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Racial quotas in employment and education are numerical requirements or Quotaism for hiring, promoting, admitting and/or graduating members of a particular racial group. Racial quotas are often established as means of diminishing racial discrimination, addressing under-representation and evident racism against those racial groups or, the opposite, against the disadvantaged majority group (see numerus clausus or bhumiputra systems). Conversely, quotas have also been used historically to promote discrimination against minority groups by limiting access to influential institutions in employment and education.
These quotas may be determined by governmental authority and backed by governmental sanctions. When the total number of jobs or enrollment slots is fixed, this proportion may get translated to a specific number.
The Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan had introduced a hierarchy of reliability by dividing the population of the Yuan dynasty into the following classes:
In 836 AD, Lu Chun was appointed as governor of Guangzhou. He was disgusted to find Chinese living with foreigners and intermarriage. Lu enforced separation, banning interracial marriages, and prevented foreigners from owning properties. The 836 law specifically banned Chinese from forming relationships with "Dark peoples" or "People of colour", terms referring to foreigners, such as "Iranians, Sogdians, Arabs, Indians, Malays, Sumatrans", etc.
Such racial quotas were restored after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, especially during the 1970s. Richard Nixon's Labor Secretary George Shultz demanded that anti-black construction unions allow a certain number of black people into the unions. The Department of Labor began enforcing these quotas across the country. After a U.S. Supreme Court case, Griggs v. Duke Power Company, found that neutral application tests and procedures that still resulted in de facto segregation of employees (if previous discrimination had existed) were illegal, more companies began implementing quotas on their own.
In a 1973 court case, a federal judge created one of the first mandated quotas when he ruled that half of the Bridgeport, Connecticut Police Department's new employees must be either black or Puerto Rico. In 1974, the Department of Justice and the United Steelworkers of America came to an agreement on the largest-to-then quota program, for steel unions.
In 1978, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke that public universities (and other government institutions) could not set specific numerical targets based on race for admissions or employment. The Court said that "goals" and "timetables" for diversity could be set instead. A 1979 Supreme Court case, United Steelworkers v. Weber, found that private employers could set rigid numerical quotas, if they chose to do so. In 1980, the Supreme Court found that a 10% racial quota for federal contractors was permitted.
In 1990 City University of New York was accused of discriminatory hiring practices against Italian-Americans.
In 1991, President George H. W. Bush made an attempt to abolish affirmative action altogether, maintaining that "any regulation, rule, enforcement practice or other aspect of these programs that mandates, encourages, or otherwise involves the use of quotas, preferences, set-asides or other devices on the basis of race, sex, religion or national origin are to be terminated as soon as is legally feasible". This claim led up to the creation of the Civil Rights Act of 1991; however, the document was not able to implement these changes. It only covered the terms for settling cases where discrimination has been confirmed to have occurred.
College admissions in the United States have had racial quotas; see for details. These have notably included blanket bans on , from 1918 to the 1950s, and an alleged Asian quota from the 1980s and ongoing .
The law student organization Building a Better Legal Profession developed a method to encourage politically liberal students to avoid law firms whose racial makeup is markedly different from that of the population as a whole. In an October 2007 press conference reported in The Wall Street Journal,Amir Efrati, You Say You Want a Big-Law Revolution, Take II, "Wall Street Journal", October 10, 2007. and The New York Times, the group released data publicizing the numbers of African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asian-Americans at America's top law firms. The group has sent information to top law schools around the country to encourage students who agree with its viewpoint to take the demographic data into account when they choose where to work after graduation. As more students choose where to work based on firms' diversity rankings, firms face an increasing market pressure to change theirs.Thomas Adcock and Zusha Elinson, "Student Group Grades Firms On Diversity, Pro Bono Work", New York Law Journal, October 19, 2007, http://www.law.com/jsp/nylj/PubArticleNY.jsp?hubtype=BackPage&id=1192698212305
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