Archive for January, 2009
Kathryn Lopez of National Review interviewed the American Civil Rights Institute’s Ward Connerly on Inauguration Day.
Connerly notes that when he and his wife were married, interracial marriage was outlawed. He knows what Barack Obama’s parents went through. To see the product of an interracial marriage become president of the United States is indeed historic.
“Being colorblind doesn’t necessarily mean that you don’t see color; it means that you discard its influence when you see it,” Connerly said. “I have been roundly criticized by blacks for over a decade as being naive about this, as they assert the inherent racism of Americans. I gloat, in this instance, to say that they were wrong.”
Lopez asks Connerly, “What’s your wildest dream about Barack Obama?”
“That he will say, ‘My fellow Americans, Ward Connerly is right about race preferences being a violation of all that is good about our beloved nation. Therefore, today, I am issuing an Executive Order that will require all federal agencies and all of those who receive federal funds to obey the law of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.’”
I’d pay good money to hear that, Mr. Connerly!
Filed under: Barack Obama, Ward Connerly | |Comments off
The Department of Justice, charged with enforcing the law and defending the interests of the United States, has filed suit against the city of Gary, Indiana for discriminating against white applicants in favor of black applicants for emergency medical technician (EMT positions.
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. The department alleges that six white applicants sought EMT positions and were placed on a hiring list. The city ended up hiring only black applicants, although the six white applicants ranked higher than the lowest-ranked black applicant who received a job offer.
The city’s attorney claims it’s geographical, not racial. The list on which the white applicants appeared was prepared while Scott King was mayor, but the new mayor didn’t recognize the list.
“We hire not on the basis of any race, but on the basis of residency,” said Hamilton Carmouche.
Would Carmouche have us believe the city hired only blacks because they live in the city and skipped over white applicants because they don’t live in the city? Quite a jarring and entirely avoidable coincidence, if you ask me.
Filed under: Judiciary | |1 Comment
It seems every other week there’s a news article or report about how American schools are becoming “increasingly segregated.” What’s happening is that people are making the choice to move to areas with better government schools, putting their kids in private schools, or opting to home-school. At least for now, people have the right to move wherever they want and for whatever reasons.
Inevitably, those who are financially unable to move to neighborhoods with better schools and can’t afford private schools or home-schooling get left behind. What is the government’s role in these situations? During the civil rights movement, the people fought for and won the right to be treated as first-class citizens. The government dismantled decades worth of Jim Crow laws and struck racial segregation from the books. Should the government now coerce people to integrate?
The Civil Rights Project at the University of California released a report that shows blacks and Hispanics are “more separate from white students than at any time since the civil rights movement and many of the schools they attend are struggling.” (Source)
What role should the government take, if any, in so-called voluntary segregation? Should we be concerned about racial segregation per se or only government-mandated segregation?
So-called residential segregation is not illegal or immoral. It’s one thing if a landlord or realtor or mortgage company discriminates against someone on the basis of race. It’s quite another if people choose to live in certain areas and around certain people. As long as the government isn’t doing the segregating, it shouldn’t be an issue.
One consequence of residential segregation is that some schools will contain a larger number of low-performing students. As the article notes, these schools tend to have weaker teachers, and a higher percentage of kids from low-income homes and for whom English is a second language.
Should we just say, “That’s life,” and be done with it?
Download the 33-page (PDF) “Reviving the Goal of an Integrated Society.”
Filed under: General | |Comments off
More brilliance from the Center for Equal Opportunity’s Roger Clegg as he goes head-to-head in a comment thread with Jay Rosner, responding to his convince-me-racism-doesn’t-matter straw man:
“[N]o one believes that racial discrimination has vanished, that race does not matter. But there are better ways to fight it than giving preferential treatment to individuals who are more privileged than those being discriminating against (as President-elect Obama acknowledged), and it is not so systemic that it justifies institutionalized discrimination in the other direction. The playing field is not level, but there are plenty of folks of all colors at both ends. Enforce the civil rights laws; provide scholarship and other aid for those of all colors.
