By DAN VALENTI

PLANET VALENTI News and Commentary

(FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE, TUESDAY, DEC. 9, 2014) — As the recent national events has shown, America is still incapable of having an intelligent discussion on race. Too many people are unwilling or unable to drop the pretexts and prejudices that preclude the neutral approach to interpersonal relations that justice demands.

Locally, the city of Pittsfield struggles with this same question. We note from this week’s city council agenda (the meeting is tonight at 7 p.m., council chambers, city hall) assistant city attorney Darren Lee’s submission to Mayor Dan Bianchi of the amended and adopted Affirmative Action Plan Policy. The city’s Affirmative Action Committee adopted the amended version on Aug. 20. Lee, on behalf of the AAC, asks that the mayor accept the new plan and that the city council place it on file.

“File” in this case does not mean “throw out,” “destroy,” or “bury,” as it does when the council doesn’t like petition, especially one submitted by a private citizen. Here, “file” means essentially to activate.

The Pieces of Paper That Can’t Touch Real Life

The policy contains the usual boilerplate about how the city of Pittsfield does not tolerate discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, or veteran status. As always, however, you know and THE PLANET knows that discrimination happens on a regular basis. You can legislate morality on a piece of paper, but you can’t touch the human heart in that way. Therein lies the problem.

Despite the honorable intentions of the new policy with respect to the city’s “moral commitment to … promote, as well as respect and accommodate, diversity in its workforce,” does the new policy contain an internal consistency? In other words, isn’t the stated intention to “promote diversity” the same thing as saying the city will not treat everyone the same with respect to employment? Promotion on the basis of preferences related to skin color, gender, or ethnic origin, for example, means to favor one group over another and commit the very act the policy is meant to curb.

The policy commits the city to hiring “without regard” to the categories noted above. Nonetheless, the stated aim is to increase in city employment the presence of “under-utilized and under-represented groups within the population.” In other words, the policy requires the city to favor in its hiring and practices groups found to be “under-represented.” Is that not a reverse way of saying it will discriminate against other classes that do not fit the prejudicial preference?

The point is that when one attempts to advance justice through artificial social engineering, one often ends up perpetuating rather than quelling a resident evil. If there are few blacks or minorities presently at work for the city of Pittsfield, why? Could it be because of outright prejudice in the city’s offices? That’s what the policy would suggest. However, could it also be that members of such minorities have made disproportionately poor decisions in life with respect to education, employment, and other key indicators of personal and professional success and therefore cannot compete for positions without unfair handicapping?

Fair Shot at the Start? Yes. Fixed Finishes? Uh, No

THE PLANET wants everyone to have a fair shot at success. That is the American Dream. We want people to be able to line up at the start as equals. That is not only reasonable but also required for a society to function at its best. We shouldn’t, however, tilt the pitch to guarantee that certain favored and otherwise unrepresented entrants will win. If, though, whole categories of people decide to build homes out of straw and not brick, is it society’s obligation to build domiciles with bricks and mortar FOR them?

As a piece of writing, Affirmative Action policies typically fall victim to the worst tendency of rhetorical idealism, which is to ignore the realities that drive one into flights of fancy in the first place. As such, the verbiage in these policies tend to read more as dogmatic tenets of faith or as sociopolitical propaganda rather than as practical guides for helping cure the human heart of hatred. No matter how noble the intention, it just isn’t going to happen.

Pittsfield’s new policy calls for a blanket approach to hiring practices, for example:

• Measurable results (fancy talk for quotas)
• Goals and timetables (forcing arbitrariness into urgency’s breach)
• Massive publicity
• Reach-out to “protected groups”
• “an atmosphere of acceptance and inclusion among city workers with diverse backgrounds”
• steps “to ensure a diverse mix of applicants for consideration in selection and hiring.”

Again it’s all well and good to draw up on the blackboard how the ideal should operate and look, but as Affirmative Action history shows, idylls cannot be expected to be mainlined into actual working human systems and expect to produce magic. In fact, often, Affirmative Action produces regression.

This is seen, for example, in the classroom when it herds and fast-tracks “underperforming students” into more elite schools. Too many students are set-up to fail, cannot compete fairly, and can only pass if they are graded on a steep curve.

How Does Discrimination Help End Discrimination?

Affirmative Action is too often code for racial, gender, and other “lifestyle” preference done in the name of “anti-discrimination.” Historically, because humans aren’t machines and thus hold on to irrational hatreds, far too many Affirmative Action initiatives have simply replaced one form of discrimination with another.

“The single biggest problem in this system — a problem documented by a vast and growing array of research — is the tendency of large [and generous] preferences to boomerang and harm their intended beneficiaries. … [This] largely explains why, even though blacks are more likely to enter college than are whites with similar backgrounds, they will usually get much lower grades, rank toward the bottom of the class, and far more often drop out” — Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr., “The Painful Truth About Affirmative Action,” The Atlantic, Oct. 2, 2012

In sum, Affirmative Action as social engineering will more often than not produce higher failure rate, more drop outs, lower performance, and the exacerbation of the problem it was intended to solve.

Why should we expect Pittsfield to be any different?

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“And me, I’m still standing with my thumb out in the rain.” — Charley Ainsley, “City Boy.”

“OPEN THE WINDOW, AUNT MILLIE.”

LOVE TO ALL.