Monday, January 12, 2009

City Discrimination Ordinance is Discriminatory

Thanks to Dustin at Racinepost, I have been scrutinizing a City of Racine ordinance concerning discrimination. The following is how the city defines discrimination:

Discriminate, discrimination and discriminating refer to any type of act or refusal to act prohibited by this article, which is based to any degree on a consideration by the actor of the age, sex, race, color, veteran’s status, disabled veteran's status, religion, disability, national origin, marital status, sexual orientation, familial status or economic status of any other person.

Very well. So you can't act or refuse to act, to ANY degree, based on a person's sex, race etc...

And yet, in the very same ordinance, Racine attempts to tackle the problem of unequal employment in the following manner:

(b) Since the prohibition of discriminatory practices is not sufficient to effectuate the principle of equal employment without affirmative and direct action, the city adopts this article designed to increase the representation of under-represented groups in all departments, job classifications, and salary categories in city employment. The city, in developing the affirmative action plan, shall require an affirmative action plan from vendors, contractors, and firms with which it does business of $10,000.00 or more per contract.

If discrimination is acting or refusing to act based in ANY way on a persons race, gender etc... then any attempt to help under-represented groups is an action based to some degree on race, gender etc...

In other words, the attempt by Racine to help under-represented groups violates their own policy regarding discrimination.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's a very weak spin attempt on that issue Denis, you can do better than that.

Denis Navratil said...

CT, I directly quote the ordinance. How is it then spin? Tell me CT, how do you increase employment for a member of an under-represented group without first assessing said person to see if they are indeed a member of an under-represented group? Also, why do you suppose the ordinance, that otherwise carefully defined terms, did not define the term under-represented?

Anonymous said...

Affirmative action is racism.

Anonymous said...

That's not just Racine...