Archive for June, 2009
In the you-won’t-believe-this department, we have a story about the son of the Dallas School Superintendent benefiting from a preference program. (Source)
Michael Hinojosa earns over $300,000 a year, and his son Michael participated in a program for disadvantaged students. The program is run by a contractor the Dallas Independent School District paid $1.6 million. The program targets low-income students, which in most cases is a euphemism for “minorities,” and Hinojosa and son are racial minorities.
This episode is but one of several unintended consequences of preference programs, whether they’re created for low-income students or specifically for racial minorities. Racial minorities whose families have the means benefit from the program because they are racial minorities and presumed to be from low-income families. Otherwise, how would Hinojosa’s son have benefited from such a program?
“We actually actively recruited Michael Hinojosa because programs like this don’t work when they’re exclusionary,” said program director Michael Martinez. “It’s best when you’ve got first-generation kids sitting next to the valedictorian.”
First-generation status (and appearances) trumps financial need? Apparently so.
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With a preferences supporting biracial president in the White House and a preferences supporting “wise Latina” judge awaiting confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court, there’s no time like the present to openly debate the fairness of so-called affirmative action and the means by which to end it once and for all.
The National Policy Institute (NPI) notes that Democrats are worried about how their support for preferential treatment for minorities will affect Democrat-voting white working class voters, and rightly so. With a biracial man sitting in the Oval Office, it’s difficult to argue that Americans should keep the bar lowered for black Americans in perpetuity. An excerpt:
During the 1970s and ’80s, programs to increase representation of minorities in public- and private-sector hiring, college admissions, and government contracting ignited many of the most searing arguments in American politics and helped remake the Republican and Democratic electoral coalitions. But since then these issues have provoked only rare skirmishes, as a combination of political, economic, and cultural changes have reduced their visibility and immediacy to all but a handful of activists on each side. “You had an environment where it wasn’t on the top of the radar screen for anybody,” veteran Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio said…Now Sotomayor’s nomination is forcing these issues back into the spotlight. And they have quickly proved as polarizing as ever.
NPI points out something that will impact the “affirmative action” debate as well as Sotomayor’s confirmation. Republicans may be reluctant to strongly challenge Sotomayor for fear of being called racists (which people call them anyway). Republicans have tried unsuccessfully to woo Hispanics, so offending them should be the least of their concerns. Defending what is right should be the focus.
The Center for Equal Opportunity’s Linda Chavez isn’t hopeful that Republicans will do the right thing. “I regret to say that it is probably going to be one or two short questions, that they have no appetite for this.”
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U.S. Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor is an ethnicity-focused “wise Latina” who believes race and sex should factor into judicial decisions. The Washington Times agrees and stands firm against Sotomayor’s confirmation.
As the paper notes, the White House has tried and failed to reconciled Sotomayor’s statements, such as “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” The problem with the White House’s spin is that Sotomayor has made too many statements to keep up with. The record shows from the time she attended Princeton to now, Sotomayor has been consistent with her Latina-centered public comments:
The record proves that the judge meant exactly what she said in a 2001 speech: “… a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male.” She repeated that exact phrase in a speech she gave in 2003 at Seton Hall University, and she used the same words minus the “Latina” modifier in at least four other speeches between 1994 and 2000.
The New York Times reported on May 30 that Judge Sotomayor “shared the alarm of others in the group when the Supreme Court prohibited the use of quotas in university admissions in its 1978 decision Regents of the University of California v. Bakke.” In 2006, Judge Sotomayor ruled that currently imprisoned felons cannot be denied the right to vote if a disproportionate number of them are black or Latino, no matter how heinous their crimes. …Judge Sotomayor’s 2008 decision in Ricci v. DeStefano showed no empathy for the dyslexic and learning-disabled firefighter who gave up a second job to study for a promotion exam he ended up acing, only to be denied the promotion because he was white.
“If you look in the entire sweep of the essay that she wrote,” President Barack Obama explained, “what’s clear is that she simply was saying that her life experiences will give her information about the struggles and hardships that people are going through that will make her a good judge.”
As we’ve long suspected, Sotomayor’s focus on ethnicity plays a central role in her professional life. She is a proponent of racial preferences, which aren’t popular, despite what liberals may claim. Republicans should grill Sotomayor on her past statements and judicial decisions, as well as her present attitude about race. If they have the heart.
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According to a poll conducted by Quinnipiac University, 55 percent say “affirmative action” should be history, and 71 percent disagree with Sonia Sotomayor’s opinion in Ricci v. DeStefano.
A majority of Americans (70 percent) aren’t buying the “diversity” argument for preferences in government hiring. Apparently, those folks aren’t in decision-making positions in government entities, where such thinking runs rampant. An even larger percentage opposes preferences in the private sector (74 percent).
Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, offers insight:
“Whether it’s a belief that the statute of limitations on past wrongs has run out or economic pressures on workers, programs that supporters call affirmative action and opponents label racial preferences are unpopular with most American voters.”
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At National Review’s The Corner blog, Victor David Hanson writes about a phenomenon most of us probably have experienced. “Beneficiaries” of racial preferences, those whose race was a factor in their admissions to colleges and universities, complain when others stigmatize them because race was a factor in their admissions.
Hanson writes:
“So Michelle Obama describes the fear that Sotomayor felt at Princeton — and its lasting effects to this day — and then compares it, of course, to Michelle’s own ambiguous feelings toward the same Princeton campus (cf. Michelle’s thesis for the details), that one is willing to put up with for the education and prestige it gave, but does not really like for the presence of apparently so many stuck-up, rich, preppy kids and their ubiquitous exclusive campus culture.”
