How Affirmative Action Erodes Standards
By • 8/30/08 |
Affirmative action causes a decline in standards. |
A pervasive theme on White America has been the decline in standards caused by affirmative action. The Affirmative Action Hoax argued that the admission of unqualified minorities to universities has eroded academic standards. An action alert on this year’s housing bill revealed that affirmative action lending had contributed to the mortgage crisis by lowering banks’ standards for loans. However, perhaps the clearest example of this trend is the gutting of civil service exams used in the hiring and promotion of government employees, like policemen, firemen, and bureaucrats.
Up until the 1970s, exams testing employees’ cognitive ability, as well as rigorous evaluations of their life history, were used extensively in both the public and private sectors. These practices made perfect sense: the best predictor of job performance is scores on intelligence tests, and the second best is previous life history.1 Someone who is bright, has graduated from high school and college, and has stayed out of trouble with the law is likely to make a better police officer than someone who fails to meet these standards. While this statement will seem perfectly obvious to most, hiring according to these commonsensical criteria has been fraught with legal peril for nearly 40 years.
In the 1971 Griggs v. Duke Power case, the Supreme Court ruled that tests and other evaluations that yielded considerable racial discrepancies in outcomes, or “disparate impact,” could be used for hiring and promotion decisions only if they measured a specific job skill needed for employment. As an example, a test for hiring a secretary could measure typing speed but not overall intelligence. Given that blacks and Hispanics tend to perform considerably worse on all aptitude tests than whites, the ruling made the tests that are most useful to employers legally suspect. And the impact of the ruling didn’t stop there. Hiring decisions based on educational attainment and previous life history also became subject to legal challenge. After all, since blacks are less likely to graduate from high school than whites and more likely to have criminal records, using this information in evaluations also has disparate impact on employment. The principles established in the Griggs case were reaffirmed in the 1991 Civil Rights Act.
As a result, employers across the country began scrapping employee evaluation tests or transforming them beyond recognition. A 1993 survey of police tests in 23 large departments found that testing for cognitive skills had been reduced or even abolished in all cases.2 The new tests were essentially useless for employee evaluations. As University of Delaware psychologist Linda Gottfredson concluded after an examination of one overhauled police test:
The Nassau County test destroys what it purports to embody—merit hiring. In the name of fairness, it removes competence as an advantage, denying job opportunities to talented individuals of all races. Thus the quality of policing can be expected to fall. This new form of racial preferences poses a clear and present danger to public safety.
Similarly, evaluations of job applicants’ previous history were abandoned or adulterated to such an extent that serious criminals could get hired as policemen.
Gottfredson has been proven right. In an elaborate and scrupulous statistical analysis, John Lott of the University of Maryland proves that affirmative action hiring has indeed led to a decline in the quality of police forces. For every one percent increase in the share of a city police force that is black, violent crime increases by 4.8 percent and property crimes by four percent.3 Steven Sailer links the mediocrity of the current federal civil service to the abolition of standardized aptitude testing in 1981.
In Coloring the News, William McGowan details several cases in which a surge in police corruption has immediately followed aggressive affirmative action recruiting. In order to boost hiring of minorities, the Washington, DC police department dumbed down its test in 1989 so thoroughly that, as one instructor at the police academy said, “a third-grader could pass it.” Also, the police department abandoned criminal background checks for new hires.
The result was that thousands of cases had to be thrown out of court because of incompetent policing. Moreover, by 1993, crime, ranging from drug trafficking to armed robbery, had become so serious among Washington policemen that the FBI formed a special unit to investigate the force. Of the 77 officers who were eventually indicted, 43 had been hired in the 1989-90 period. McGowan finds a similar link between affirmative action and police corruption in New York and New Orleans.4 Of course, the infamous Ramparts Scandal in Los Angeles, which resulted in the firing of 30 criminal affirmative action police hires, was an example of the same thing.
Police departments tend to be secretive about corruption, but it is still widespread today. In 2006, the New York Police Department Internal Affairs Bureau launched 1,057 corruption cases for crimes as diverse as stealing credit cards from dead people, skimming the profits of police fundraisers, and even putting out contracts for murder. The names of the crooked cops—Mammianne Zadja, Eduardo Saillant, Kabeer Din—suggest that minority hiring and corruption are linked. Moreover, a 2004 report by New York City’s Commission to Combat Police Corruption charged that 20 percent of the 2003 Police Academy class should have been disqualified for their previous arrest records.
Horror stories abound in other cities as well. If it surprises you that Boston is a hotbed of Hispanic police corruption, you haven’t comprehended how rapidly the demographics and culture of America are changing. Over the past year, four Hispanic officers in Boston have been found guilty of involvement in the drug trade. The convicts had been committing crimes regularly for years before their arrests, but Boston officials remained blind, despite the fact that at least one of the criminals tested positive on a drug test in 1999. It took a federal investigation to expose the crooked cops. Between 1999 and 2006, sixty-five black and Hispanic Boston police officers have tested positive for drugs, but their jobs are protected by a powerful minority lobbying association and a spineless administration.
Of course, Hispanic government employees across the country are massively involved in Latin American drug and human smuggling networks, particularly at the border. In 2005, I profiled dozens of examples of corruption among Hispanic border officials for American Renaissance. (See also here.) Background checks are so lax that in some cases, actual illegal aliens have been hired to police the border!
An essential determinant of the success of a society is the competence and honesty of its public officials as well as those of the broader workforce. In a nation where holding the workforce to high standards is branded as racist, standards will inevitably decline, and with them the general quality of life. Moreover, the gutting of employment evaluations is only one aspect of the general decline in standards that affirmative action has wrought. The same trend can be seen in university education, home lending, and many other aspects of American society. Mass non-white immigration inevitably increases the power of minority advocacy groups that lobby for affirmative action. Unless we eliminate racial preferences and the immigration policies that lead to them, I fear for the future of my country.
- Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray. The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994), 81. ↑
- Marvin Dunette et al., “Police Selection and Promotion Practices Survey Results,” HRStrategies, April 1993. ↑
- John R. Lott, Jr., “Does a Helping Hand Put Others at Risk?: Affirmative Action, Police Departments, and Crime,” Economic Inquiry 38, no. 2 (April 2000): 249. ↑
- William McGowan, Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2001), 148-57. ↑
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Excellent article on the negative effects of Affirmative Action. Political correctness has taken a toll on the quality of employees that companies and government entities are forced to hire.
Political correctness will continue to damage our country. When did it become unacceptable to speak the truth? Why are we forced to believe what we know is untrue? Because we allow ourselves to be shamed by those with no standards.
Thanks again for the article and please visit and comment at www.angrywhitedude.com
Angry White Dude
Having recently retired after 30 years working in a federal agency, I can testify regarding the effect of Affirmative Action. The federal government does in fact have a huge effort to recruit blacks. However, most the blacks recruited are marginal at best, but instead of terminating their employment, they quite often promote them to management positions. Or, if there is no management position open at the time, they will move them to a public contact unit, answering phones, but pay them the same as if they did the job that they were originally hired for, which is often higher than those who normally work in the public contact units. The Washington DC office of my agency recently closed, farming the work done there to offices in Virginia, and West Virginia. That particular office should have been closed years ago. 96 percent of the employees were black, the file area was essentially a “no go” zone which were controlled by various gang members who had been hired to work there. Naturally, any complaint about the incompetence of a black employee was regarded as racism. The best example is: a white man was promoted to a low level job in our department, he proved to be unsatisfactory, and after his 4 month training period he was sent back to his previous lower level position. A black man was hired right afterwards. They kept him on a training status for over one year, having to document all their training efforts, results over and over again before management reluctantly demoted him back to his old position.
I’m just at the end of “The Affirmative Action Hoax”. It is very well written and it really, truly makes me angry. As I’ve stated before, liberals (including 90% of the sheeple who can’t think for themselves) would rather die than read this book so it’s usually preaching to the choir. Perhaps we should start a fund whereby any liberal who reads the book in its entirety (whites only) would be paid $100 but they must pass an interview/test proving that they absorbed the facts and concepts therein. That’s the only way to get them to read it.
The reason all of our industry and manual labor jobs have left plus the quality of the American product declining is affirmative action. When substandard people get hired for jobs that require higher quality performance the result is obvious. Problem is we as a society have been dumbed down through our schools,literature,news,TV,radio,and jobs because of having to drop standards so low so that the incompetents can eek by.I believe it is an unfortunate mistake that this country may never recover from because of the ignorance of today’s youth and lack of concern for the country as a whole.Our current political system has failed and the effects are starting to show and if we as White Americans do not rise to the occasion or wake up then this country will soon be the next fallen superpower!
Read the following link on how they adjust the ASVAB to be fair to all demographics. God forbid that one demographic outperforms another. http://official-asvab.org/fairness_coun.htm
From first poster “Anonymous” above, something I must comment on [emphasis added]:
“I’m not a racist, and I’d have no problems working with a black employee who met the standards and was hired on their own merit. However, I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for that to happen. Not because my managers are racist (I doubt they are), but because they hire on merit alone and there is a paucity of qualified blacks.”
Sorry, sir, you’re kidding yourself. You most certainly are one bitter, hate-filled “racist” in the view of the mainstream Establishment, because you don’t understand that your enemies define the term, not you.
For example, in your post, you actually dare to recognize a “paucity of qualified blacks”. Do you seriously think you could express that fact in “polite company” and not be labeled with the R-word? Would you dare say that in an editorial letter to your local paper? What reaction would you expect?
You don’t help yourself or anyone else by worrying about being “racist”; you merely confirm you’ve lost any real argument before it begins.
Our language is one front in our battle for sanity and justice. Forget “racism”. Tune it out, recognize it as name-calling, not thinking. You’ll never be free until you do.
I tend to agree with Oops…
Never apologize for being called a racist. Laugh it off. It is as meaningful a word as “snotnose”, if I may borrow from Harper Lee. Some may say, well, someone could be the sort who doesn’t wipe his nose, so really it has meaning. But if it’s never applied that way it doesn’t mean that! “Racist” is more of a sentence than a word, and the sentence means “White people do not have the right to express nonleftist opinions about culture, nation, and ethnicity, and they most certainly do not have the right to look after their own physical safety.”
When interviewing for my current job in the private sector, I had to take two written exams. For most of the questions, it would be a stretch to say they measured specific job skills needed for employment. Some of the questions did test my overall engineering knowledge, but others seemed designed to measure overall intelligence. I was surprised the company was able to administer these types of exams. From what I’ve read in books like Paved With Good Intentions, this might be a lawsuit waiting to happen.
In the meantime, it’s comforting knowing none of my co-workers are affirmative action hires. Not surprisingly, my department of over 150 people is almost 100% white. A handful of my co-workers are Jewish, as would be expected. There’s one Asian (I was expecting more), one Hispanic, and no blacks. I don’t live in a particularly white region of the country, so the office demographics are conspicuously out of synch with those of the rest of the community.
I’m not a racist, and I’d have no problems working with a black employee who met the standards and was hired on their own merit. However, I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for that to happen. Not because my managers are racist (I doubt they are), but because they hire on merit alone and there is a paucity of qualified blacks.