An Alternative: Criminalize Bigotry

We have found a sensible solution to the highly divisive issue of affirmative action: We can live with dismantling affirmative action if, in exchange, we as a society make the eradication of discrimination our No. 1 priority. We can do this by criminalizating the offense: Deny someone a job, a loan or an education because of race or ethnicity or gender, and go to jail.

We challenge our body politic on both sides of the political spectrum to seriously consider this simple proposition.

Currently, the perpetrators of hate and prejudice are fined, at best. But even that's rare. We as a society have never legally treated discrimination as a serious offense. We have determined that it is no worse than loitering, littering or smoking in public. In fact, littering and smoking are now considered much more socially offensive.

The other side of Hitler was egotistical, arrogant, grandiose, loquacious, aggressive and irritable. He had delusions of omnipotence, invincibility and infallibility, violent mood swings, rages, racing thoughts and pressured speech.

As Carl Rowan documents in “Dream Makers, Dream Breakers,” which chronicles the life of Justice Thurgood Marshall, historically, the people who have gone to jail were those fighting against discrimination, not those practicing or perpetuating it.

“Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!” proclaimed Alabama Gov. George Wallace in his inaugural speech in 1963. Six months later, he stood outside the University of Alabama to refuse admission to two African American students, and he never spent a day in jail.

In part, this is because U.S. coursts now operate on the thesis that “racism is largely a thing of the past and color-blindness a current reality,” writes Lani Guinier in “The Tryanny of the Majority.” Reading her 1994 book, which offers an insightful view on the development of our nations's civil rights laws, one gets the impression that discrimination is a complex issue.

From a legal standpoint, it is. Yet morally, the issue is quite simple: Discrimination has no place in a civilized, democratic society.

Even the opponents of civil rights publicly agree with that. Where people differ is in their perception of the extent of the problem and in their approaches about how to solve it.

Allowing history to render judgment against bigots or simply handing out fines has consistently permitted society to feel comfortable with the idea that such practices are not so bad.

Further, the historically underfunded Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which is generally charged with enforcing antidiscrimination laws, provides little disincentive for employers and even lawmakers to discriminate. EEOC's current backlog is roughly 100,000 cases.

For the sake of argument, let's agree to disagree about the prevalence of discrimination. And let's agree that no one actually wants quotas and nobody ever actually wanted affirmative action. Affirmative action arose as a means by which to rememdy the legacy of historical bigotry and as a means to deal with current offenses. Let's agree that we as a society no longer need to make reparations for past practices, but instead need to decide how we as a society morally and legally deal with the current problem.

Discrimination should be considered the most morally repugnant thing one human being can do to another.

To deny people jobs because of their race, ethnicity or gender is to deprive them of their livelihood. To remand children to an inferior education because of their skin color is to potentially condemn them to a life of crime and poverty. To deny people the right to live wherever they choose is to tell them that they are not worthy of living among other human beings.

Our task as a society should be to create a punishment to fit the crime, a powerful disincentive, such as criminalizing discrimination and making a committment to end it once and for all. And, yes, that would most definitely also call for more funds. That's the trade-off. We argue that the moral price of violating the human spirit is higher than the monetary, material cost of mounting a serious effort to dismantle the remnants of Jim and Jane Crow.

Criminalizing discrimination should satisfy everyone: those who want to dismantle affirmative action and those who truly are committed to creating a color-blind society.

Roberto Rodriguez and Patrisia Gonzalez write a syndicated column in San Francisco.

Commentary

There is or was a comic strip, once appearing in National Lampoon, called Politeness Man. A slightly Dick Tracy like character roamed the world looking for breaches of etiquette. He'd usually do something like jumping through a window to lecture a startled armed robber on the need to say “Please!” when asking victims for their cash. He would then turn to the victims and excoriate them for some even more abstruse breach of syntax or conduct and then award them the Steel Hanky (five pound metal likeness of the rag you're supposed to pick up when a lady drops it) usually flinging it upside their heads and knocking them out, finally departing to the sound of thanks from the real criminal. Now why did that come to mind?

But indeed — isn't it time that we as a nation turned away from our petty preoccupation with street murders, rapes, armed robbery, impending national insolvency, wars, famine and disease and instead address ourselves to something of real importance — like people calling each other names?