…
“[E]ven if there are some dubious benefits to the use of racial preferences, they are overwhelmed by the costs: It is personally unfair, passes over better qualified students, and sets a disturbing legal, political, and moral precedent in allowing racial discrimination; it creates resentment; it stigmatizes the so-called beneficiaries in the eyes of their classmates, teachers, and themselves, as well as future employers, clients, and patients; it fosters a victim mindset, removes the incentive for academic excellence, and encourages separatism…”
Clegg and Rosner are discussing an article about an October 2007 study, which concluded that eliminating race preferences would result in a 35 percent decrease in minority enrollment at competitive schools and a lesser decrease at all colleges. See the original exchange on this Inside Higher Ed comment thread. Great stuff, Mr. Clegg.
Filed under: Center for Equal Opportunity, Roger Clegg | |Comments off
On November 4, 2008, 58 percent of Nebraska voters barred their state and local governments from preferring and discriminating against individuals based on race in hiring, contracting, and admissions.
After the governor certified the results, Nebraska Civil Rights Initiative executive director Doug Tietz said, “The voters overwhelmingly supported the Nebraska Civil Rights Initiative and now Nebraska’s state motto ‘equality before the law’ is officially the law of the land.”
As expected, the new law was challenged in court. Last week, a Nebraska court upheld the ban. Ruling against a group called Nebraskans United, Judge Karen Flowers wrote that the facts didn’t present any evidence of fraud, as the group claimed. (Source)
“The most common phrase in the judge’s ruling is, ‘there is no evidence,’” Tietz said. “It is time for the opposition to put to rest their baseless allegations and acknowledge the people’s decision to end race and gender preferences in public contracting, public education, and public hiring”
Will Nebraskans United end up appealing Judge Flowers’s ruling? Most likely. They probably won’t prevail, since the lower court found no evidence of fraud, but that won’t stop groups from trying to overturn the vote.
Protecting and upholding the will of the people is no small task, is it?
Filed under: Doug Tietz, NECRI | |Comments off
New Haven firefighter Frank Ricci did what he was supposed to do. He bought the recommended books and studied for a promotion exam. Despite his dyslexia, Ricci scored high enough to qualify for a promotion, but the department threw out all test results. No blacks and only two Hispanics scored high enough to be promoted.
Over a dozen white firefighters and one Hispanic filed suit against the city in 2004, claiming it violated their constitutional rights and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act by discriminating against them based on race. Had the fire department certified the test results, however, the lower scorers likely would have sued the city under Title VII’s “disparate impact” provision. The fire department was damned if it did and damned if it didn’t.
Read the rest at Townhall.
Update: Naturally, the NAACP sides with the city in the Ricci lawsuit. Twelve black New Haven firefighters asked for the NAACP’s support.
“Historically, as African-Americans, we don’t do as well on strictly written exams,” said Donald Day, retired firefighter and former regional director of the International Association of Black Professional Firefighters. “Some of the worst officers you’ve ever had were ‘book smart’ officers.”
That may be true, but standardized written exams (a reasonable screening process) are required for a number of professions, including lawyers, doctors, and pilots. Can you imagine if they started dropping standards just to make sure there is an arbitrary percentage of blacks in these professions? There’d be chaos!
I’m waiting, patiently, for some person or group to seriously suggest lowering the standard of entry for pilots or surgeons!
Filed under: Column | |Comments off
In No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning, Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom put the onus on individuals to close the academic achievement gap between black students and everyone else. Parents must have high expectations and instill in their children the value of education. The authors contend that the black subculture itself is part of the problem. No Excuses features several inner-city schools that have defied low expectations where black students have achieved academic success.
No child should be excused from doing the best he can. Will the election of America’s first biracial president emphasize the importance of that message?
An article in Diverse picks up on the “no excuses” theme and highlights a few ideas gleaned from those who voted for Obama and/or witnessed the inauguration.
