The Selective Discrimination of Positive Discrimination

By Martin Hames

Martin Hames is an economist and writer, author of Winston First and The Crisis in New Zealand Schools.

The bias and selectivity with which collectivists, radical feminists and other anti-liberals typically point to certain gender and racial gaps as "problems" requiring increased government powers is as scandalous as it is intellectually disreputable.

In no society in history have all races and both sexes exhibited identical social characteristics. Yet any disparities in performance between groups in a given area is routinely put down to "discrimination", "prejudice", "racism," or "sexism", with no further questions asked - so long as the lagging group possesses the approved "victim" status.

Thus inferior school performance among Maori is put down to an education system that discriminates against Maori. The "solution" is more spending on Maori or changing the law in their favour. Superior Asian performance in education is never put down to a system that discriminates in favour of Asians. A special tax on Asians is never advocated, nor is changing the law to their disadvantage.

The heavy over-representation of Polynesians in All Black back-lines is never put down to the game of rugby discriminating in favour of Polynesians. Nor has affirmative action ever been urged, to ensure that Europeans get "fair" representation on the wing.

The Shocking Truth: Men and Women are Different

The Margaret Wilsons and Laila Harres of this world constantly harp on the earnings gap between men and women, for which we are threatened with drastic new government controls. Yet the many social indicators in which women outperform men are passed over in absolute silence by the harridans of the left.

They never complain that we need a new "employment equity" scheme to close the gap in the unemployment rate between men and women. They never threaten a new "prison equity" scheme, to reduce the huge disparity in imprisonment rates between men and women. They don't moan about the need for an "education equity" initiative, to ensure equal numbers of boys and girls do well in the NCEA, or a "life equity" scheme to even up the disparity in life expectancy between the sexes, or a "depressives equity" scheme to even up the number of suicides.

One can only conclude that for a certain class of feminist activist, a truly non-sexist society will only come about when women surpass men in all social indicators. Then she will have her revenge on men.

It may come as shocking heresy to some people, but men and women are biologically different in numerous respects. Nobody denies that peer pressure, or social expectations more generally, can influence behaviour. But if men are more violent than women in all observed societies, and if the evolutionary psychologists have something like a plausible story to tell about it (such as our male ancestors hunting mammoth for a living, and sometimes fighting each other over women), then it is reasonable to conclude that the number of men committing violent crimes in New Zealand will always exceed the number of women, no matter how often the gender police tried to massage the statistics, and no matter how many times they screened television advertisements showing the All Blacks cuddling babies and helping old ladies across the road. The same goes for a thousand other characteristics.

In other words, in a world of equal opportunities, unequal outcomes between the sexes is precisely what we would expect. Included in these unequal outcomes are continuing patterns in the occupations freely chosen by men and women. Women still prefer "caring" professions such as nursing while men congregate in "macho" professions such as police and the military.

The Lesson of History: Don't Jump to Conclusions

A similar blindness to group differences obfuscates our thinking about race. In British Colonial Malaya ethnic Chinese outperformed the native Malays in education, despite having fewer rights and less access to government-provided schools. Moreover, a thousand other differences in the social characteristics of races can be traced throughout history, when often the outperforming group had no particular advantages, and even - as in the case of Jews - laboured under significant legal disadvantages.

Given these demonstrated facts, simply labelling all disparities in outcomes between races as evidence of "discrimination" or "racism" flies in the face of all reality, trivialises true racism, and brands the labeller a purveyor of shrill ideological slogans rather than a dealer in rational argument.

We do not necessarily need to draw on genes to explain racial differences. Different cultural patterns can persist for generations, if not centuries, and for a huge variety of reasons, as Thomas Sowell demonstrated in his magisterial Race and Culture: a World View.

I sometimes wonder how left-wing activists can cope. Having to ignore or play down a huge swathe of reality - such as the whole of the known world, or the whole of history - must subject the Laila Harres of this world to such an enormous strain - intellectual, moral and emotional - that one seriously wonders how they can avoid going completely mad.