Lani Guinier, who said African immigrants should not receive racial preferences because they are not descendants of black American slaves, co-wrote an article in the New York Times with Susan Sturm, a fellow liberal law professor. Guinier was Bill Clinton’s nominee for Assistant Attorney General until her pro-quota views became known.
I echo what the Center for Equal Opportunity‘s Roger Clegg says about the op-ed (via National Review Online):
“In a New York Times op-ed today, Profs. Lani Guinier and Susan Sturm discuss why they dislike standardized tests. They have no empathy, as it were, for Frank Ricci in the New Haven firefighters case, who earned his promotion by doing well on one. But the issue in that case was not whether this or that test was perfect; the issue was whether, having administered a particular test, it was illegal racial discrimination for the city to throw out the results because it didn’t like the skin color of the people who did well in it. And it’s hard to imagine that Guinier and Sturm would have written this op-ed if Frank Ricci and the other successful firefighters had been the right color or, more broadly, that they would work so hard to find objections to standardized tests if such tests didn’t so often have a politically incorrect disparate impact. Myself, I’m perfectly happy for cities to adopt whatever selection device they think is best, so long as they ignore race in making that decision.”
I believe objective tests are an excellent way to avoid being the victim of racial discrimination, even if minorities perform relatively poorly on those tests. There is always room for improvement, and factoring in race, even when it benefits minorities, has unintended consequences.
Minorities would do well to remove the government’s hand from the deck and rely on a “standardized” shuffle of the cards.
Comments on this entry are closed.