Morehouse College president Robert Franklin said, “The most exciting message I’ve heard from students, having worked to help elect Obama, can be summarized in two words: no excuses. After this election, there will be no excuses for our academic underperformance, no excuses with disrespect to women, and no excuses for bad behavior. And so we hope to leverage the Obama factor to transform all Black boys and ultimately lead the renaissance of the entire Black community.”
Now that’s a promising statement. While Obama has pledged more money for education, money alone won’t close the academic achievement gap. As Franklin implies, conduct is a factor in educational failings. Perhaps Obama, who says he’s not sure if he’s ever benefited from race preferences, will serve as an example of someone who presumably allowed himself no excuses.
Filed under: General | |1 Comment
While “dialoguing” about race relations in the wake of the election of America’s first biracial president, we hope people will seriously discuss whether race preferences, which typically involve lowering standards for certain racial minorities, are necessary. Voters in California, Michigan, Nebraska, and Washington answered the question with a resounding NO.
According to a CNN poll, 69 percent of blacks believe Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, dream has been realized, while only 46 percent of whites say the same. Why the discrepancy? On the one hand, these white respondents may believe whites still discriminate against blacks. On the other hand, they may hold the view that, given the continued use of race preferences, the country has not fulfilled King’s dream of people being judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin.
Race preferences certainly belong in the top ten list of government policies that do not fulfill the dream. If fact, they betray the dream.
Filed under: Barack Obama | |1 Comment
The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear arguments on whether Congress went too far in extending Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.
Once upon a time in America, some states tried to keep blacks from voting. The infamous poll tax was one method used to suppress the black vote. Over 40 years ago, Congress enacted a law that required states like Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Louisiana to seek Justice Department permission to change voting procedures (pre-clearance). As George Will points out in the Washington Post, these states needed permission to make even minor changes.
In 1975, Texas was added to the list of states covered by the provision. In 2006, the act was extended for the fourth time – for 25 years. A utility district in Texas that came into existence in 1986 has challenged the law. Considering the racial progress made in the last four decades, particularly the election of black officials, the pre-clearance requirement is intrusive and based on out-of-date evidence, the plaintiff contends.
Perhaps the best evidence that Section 5 is obsolete is the election of Barack Obama, America’s first biracial president.
Filed under: Judiciary | |1 Comment
NPR hosted an interesting roundtable discussion about the future of race preferences (although it uses the misnomer “affirmative action”) in the context of the election of a biracial president. NPR did a fair job selecting participants for this panel. Writer Dahlia Lithwick sounds only slightly pro-preferences, BAMN’s Shanta Driver is pro-preferences, and John McWhorter is opposed to race-based admissions policies.
The two women point out that enrollment in California schools dropped after voters barred the government from considering race in admissions, but McWhorter added that in subsequent years, minority admissions increased as schools sought ways to bring qualified minorities to campuses.
McWhorter asks “whether it’s really such a tragedy” that a black student gets a degree from the University of California at San Diego rather than UC Berkeley, in the absence of race-based admissions. (I often wonder the same thing. It is really such a tragedy that minority enrollment at “elite” schools would decrease under race-blind admissions policies?) More important, McWhorter notes that there is no documented educational benefit to diversity. He believes we should keep affirmative action based on class and economic disadvantage, which the American Civil Rights Institute supports. What I assume McWhorter means by economic affirmative action is widening the admissions pool with more disadvantaged candidates and not lowering standards to admit these students.
If we have a two-tied system of admissions, says McWhorter, we’re going to have to talk about the effect of it. Too many people talk around it. As someone on the inside (a college professor), he’s seen the results. Blacks and Hispanics admitted under lowered standards graduate at lower rates, and there is a stigma associated with being admitted under preferences.
Interesting discussion. Got an extra 30 minutes in your schedule? Listen to it in full.
Filed under: Barack Obama, Diversity, Socioeconomic AA | |Comments off
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