Small: Court finds discrimination is wrong

Court finds discrimination is wrong

By Jonathan Small

The U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled that discrimination is wrong. That may surprise Ibram Kendi disciples but not any Oklahoman with an ounce of common sense.

(Kendi is the author of “How to be an Antiracist” and notoriously declared that “racial discrimination is not inherently racist” and the “only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.”)

Marlean Ames, a white woman, began working for the Ohio Department of Youth Services in 2004. In 2019, she applied for a management position that ultimately went to a lesbian woman. The agency subsequently demoted Ames from her role as a program administrator and hired a gay man to take her place. Ames sued the agency, alleging she was denied the management promotion and demoted because of her sexual orientation.

A lower court sided with the agency, in effect saying Ames had to take additional steps to show discrimination that go above and beyond what would be required if Ames was a member of a minority group.

The U.S. Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision authored by liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, disagreed.

“By establishing the same protections for every ‘individual’ – without regard to that individual’s membership in a minority or majority group – Congress left no room for courts to impose special requirements on majority-group plaintiffs alone,” Jackson wrote.

This doesn’t mean Ames’ lawsuit will succeed, but it does ensure that Ames and others like her are treated the same as any other complainant.

This is an important victory. Spurred on by the aforementioned Kendi and other individuals in the “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI) industry, businesses and schools have embraced practices that, in effect, amount to active discrimination based on individuals’ race, sex or sexual identity. That these practices have been the flip side of Jim Crow-style discrimination—by discriminating against white citizens rather than black, for instance—does not make them any more palatable to the American ideal.

The public backlash against DEI’s evil, discriminatory practices is real and growing, but the pursuit of a truly color-blind society where merit is prized above all other characteristics has been dramatically bolstered by the court’s ruling. We can’t have one set of rules for one group, and a different set of rules for another.

On a personal note, as a black man with five daughters, I have long found DEI to be abhorrent. In practice, DEI teaches my daughters to view themselves as oppressed, and to view their mother as an oppressor of their father, based on skin color, not reality. The melting-pot reality of my family is not unusual in the United States today. Neither my daughters nor I am oppressed, and equality under the law should be the norm, not the exception.

Jonathan Small serves as president of the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs.