An Additional Point on Racial Mirroring
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Kudos to Professor Sidhu for his fine article on “Racial Mirroring”—the notion that, say, police departments should weigh race in their hiring in order to have a workforce that “looks like” the surrounding community—and how it “violates the Equal Protection Clause, perpetuates harmful racial stereotypes, and produces significant legal and social costs.”
I would add only that, as dubious as such a practice is as a constitutional matter, it’s even harder to justify under the most relevant federal civil-rights statute, namely Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. I’ve discussed the problems with any nonremedial justification for racial preferences under Title VII in another Federalist Society publication here (part III, starting on p. 981).
Executive Vice President, Law Affairs Center, Georgetown Law
Board Member, Center for Equal Opportunity
Roger Clegg is a Board Member at and former President and General Counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity. He focuses on legal issues arising from civil rights laws--including the regulatory impact on business and the problems in higher education created by affirmative action. A former Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Reagan and Bush administrations, Clegg held the second highest positions in both the Civil Rights Division (1987-91) and in the Environment and Natural Resources Division (1991-93). He has held several other positions at the U.S. Justice Department, including Assistant to the Solicitor General (1985-87), Associate Deputy Attorney General (1984-85), and Acting Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Policy (1984). Clegg is a graduate of Yale University Law School (1981).