Putting Things in Proportion
I'm excerpting a bit I wrote in response to a discussion going on in another forum. My involvement in the discussion started when someone made the ludicrous and thoroughly insupportable claim that the Democrats were blocking the nominations of Janice Rogers Brown and Miguel Estrada out of racist motives. The theory was that the Democrats can't bear to allow a Republican president to appoint minority judges because it will sap away the Democratic minority voting base. Democrats can be the only ones to appoint minority judges.
Well, at least, that was the claim until I pointed out the following statistics.
The breakdown of Bush's judicial nominees that were confirmed is as follows:Blacks - 10 men, 2 women
Hispanics - 10 men, 4 women
Arabs - 2 men
Asians - 1 manThe remainder were all white men and women.
It is clear that the Democrats are not stopping the Republican Bush from appointing minority judges. So then the claim became that Democrats are racists because those numbers are not proportionately representative of minorities in this country. Now the last part of that statement is actually true. However he lays the full blame for this at the feet of the Democrats, ignoring completely the obvious fact that Democrats can't vote to confirm people who haven't been nominated, and Bush hasn't nominated a lot more minorities than that. The only two minority candidates the Democrats have threatened to block are Rogers Brown and Estrada, and those two fall in with four white candidates. The similarity all six share? Ideology.
He also completely ignored the fact that those numbers represent only the minority candidates nominated by Bush and confirmed by the Senate. A more thorough look at the demographic breakdown of the currently serving Federal judiciary follows.
88 Blacks, or 9.58%
52 Hispanics, or 5.66%
8 Asians, or 0.87%
0 Native Americans
3 Arabs, or 0.3%
Of those numbers the following were the numbers nominated by President.
Blacks - Carter 6, Reagan 3, Bush I 7, Clinton 60, Bush II 12
Hispanics - Johnson 1, Carter 2, Reagan 5, Bush I 7, Clinton 23, Bush II 14
Arabs - Clinton 1, Bush II 2
Asians - Reagan 1, Bush I 1, Clinton 5, Bush II 1
Still not proportionately representative. I was, however, quite amused to see a Republican, and a staunch conservative one at that, advocating proportional representation. Will wonders never cease? So finally we get to the actual point of all of this. My excerpt about proportional representation.
In a truly non-racist society, one would expect to see proportional representation as a matter of course. There is nothing objectively cultural that causes members of one ethnic group to seek careers in law more than others. Certainly if you look at origin countries, they have lawyers and judges, which means that members of that culture seek careers in those venues. And it's not like Israel has only lawyers, doctors, financiers, and entertainment moguls. There are specific historical reasons why Western Jews tended to primarily work in the first three sectors which are unrelated to some objective cultural attraction towards those pursuits, but are in fact highly correlated to discrimination. Similar factors also relate to reasons members of other cultures haven't sought careers in those sectors outside of their origin countries. Differences like that might take generations to work themselves out, but given enough time in a non-discriminatory society, eventually they would. The problem is people tend to draw their conclusions about different groups based on the result of hundreds of years of discrimination, never giving thought to how that is skewed by why the result came about in the first place.
But you can't really judge the impact of discrimination on a society solely by looking at the upper levels anyway. Promotions to the top level are distorted by what goes on at the levels beneath. For example, even with the best intentions in the world, it would be virtually impossible to have 50% of all corporate CEOs be female next year. Simply because 50% of the pool from which you would pick CEOs is not female. Neither is 50% of the level right beneath that. As you go further down the chain, however, you will see that as you near the bottom, it is, in fact, proportionately representative of gender, but that a thinning out goes on as you move up. The higher up you move, the more pronounced the thinning out becomes. It is at those lower levels that you need to begin your understanding of what factors are at work and address them. The same analysis does need to occur at all levels, including the top ones, but the first place you need to look is where the thinning out begins and understand that. Then you work your way up.
What does all that mean? Proportional representation should not be an end unto itself. Proportional representation should be the by-product of our real end goal - a non-discriminatory society. If we work on that, proportional representation will naturally follow.