Today the Supreme Court hears argument in the Schuette case, regarding the constitutionality of Michigan voters’ decision to ban racial discrimination and preferences in public university admissions (the equivalent bans for public employment and contracting haven’t been legally challenged). In no conceivable world can the Equal Protection Clause — the constitutional provision that bans racial discrimination — prohibit a state law that bans racial discrimination. The Supreme Court should and almost certainly reverse the lower court’s ridiculous judgment to the contrary, and will likely do so with a great degree of unanimity on the “political structure” aspect of the case.
Coinciding with that oral argument, Cato is getting involved in a lower-court case called EEOC v. Kaplan Higher Education Corp. Here’s the situation: Following several incidents of employee theft, Kaplan University did what any reasonable employer might do in similar circumstances: it instituted heightened screening procedures for new hires. This process included credit checks to filter out potential employees at greater risk of committing theft. These checks made no mention of any applicant’s race and Kaplan didn’t collect any race information from applicants, thus making the hiring process both race-neutral and race-ignorant. Nevertheless, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which itself uses credit checks in hiring decisions, sued Kaplan under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, claiming that the use of credit checks has an unlawfully disparate impact on African American applicants.
Because Kaplan doesn’t keep racial data for applicants, the EEOC had to come up with its own data to prove its case. The agency thus created a team of “race raters,” a group of seemingly random people who sorted Kaplan’s job applicants into racial categories based only on the applicant’s name and DMV photo. (You can’t make this stuff up!) Because of the unscientific and unreliable nature of this data, the EEOC was soundly rebuffed in the federal district court in Ohio where it brought its case.
Now before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, the EEOC is continuing its awkward crusade against employers’ use of credit checks. Cato, joining the Pacific Legal Foundation, the Center for Equal Opportunity, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and Project 21, has filed a brief supporting Kaplan and arguing that the EEOC’s use of “race raters” and its incautious application of disparate-impact theory violate the Fifth Amendment’s equal protection guarantee.
Classifying people into racial categories based on their name and physical features is a demeaning violation of the Constitution’s mandate that individuals be treated as individuals and not reduced to mere members of a racial class. We also argue that the EEOC’s irresponsible use of disparate-impact theory to attack reasonable business practices contradicts the spirit of equal protection by forcing employers to consider race for all of their business-related decisions in order to avoid bureaucratic entanglement.
When combined with the ongoing Fisher v. UT-Austin saga, we see that while Jim Crow is dead, various government actors continue to offer massive resistance to the ideal of a colorblind society.
