Discriminating Tastes
I guess I’ve gotten it wrong all this time. I thought that we were supposed to hire people based on merit. And, in the past couple of decades, we were told that if two candidates were equally qualified, the tie breaker should be if the person was a member of a group that had been traditionally disenfranchised…women, people of color. More recently, we were told that even if the most qualified person was, for example, a white male…if the second or even third choice was a woman or a person of color, they should in essence get bonus points…all to make up for past errors, to give us good role models in the workforce for others to follow, to create a more diverse work group. I don’t think there’s any factual dispute about anything I just said.
Imagine if a Caucasian Republican said there were too many people of color in an administration, and that person was going to vote against all administration nominees until more Caucasians were appointed. The cries of racism would be loud, and accurate.
But that’s not what happened this week.
Instead, two female Democrat U.S. Senators, Mazie Hirono of Hawaii and Tammy Duckworth of Illinois…who are also both minorities…declared that they would vote against all future Biden nominees until Asian American Pacific Islanders…AAPIs, apparently…are given a higher profile in the cabinet.
Given the 50-50 split in the Senate, even one Democrat defection would doom a nomination in theory.
The administration quickly gave them those assurances and the two have backed down on the threat.
So just to make sure I’m clear…in my hypothetical, the person would be declared to be a racist. But in the real situation, declaring that appointments had to be made based on gender and skin color, it’s not only not racist, but the administration caves in to the demands?
Welcome to the Biden-Harris view of America.
