In Your Heart, You Know He’s Right

Mark Thompson in reply to Mike Schilling says:

@Mike Schilling, I think IOZ’s point is rather that the CRA’s prohibitions in large part simply resulted in racists finding new ways of oppressing minorities. He is obviously being hyperbolic to a large extent, and I disagree somewhat with IOZ even considering that- but then again, I attach far more value on voting than he. Indeed, I’ve also argued before, and have a half-finished post continuing to argue that the CRA’s prohibitions on private discrimination were necessary and appropriate. However, as someone who does a tremendous amount of work in this area, I can tell you that those prohibitions on private discrimination are, in fact, “dubiously successful.” This is not the same as saying “abject failure,” mind you. But there are few things more difficult to win than an employment discrimination case, and I struggle to think of anything that is remotely as expensive to try for an individual plaintiff than an employment discrimination case. I assure you that employers are well aware of this fact. I also assure you that the result is that there are magnitudes more legitimate cases of employment discrimination that never come before a lawyer, much less before a judge, than there are cases that do.

Additionally, IOZ’s advice to Rand Paul does not at all imply that Jim Crow laws could have been eliminated purely via “respect, civic dialogue, and cooperation.” It stands instead simply for the truism that this is the only way to eliminate “fears and prejudices.” Government cannot change peoples minds by fiat.

Moreover, the entire point of the first half of the post – and the primary reason I linked it – is that the proof that Rand Paul has a huge problem with race isn’t that he’s expressing opposition to the private discrimination parts of the CRA but the fact that he couldn’t even suggest, in response, that overturning existing laws with a tremendous discriminatory effect (and often intent) should be a vastly higher priority than whatever he thinks should be done with the CRA. The problem is not that he thinks the CRA is imperfect. His problem is that he thinks the CRA’s imperfections are worth complaining about, but the existing laws that do far more harm to racial minorities than the CRA does to private business owners are not. That is the mark of a person who is, in fact, a racist. Or, at the very least, someone who is willfully ignorant about issues of race despite the fact that his pre-existing reputation on racial issues is, uhh, a bit less than stellar and a known area for journalists to (rightly) inquire about.Report