White man fired from Wells Fargo for stealing a dime 50 years ago, while black armed robbers, drug dealers, and rapists are hired as police officers

Susan G. writes:

The Daily Mail has story,

“A 68-year-old bank employee fired for “stealing” TEN CENTS from a laundromat when he was a TEENAGER.”

The story explains that in 1963 Richard Eggers was caught by a sheriff while trying to use a fake coin to get a free load of laundry, and charged with fraud, and 49 years later he has been fired by Wells Fargo Bank because of “a new federal law that prohibits insured depository institutions like Wells Fargo from hiring people with criminal histories.”

Of course, if the Mail’s account is true, the original case would appear to have been an instance of prosecutorial overkill. The story reads like a latter-day-day Les Misérables, with Eggers cast as Jean Valjean.

But there are further implications, apart from the idiocy of a zero-tolerance federal banking law which reportedly allows no discretion in individual cases.

The photo of Mr. Eggers shows that he is white. But aren’t many cities hiring felons as police officers, in order to increase the diversity of the police? And the convictions weren’t for putting cardboard nickels into laundry machines, either.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has declared on its Task Force blog that the “overrepresentation of minority communities in the criminal justice system” is a “form of discrimination” practiced by police and prosecutors. EEOC guidelines updated on April 25, 2012 state that “it is a violation of federal civil rights law to use a criminal background check in a manner that discriminates on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin” . The lengthy enforcement guidelines attribute this edict to Title VII of the 1964 Civil rights Act as amended by subsequent court decisions and the EEOC’s own “guidance documents.”

So it appears that according to our government, only whites can be barred from employment on the basis of their criminal records.

LA replies:

This is entirely consistent with the principle of Brown v. Board of Education, which, as I have pointed out before, was not about treating all races by the same standard, but about elevating the social and psychological condition of blacks.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 29, 2012 01:20 PM | Send