The New York Times published a story about Lieutenant Ben Vargas, the lone Hispanic who joined a lawsuit with white firefighters in Ricci v. DeStefano. Vargas says he was knocked unconscious by someone he suspects was a black firefighter for joining the lawsuit. His own brother, also a firefighter, turned against him. Vargas, who received the sixth highest score on the promotions exams, was called a turncoat and an Uncle Tom for standing up for his rights.
Black Americans are all too aware of the epithet “Uncle Tom,” which refers to someone considered subservient to whites, an accommodating token. A black person is branded an Uncle Tom for veering from the group in any way.
When one goes against prevailing opinion, derision is to be expected. In group-think, individuals are not allowed to express opinions different from the group’s. What’s good for the group takes precedence over what’s good for the individual. As black conservatives know, going against the grain takes courage. Standing up for what’s right is difficult but worth the effort.
“I consider myself an American — I was born and raised here,” Vargas said. “I love my people. I love my culture. I love our rice and beans, our salsa music, our language — everything my parents raised us with. But I am so grateful for the opportunity only the United States can give.”
Last month we blogged about the Center for Equal Opportunity’s study, “Racial, Ethnic and Gender Preferences in Admissions to the U.S. Military Academy and the U.S. Naval Academy,” which concluded that both service academies lowered admissions standards for black admittees. Professor Bruce Fleming, who teaches at the Naval Academy, exposes how the school assesses applicants based on race. An excerpt from his opinion piece:
“A vote of ‘qualified’ for a white applicant doesn’t mean s/he’s coming, only that he or she can compete to win the “slate” of up to 10 nominations that (most typically) a Congress(wo)man draws up. That means that nine ‘qualified’ white applicants are rejected. SAT scores below 600 or C grades almost always produce a vote of ‘not qualified’ for white applicants.
“Not so for an applicant who self-identifies as one of the minorities who are our ‘number one priority.’ For them, another set of rules apply. Their cases are briefed separately to the board, and SAT scores to the mid-500s with quite a few Cs in classes (and no visible athletics or leadership) typically produce a vote of “qualified” for them, with direct admission to Annapolis. They’re in, and are given a pro forma nomination to make it legit.”
Read it again, and understand what’s going on. This is not affirmative action. This separate-track admissions practice is how colleges and universities across the country achieve skin deep-only diversity. Admitting students without regard to race would produce a freshman class of too few blacks, how ever these schools define “too few blacks.” To overcome this “embarrassing” obstacle, they assess blacks students against one another, not against the general pool of applicants. Consequently, black students generally are admitted with lower grades and scores than whites and Asians.
It’s patently unfair, but that’s how it works.
The blogosphere recently buzzed over the Naval Academy’s widely reported “commitment” to diversity. The academy has twice as many blacks and Hispanics as it did 10 years ago, and the increase is the result of “a blitz of 1,000 outreach and recruitment events across the country.” (Source)
If only that were so, it would be the stuff from which affirmative action is made! The so-called blitz produced a pool of underqualified applicants who were admitted because they were minorities. As Fleming notes, diversity comes at a price. Interviewed for the Washington Post article, he said, “First of all, we’re dumbing down the Naval Academy. Second of all, we’re dumbing down the officer corps.”
The Naval Academy may boast that 76 percent of its 2013 class comes from the top 20 percent of their high school classes, the same proportion as 10 years ago, but “top 20 percent” doesn’t mean much if minorities are coming from schools with mostly low-achieving students.
Like most liberal politicians, President Barack Obama supports race-based preferential treatment, although he calls it affirmative action, which it is not. We’ve explained on the blog several times what affirmative action is: widening the recruitment net to include qualified minorities historically left out of the process for whatever reason. Racial preferences are not affirmative action. Preferences purport to include qualified minorities, but most often involve lowering standards to increase “diversity.”
Last week the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in favor of white firefighters and against the city of New Haven in Ricci v DeStefano. The city had thrown out the results of a promotions test because no blacks scored high enough to qualify for promotions. The city claimed that had it certified the test results, it could have been sued by black firefighters under the disparate impact theory.
“Keep in mind the Supreme Court didn’t close the door to affirmative action,” Obama told the Associated Press. “I’ve always believed that affirmative action was less of an issue or should be less of an issue than it has been made out to be in news reports. It hasn’t been as potent a force for racial progress as advocates will claim and it hasn’t been as bad on white students seeking admissions or seeking a job as its critics say.”
Obama is delusional to think racial bean-counting “hasn’t been as bad” on whites applying to schools or for jobs. Racial discrimination is just as demoralizing and unfair to whites as it is to blacks, regardless of what Obama says. The government has no businesses judging one individual as more deserving than another based on the color of his/her skin. Private employers shouldn’t do it, either, but the government is constitutionally required to treat citizens as individuals and not as members of a racial group. By preferring one person over another based on race, the government is doing exactly that.
While the president tries to appease both sides of the debate with smooth rhetoric, to reasonable people, it rings false. The size and extent of the negative effects of racial discrimination aren’t the point. Racial discrimination needs to be abolished in whole, not in part.
It should surprise no one that Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor supports preferential treatment for racial minorities and women. Consequently, one shouldn’t be stunned that she served on the board of a group that filed lawsuits over employment exams similar to the ones in Ricci v. DeStefano. (Source)
The Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund claimed civil service tests unfairly disadvantaged minorities. Republicans likely will use this information against Sotomayor during upcoming confirmation hearings, although she wasn’t involved in the cases. These facts probably won’t impede her confirmation. Liberals favor preferential treatment for minorities. Sotomayor is a liberal who ruled in favor of the city of New Haven, which discriminated against white firefighters because they were white.
A few years ago, white parents in Seattle and Jefferson County, Kentucky, sued the school districts for assigning students based on race, a policy they said violated their rights to equal protection of the laws. The schools claimed they used race only as a “tie-breaker.” The cases made their way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declared the race-based school assignment programs unconstitutional.
The court contended that “remedying the effects of past intentional discrimination is a compelling interest under the strict scrutiny test,” but because Seattle was never court-ordered to desegregate, and Jefferson County’s desegregation order had been dissolved, remedying the effects of past intentional discrimination wasn’t involved in the case.
“The school districts have not carried their heavy burden of showing that the interest they seek to achieve justifies the extreme means they have chosen–discriminating among individual students based on race by relying upon racial classifications in making school assignments.”
Despite the Supreme Court’s ruling, Jefferson County still relies too heavily on race when assigning students, so says Ted Gordon, the lawyer who challenged Jefferson County’s assignment plan. “They cannot use race as a factor. Here we are again.” (Source)
A family of Indian descent wanted their daughter to attend Stopher Elementary, their neighborhood school. The district assigned her to Shelby Elementary, a school 20 miles away. Gordon said the district likely assigned a certain number of black students from the Shelby neighborhood to Stopher through a race-based assignment plan, which Gordon says violated the Supreme Court’s ruling, and assigned the child of Indian descent to Shelby for racial balance.
Jefferson County School Superintendent Sheldon Berman insists sending children to certain schools based on the color of their skin is necessary to preserve “diversity in our community.”
Why do school districts classify and assign students by race, although Brown v. The Board of Education was supposed to end this practice? One reason is that some schools will become heavily black. Why is that a problem, you ask?
If you know the answer, please share it with me. I’m dying to know.
“The problem began 38 years ago in a Supreme Court case called Griggs v. Duke Power Co. Black applicants disproportionately lacked required diplomas and/or failed the employment tests. The court held that for purposes of hiring, both requirements violated the Civil Rights Act. If an employment practice is “facially neutral,” it’s suspect if it has a disparate impact on members of a protected class, even if there’s no discriminatory intent. To avoid liability, businesses would have to demonstrate that such tests are job-related and a justified business necessity.
“Disparate impact puts employers in a bind. Unless all races score equally on racially neutral tests, they’ll likely face litigation. Generally speaking, blacks tend to score lower on standardized tests than whites (which doesn’t mean blacks deserve special treatment as a result), so as long as such tests are used, employers must lower standards (which also would benefit non-black test-takers) and/or manipulate the results to avoid lawsuits.”
The Chronicle of Higher Ed reports that “experts” are glad the Supreme Court’s decision in Ricci v. DeStefano won’t hamper colleges’ use of racial preferences in admissions.
