Lot of questions about how this bill requiring minority representation on all corporate boards will affect business in California; one likely consequence is a sharp increase in those identifying as bisexual.... https://www.pasadenanow.com/main/local-assemblymembers-bill-requiring-diversity-on-corporate-boards-passes-senate-floor/

One of the purposes of the 1619 Project is to assert the moral priority and historical primacy of black Americans in the struggle for civil rights.

No one anticipated that the Civil Rights movement ending Jim Crow would mean that California would mandate bisexual representation on corporate boards in 2020.

The basic problem is that there are too few black people in America to sustain political support for the civil rights establishment, thus new groups have to be brought under its umbrella -- but in the process those groups end up appropriating most of the gains.

Shep Melnick observed that an absolute majority of the country qualifies as some form of "protected class" under various civil rights statutes and regulations.

So through an entirely emergent and opportunistic process, civil rights ceased to be a means of redressing the condition of those brought here in chains and consigned to second class citizenship through 1964 -- and became a way to hold together a coalition of the majority

of those with various claims to belong to identity protected classes, which legal and moral entrepreneurs of various stripes seek to manufacture and monopolize

To give a very clear example, Californians will vote in November on a constitutional amendment that will undo a prior referendum that prohibited racial preferences in government practices, including college admissions.

In practical terms it will mean cutting the Asian American population in the UC's by more than half, while more than trebling the share of the Hispanic and black population.

This policy is driven by the Hispanic plurality (Hispanics are 37 percent of the population; Asians are 15 percent.) So while these measures purport to be aimed at ending "white supremacy", they are actually one predominant plurality taking things away from another minority.

On the other hand, corporate boards can fulfill their diversity mandate by elevating Asian Americans to the board -- which is how the civil rights coalition keeps Asian elites on board, while sacrificing rising generations of Asian students.

What does any of this have to do with the original moral purpose and mandate of the civil rights movement? Very little.

But it wreaths itself in the remaining moral prestige of that movement while it increasingly turns our society into one governed by what amount to overt privileges conferred upon some through the political process

Incentivizing a proliferation of new claims to deserve protected status for new categories of the oppressed in a manner that is both politically toxic and psychologically crippling

This is the master key to today's politics