The EEOC's War on Honest African-Americans

[Geee]

American Thinker:

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has recently decided that employers are too hard on job applicants who have criminal records.

While the new policies (EEOC testimony) are targeted at all potential employees, the motivation was the EEOC's concern that since African-Americans and Hispanics have a higher rate of criminal convictions than whites, considering former crooks as a hiring risk would unfairly impact minorities.

This would seem to violate Martin Luther King, Jr.'s desire to judge men by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. Spending time in jail is usually a good sign of a certain type of character after all.

It's clear, of course, that people do change and that many former criminals, of all races, are now responsible members of society. But by weighing in as it has, the EEOC is going to make it harder for employers to cost-effectively make informed hiring decisions. The fear of a government-funded lawsuit will force businesses to spend more time investigating criminals who apply for jobs. If the business is sane, it will probably tend to hire crooks it wouldn't have in the past just to avoid the risk of Eric Holder sending in a SWAT team -- or maybe Holder will outsource to the New Black Panthers.

Further, while the EEOC guidelines do not force companies to hire those with criminal records, the fact that the EEOC is even addressing the issue is highly questionable. Where in the Constitution does it say that the government can prevent companies from rejecting a candidate for a job because of the behavior of that person? Behavior, unlike race, is something people can control. Additionally, while there are no "bad" races, there are bad behaviors. What's next? Forcing private schools to consider hiring a teacher convicted of child molestation because the teacher has "reformed"?

Assuming for the moment that in Obama land there are no constitutional restrictions on what the government can tell citizens they can and can't do, who benefits from this new guideline?

According to the EEOC, one in three African-American men, one in six Hispanics, and one in seventeen white men have been in jail.

It's interesting that the EEOC cited the number only of men who had been incarcerated. Perhaps the fact that minority women tend not to land in jail skewed the statistics in a way that the EEOC didn't like. After all, it's not like women in America are all homemakers anymore, so why exclude them?