I want to break the impression that Affirmative Action/DEI began in...
arctotherium@arctotherium42
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Jan 02, 2026
~3 min read
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I want to break the impression that Affirmative Action/DEI began in 2014 or is limited to school admissions and a handful of infamously left-wing fields. Here are some excerpts from chapter 4 of the 1992 book "Paved With Good Intentions." First, firefighting.
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Police, firefighting, sanitation work, federal civil service. All public fields throwing out tests because blacks scored lower. These fields don't have market competition, so eliminating these tends to make them very dysfunctional.
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Court order whites be fired first during teacher cuts, school boards who did not meet racial targets suspended.
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The arbitrariness of affirmative action categories - Spaniards qualify. Whites faking black, Hispanic, and Asian ancestry in response.
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Extremely tortured legal logic from the Supreme Court. "in order to treat some person's equally, we must treat them differently."
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Justice Thurgood Marshall: “You guys have been practicing discrimination for years. Now it is our turn.”
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In 1989, 36 states had set-aside programs mandating a certain % of contracts go to women or nonwhites. This obviously makes government procurement less effective and also invites rampant cheating.
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Atlanta (in 1989 under a black government for 20 years) spent half a million dollars on a project to find past discrimination so it could keep these set-asides going. NY and SF similar.
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The US Labor Department does not approve government contracts with companies that don't practice affirmative action. The FCC can revoke broadcaster's licenses for insufficient diversity.
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Northwest Airlines shaken down and forced to not only set up special promotion channels for nonwhites but also finance scholarships for them.
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The Small Business Administration gives preferential loans to minorities.
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The FBI gives additional points on its hiring tests to nonwhites, and throws out the results if not enough nonwhites make it through anyways. State Department stopped considering foreign language skills because too few blacks spoke them and has a lower threshold for hiring them.
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Not just a govt thing. Warner Bros, 20th Century Fox, and many newspapers have special hiring and promotion channels for nonwhites.
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Other companies give executives bonuses for hiring and promoting more women and nonwhites, have minority-exclusive internships. KFC makes 3 executive lists so blacks only compete with blacks and women with women.
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Only 14% of Fortune 500 CEOs in 1990 said they ignored race and hired exclusively on merit. Which makes sense, since so many companies tie bonuses to hiring fewer white men.
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Minority-only job fairs are common. Black engineers are so in demand that Howard University began demanding donations to allow companies to recruit engineers there.
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USG used to have a sophisticated psychometric test, the GATB, that they provided as a service to both govt agencies and private employers. But they race-normed results, so given an equal score the reported results would show black > Hispanic > Asian = white.
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DEI training is not new. To diffuse white resentment of being discriminated against, companies gave "sensitivity" training to white employees. In one case, answers given when asked for negative stereotypes were used as evidence of bias later by Judge Patel in San Francisco.
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Big 3 automakers all subsidize nonwhite-owned car dealerships.
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Grant-making bodies, like the Ford and Rockefeller foundations and National Endowment of the Arts, favor nonwhites.
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College hiring committees had to justify not hiring minorities as early as the 1970s. Many hiring processes explicitly excluded whites.
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Many colleges give additional tuition assistance to nonwhites, as well as money, counseling, tutoring, and advice.
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There are many race-exclusive scholarships available. An attempt to stop this was scuttled by Bush I.
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In the early 90s, Texas A&M was spending $5.5M/yr on minority recruitment and retention. Too many whites can threaten a college's accreditation status.
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At Berkeley, both whites and Asians were discriminated against. However, Asians raised a stink and as a result were not underrepresented while whites were by a factor of two. Racial composition of admissions at selective schools is mostly determined politically.
