Kiss Chinatown goodbye under Obama data-mined racial quota system?
After the recent Supreme Court ruling on “disparate impact” in housing, Amy predicted that social justice activists and lawyers had been given powerful precedent to use racial and ethnic data mining against developers who did not intentionally discriminate:
When the Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Texas Department of Housing v. Inclusive Communities Project last week, social justice activists claimed a major victory in the battle against segregated housing. The decision endorsed a “disparate impact” analysis as applied to a Texas program that plaintiffs claimed distributes federal low income housing credits disproportionately, awarding too many credits to inner-city, predominately black neighborhoods and too few to suburban, predominately white neighborhoods….Kennedy and the majority endorsed a form of social engineering just as pernicious as those that disparate impact analyses aim to correct. Instead of creating “more equality,” these methods do nothing but invent controversies for social justice groups and the courts to work out, and, as Clarence Thomas says, presume that defendants are “guilty of discrimination until proved innocent.”
In the NY Post, Paul Sperry of the Hoover Institution, highlights how massive data mining by numerous branches of the Obama administration is set to light a fire nationwide even where there is no government-sponsored, or intentional private discrimination in order to recreate communities and businesses, Obama collecting personal data for a secret race database:
A key part of President Obama’s legacy will be the fed’s unprecedented collection of sensitive data on Americans by race. The government is prying into our most personal information at the most local levels, all for the purpose of “racial and economic justice.”Unbeknown to most Americans, Obama’s racial bean counters are furiously mining data on their health, home loans, credit cards, places of work, neighborhoods, even how their kids are disciplined in school — all to document “inequalities” between minorities and whites.This Orwellian-style stockpile of statistics includes a vast and permanent network of discrimination databases, which Obama already is using to make “disparate impact” cases against: banks that don’t make enough prime loans to minorities; schools that suspend too many blacks; cities that don’t offer enough Section 8 and other low-income housing for minorities; and employers who turn down African-Americans for jobs due to criminal backgrounds.Big Brother Barack wants the databases operational before he leaves office, and much of the data in them will be posted online.So civil-rights attorneys and urban activist groups will be able to exploit them to show patterns of “racial disparities” and “segregation,” even if no other evidence of discrimination exists.
Needless to say, the government database angle is generating the most interest, and rightly so.
But it’s more than government power abuse.
If carried to it’s logical conclusion, the housing diversity initiative should result in communities with concentrated ethnicity — such as the Chinatowns, or Little Italy’s, or increasingly, Little Koreas — being forced to diversity. And don’t forget areas, particularly in New York City, with solid concentrations of Orthodox or Hasidic Jews.
The Post article continues:
The granddaddy of them all is the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing database, which the Department of Housing and Urban Development rolled out earlier this month to racially balance the nation, ZIP code by ZIP code. It will map every US neighborhood by four racial groups — white, Asian, black or African-American, and Hispanic/Latino — and publish “geospatial data” pinpointing racial imbalances.The agency proposes using nonwhite populations of 50% or higher as the threshold for classifying segregated areas.Federally funded cities deemed overly segregated will be pressured to change their zoning laws to allow construction of more subsidized housing in affluent areas in the suburbs, and relocate inner-city minorities to those predominantly white areas. HUD’s maps, which use dots to show the racial distribution or density in residential areas, will be used to select affordable-housing sites.
I realize that the goal of the law is to increase non-white groups in white areas. But that’s just the flip side of “desegregating” areas of non-white concentration obtained through the voluntary affinity of various group members.
Such voluntary affinity is a far cry from active discrimination. If people not of Chinese heritage were prohibited from living in a Chinatown by explicit or implicit city or private policies or conduct, that would be one thing.
But the mere fact that people of one racial, religious or ethnic origin are voluntarily drawn to a particular area for a variety of cultural reasons should be none of the government’s business.
But nowadays, everything seems to be the government’s business.
So kiss Chinatown goodbye if the government diversity push is honestly and fairly applied.
Just another loss of freedom.
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