It’s sad that minorities tend to see everything through a racial lens. As Hanson points out, the first year of college is often terrifying for everyone, but people like Michelle Obama and Sonia Sotomayor reduce it race. I went to an historically black college, and I was scared and uncertain about what to expect. I spent the next four years dealing with “stuck-up” kids and others who didn’t like me for whatever reason. Regardless of race, we all go through uncertainty and feelings of exclusion. But at a black college, I couldn’t play the race card the way minorites like Michelle Obama and Sonia Sotomayor can.
An inevitable consequence of feeling separate from others, as Hanson points out, is separatism and identification with the “tribe.” Such students may end up joining race- or ethnicity-focused groups, defeating the whole “diversity” effort in the process.
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The Pew Research Institute released a survey last month that revealed 58 percent of blacks agree that minorities should receive preferential treatment. Not a surprise. Only 22 percent of whites agree. Among Democrats, 45 percent agree that minorities should receive preferential treatment, in contrast to only 13 percent of Republicans. Twenty-eight percent of independents agree.
Here’s the surprise: 44 percent of people younger than 30 believe “every effort should be made to improve the position of minorities,” which we may assume includes racial preferences. One would think younger people, who didn’t live through Jim Crow (and whose parents may not have been alive during Jim Crow, either), would oppose preferences now that barriers have been torn down, and the only evidence of “racism” they’ve experienced is a white sales clerk following them around in a store or people looking at them “funny.”
To support preferential treatment is to support lowered standards. There’s no other way around it. Employing racial preferences involves lowering the bar for individuals who are members of certain racial groups.
And some people call that progress.
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“One of the unexpected results of the Sotomayor nomination is a refocusing on the politics of racial identity and the fossilized institutions of affirmative action-or the belief that the U.S. government should use its vast power to ensure an equality of result rather than a fairness of opportunity.” (Source)
So begins an excellent op-ed by Victor Davis Hanson. He summarizes what we anti-preference folks have been saying for many years and in many different ways: given varying levels of talent, drive, and motivation among individuals, it is impossible – impossible – to ensure that everyone ends up with the same stuff. The best we can hope for in our wonderfully free and wealthy society is to ensure that individuals have opportunities to succeed. The process cannot be forced, and failure to succeed is not proof of racism.
Hanson points out the glaringly obvious. With America’s multiracial make-up, who is considered black enough to qualify for preferences? If someone has a white parent and a black parent and checks the “non-Hispanic White” box, he doesn’t qualify for special treatment. If he chooses to self-identity as black, he receives preferences. Right? (He could always check “Other” or write in “American” just to be rebellious.)
Hanson asks, “[W]hat constitutes racial authenticity? Lack of income? An absence of success in the American rat race? Is the fourth generation upper-class Cuban an ‘Hispanic’ who should qualify for affirmative action because his name is Hillario Gonzalez? Does the one-quarter aristocratic Jamaican qualify for American redress on account of his partial blackness?”
See how muddled it gets? It’s rather distasteful to have the government making these determinations to begin with. We were naive to think the civil rights movement ended such practices. The government is still up to its eyeballs in racial categorization.
Hanson does an admirable job illustrating the absurdity of racial preferences by asking a series of rhetorical questions to figure out why preferences exist. Past discrimination against a collective? Then Barack Obama, born of a white mother and Kenyan father, should not have received preferences. Present racism against an individual? Do dark-skinned, non-blacks who face discrimination qualify for “affirmative action”? Is poverty a criterion? Then poor whites should benefit from preferences, right?
The slope becomes more slippery.
“Indeed, creating, recreating, and emphasizing racial identity, especially among elites, currently involves so many contortions that it has descended from the absurd to the outright pernicious-and is becoming a sort of racism itself.”
And lowering standards for blacks instead of expecting them to compete with everyone else is also a sort of racism.
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Rod Paige, George Bush’s former secretary of education, says the academic achievement gap between the races must be closed. How does he proposed to do that? (Source)
Paige has some interesting things to say. For instance, he said racial discrimination and injustice are “now episodic and much less of a barrier to success,” to which I wholeheartedly agree, but I want to get to the heart of the matter. He notes that the typical black 17-year-old reads and does math at the level of a typical white 13-year-old. Again, how do we close the gap?
“Political leaders must be open to support a broader array of instructional modalities including charter schools, private schools, parochial schools and virtual learning systems. They must resist the urging of the guardians of the status quo. Parents must help children understand the power of education to improve life’s circumstances and encourage them to do their best in school. Community leaders must mount after-school and Saturday morning programs and other initiatives that help children catch up on skills they have missed. Churches must expand their education programs and create better coordination with schools. Organizations like the NAACP, LULAC, the Urban League and others must work more forcefully with social organizations on educational initiatives. In other words, closing the education achievement gap will require a total community effort.”
And these will help close the achievement gap? Call me skeptical. Paige’s general suggestions are well intentioned and oft-repeated. The reward for better educated children is huge, but the task of better educating them is also huge.
Racial preferences, i.e., lowering standards, is one consequence of the academic achievement gap. Apparently, there aren’t enough minorities with the grades and scores to compete with everyone else, so schools drop standards (but only for minorities) in order to admit an arbitrary percentage of them for purposes of skin deep-only diversity.
If readers who think I’m off-base have another explantion for lowered standards, I’m all ears.
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