Discrimination is clearly wrong. Which helps explain why positive discrimination, sometimes characterized as diversity, equity and inclusion or DEI can seem so wrong to some people. The clue is in the name, positive discrimination is still discrimination.
But we clearly live in a world where discrimination happens naturally. For example, about 13.5% of the US population is black. If there was no racial discrimination, we would expect about 13.5% of college students to also be black, yet the real figure is about 8.7%. That’s less than two-thirds as many black college students as we should expect.
Doesn’t that look like discrimination? The figures certainly show that black students are under-achieving. We could point the finger of blame at those students themselves and simply claim that they aren’t as strong academically. But if all things are equal, that would be pure nonsense.
What is really happening could be compared to a 100m race for a black and a white runner. If we move the starting blocks for the black runner back by 10m, we shouldn’t be surprised if the black runner fails to win as many races as we would expect them to. In a perfect and equal world, we would move their blocks forward so that both runners are racing across the same 100m distance.
But that isn’t how positive discrimination really works. In effect, the white runner’s blocks are moved back 10m to match the black runner. So now, rather than just the black runner being discriminated against, the white runner is also facing discrimination too.
Which leads to a less than straightforward question.
Is it fairer to discriminate against as few people as possible or to discriminate against everybody?
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