities violent and its suburbs sterile.
As Kevin wrote there,
“Disparate impact” assumes that human beings are precisely alike across all protected classes, and therefore any statistically significant difference in aggregate outcomes can be regarded as prima facie evidence of illegal discrimination [...]
Even standards that the vast majority of protected individuals would meet, like “being able to touch your toes” or “knowing how to read” or “not stealing everything that isn’t nailed down”.
It doesn’t matter that most minority applicants to the Maryland State Police could touch their toes. The point is that fewer minority applicants could touch their toes — which means that that standard is racist and must be abolished.
This means that, in any space controlled by an institution with more than 15 employees, it is illegal to hold protected individuals to any standard of competence or behavior.
Disparate Impact Strikes Again
The DOJ's case against the Maryland State Police that Kevin mentioned above wasn't anomalous--it has been doing this all over the country. The latest example was the Durham, North Carolina Fire Department, where the DOJ determined that it was racist to require firefighters do be able to do the basic arithmetic required of the job.