Obama favored race-based data collection, however, when he believed it would tip the scales in the direction of his minority constituents.
“The state must compile traffic stop data and find out if law officers are singling out minority motorists,” he said during a 2000 press conference announcing his “End Racial Profiling Act” at the Illinois Statehouse. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund backed the legislative measure.
In another 1999 episode, Obama pushed for an African-American appointee to the Illinois Commerce Commission. “Obama,” the Defender wrote, “said racial diversity on the utility commission would better protect consumers across Chicago and Illinois.”
The Daily Caller has seen archival copies of the Defender interviews described in this report.
Obama decried the lack of “minority decision-making power” on the regulatory board, which governs phone companies, utilities and railroads throughout the state.
Center for Equal Opportunity president Roger Clegg wrote in January that the Obama administration’s preference for racial set asides include support for “university and even K-12 race-based policies, contracting preferences by the federal government, racial gerrymandering, federal workforce “diversity” efforts; and legislative provisions in Obamacare and Dodd-Frank.”
The administration, Clegg added, was committed to “aggressively pushing the ‘disparate impact’ approach to civil-rights enforcement,” through which “the federal government insists that the numbers come out right, even if it means that policemen and firefighters cannot be tested, that companies should hire criminals, that loans must be made to the uncreditworthy, and that — I kid you not — whether pollution is acceptable depends on whether dangerous chemicals are spread about in a racially balanced way.”
