Tag Archives: civil rights

the Civil Rights Act

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I admit I don’t know much about the Civil Rights Act. I learned about Martin Luther King Jr.’s more positive moments 67 times in school, but I learned about neither his darker moments nor the ground-breaking legislation his leadership helped bring about. One thing I do know pretty well is the Clean Water Act. In the Clean Water Act, permittees (basically any entity with a pipe or ditch leading to a surface water, including factories obviously but also most cities, towns and larger developments, only not most farms) are required by law to collect data on what they are discharging and report it to their state environmental agency, which is required to report it to the federal Environmental Protection Agency. If they are discharging more than they should, the state agency has to step in (typically this means fine them once, then sue if that doesn’t work), and if the state agency fails, the EPA has to step in. If either the state or EPA fails, third party non-profit groups will step in and sue. (This seems unfair, but normally they sue the permittee, and the state and federal agencies will sign on to the lawsuit on the side of the third-party group. Basically the state and federal agencies are doing what would have been their job anyway, but the lawsuit has forced their hand in making this particular permittee a priority.)

Anyway, it would be hard for Presidential cronies to break this system. It is law and it is decentralized among federal, state, and private entities. The Clean Water Act was passed in 1972.

Now we turn to the Civil Rights Act, which was passed in 1964. It prohibits discrimination in the hiring and firing process, period. So why are we arguing about “affirmative action” and “diversity equity and inclusion” in 2025?

This is from a blog called Popular Information, which is written by Judd Legum, the founder of ThinkProgress. And that’s everything I know about it, so consider the credibility of the source as you consider this:

Trump issued an executive order repealing Executive Order 11246, which was put in place by Lyndon Johnson in 1965. For 60 years, Executive Order 11246 prohibited government contractors with contracts of more than $10,000 from discriminating in hiring or employment based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin…

it contained two words that became very controversial, and those were “affirmative action.” Affirmative action had been used in a previous executive order by John F. Kennedy, but it was still undefined. And so, over the rest of the Johnson administration and into the Nixon administration, there was a lot of discussion and debate about what exactly affirmative action meant. And so that became a critical part of the legacy. It was resolved by Nixon. The Nixon administration allowed for the use of goals and timetables to measure the inclusion of minorities and other protected groups within government contractors, and that process has been more or less in place since. Essentially, 11246, with some modest amendments, since 1965 has been in place as the primary mechanism for enforcing nondiscrimination in government contracts and also by government vendors and subcontractors…

Under 11246, government contractors have to demonstrate that they have a plan for reaching out to protected groups, including minorities and women. And then they have to report on the composition of their workforces, or their subcontractors.

So like the Clean Water Act, regulated parties had to actively collect and submit data to show they were complying with the Civil Rights Act. This data could be scrutinized by public and private entities, leading to enforcement by public agencies and the threat of private law suits to force public agencies to do their jobs if that was necessary. But unlike the Clean Water Act, the requirement to collect and submit the data was the result of an executive order and not a law. So some lawyer in Trump’s camp was smart and evil enough to understand this and to remove that reporting requirement after 60+ years. The law is still there, but it will be harder to monitor and prove that someone is breaking the law.

The obvious solution going forward would seem to be for Congress to amend the Civil Rights Act to include the text of the executive order. It would even make a lot of sense to add the protections of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act to the U.S. Constitution itself. These things are not going to happen while the current iteration of the Good Ol’ Neo-Nazi Party is in the majority, despite support for basic bedrock civil rights being a bipartisan consensus for many decades under many center-right administrations.

June 2020 in Review

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In current events, the coronavirus crisis in the U.S. is spinning out of control as I write this in early July. I made a list of trackers and simulation tools that I have looked at. Asian countries, even developing countries, pretty much have it under control, Europe is getting it under control, and the U.S. and a few other countries are melting down. Some voices are very pessimistic on the U.S. economy’s chances to come back. So of course I’m thinking about that, but I don’t have all that many novel or brilliant ideas on it so I’m choosing to write about other things below. Most frightening and/or depressing story:
  • The UN just seems to be declining into irrelevancy. I have a few ideas: (1) Add Japan, Germany, India, Brazil, and Indonesia to the Security Council, (2) transform part of the UN into something like a corporate risk management board, but focused on the issues that cause the most suffering and existential risk globally, and (3) have the General Assembly focus on writing model legislation that can be debated and adopted by national legislatures around the world.
Most hopeful story:
  • Like many people, I was terrified that the massive street demonstrations that broke out in June would repeat the tragedy of the 1918 Philadelphia war bond parade, which accelerated the spread of the flu pandemic that year. Not only does it appear that was not the case, it is now a source of great hope that Covid-19 just does not spread that easily outdoors. I hope the protests lead to some meaningful progress for our country. Meaningful progress to me would mean an end to the “war on drugs”, which I believe is the immediate root cause of much of the violence at issue in these protests, and working on the “long-term project of providing cradle-to-grave (at least cradle-to-retirement) childcare, education, and job training to people so they have the ability to earn a living, and providing generous unemployment and disability benefits to all citizens if they can’t earn a living through no fault of their own.”
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:
  • Here’s a recipe for planting soil using reclaimed urban construction waste: 20% “excavated deep horizons” (in layman’s terms, I think this is just dirt from construction sites), 70% crushed concrete, and 10% compost