Robert M. O’Neil, emeritus professor of law at the University of Virginia, says Grutter v. Bollinger, a case in which the Supreme Court barred racial quotas but allowed some racial considerations in admissions, protects schools that lower the bar for minority applicants in the name of skin deep-only diversity.
Will Ricci affect hiring in higher education? American Council on Education’s Ada Meloy said, “The opinions rendered today do not explicitly or impliedly threaten the complex and nuanced faculty hiring or promotion procedures used in most institutions which struggle to increase diversity while complying with the law.”
The Center for Equal Opportunity’s Roger Clegg said, “Unfortunately a lot of universities do weigh race and ethnicity in their hiring and promotion practices. And if you do that, you are on legally thin ice.”
Others argue that Ricci applies to standardized employment tests only and won’t impact overall efforts to achieve a diverse workplace.
Recently Bryan O’Keefe and Richard Vedder have argued that one of the unintended consequences of the decision in Griggs was to fuel the vast expansion in college enrollments over the ensuing decades. How? Because Griggs effectively ruled out the possibility of employers using their own tests to determine the general level of competence of job applicants, employers fell back on the next most convenient proxy: the applicant’s possession of a college degree. Suddenly for all manner of jobs that didn’t before require a college degree, such a degree became a prerequisite–evidence of some basic level of “determination, critical thinking and writing, organization, and independence.”
The O’Keefe/Vedder hypothesis may have new bearing in light of the Ricci decision. If Ricci turns out to mean that employers can now administer skills tests for hiring and promotion with much less fear of disparate impact lawsuits, perhaps we will see some relief from the pressure on high school graduates to go to college to “get the credential.” History, of course, cannot just be shoved into reverse. The cultural pattern in America of sending on to college higher and still higher percentages of high school graduates has momentum of its own, and is bolstered by the need of colleges and universities to keep the tuition flowing.
If the college degree has served as a replacement for lawsuit-prone employment testing, as Wood notes, obtaining it becomes more important; hence, the need to fill college campuses with brown faces to bolster a school’s diversity quotient. Consequently, schools assess certain minority applicants on a lesser standard in order to achieve an arbitrary percentage of these students. This practice is unfair to those who have the scores and grades.
The media and the blogosphere are buzzing over the Supreme Court’s decision in Ricci v. DeStefano. Conservatives hail it as a tenuous victory over racial quotas, and liberals jeer it as a step backward for civil rights.
Abigail Thernstrom, co-author of No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning, calls the decision “very good news.” Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Thernstrom briefly recounts the facts in Ricci and notes the contradictory nature of Title VII’s disparate impact and disparate treatment provisions:
“Speaking for a 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court, Justice Anthony Kennedy did acknowledge an internal contradiction in employment discrimination law. Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibited intentional discrimination on the basis of ‘race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.’ Yet another law, in 1991 — which built upon a 1971 Supreme Court decision — banned employment tests that had a disparate impact on the hiring of racial minorities, unless the tests were shown to be job-related and a business necessity.
…
“All racial classifications are highly suspect under the 14th Amendment. The Constitution protects individuals from discrimination — without respect to race. Distributing benefits and burdens on the basis of color was supposed to be the ugly mind-set the leaders of the civil rights movement struggled so heroically to change. We have not escaped such race-thinking yet, but this decision is an important step in the right direction.”
In throwing out tests because no blacks qualified for promotions and, therefore, penalizing whites who qualified, New Haven blatantly violated Title VII. But the law’s disparate treatment and disparate impact provisions are paradoxical. One bars intentional racial discrimination against individuals, while the other bars tests that have disparate impact on certain racial groups unless the tests are job-related and consistent with business necessity.
How can a government entity treat people fairly, without regard to race, if they’re allowed to consider race when creating and/or scoring tests?
The views and opinions expressed on this blog do not necessarily reflect those of the American Civil Rights Institute. This blog is written and maintained by La Shawn Barber. E-mail her at lashawnbarber@gmail.com
The New York Times published a story about Lieutenant Ben Vargas, the lone Hispanic who joined a lawsuit with white firefighters in Ricci v. DeStefano. Vargas says he was knocked unconscious by someone he suspects was a black firefighter for joining the lawsuit. His own brother, also a firefighter, turned against him. Vargas, who received the sixth highest score on the promotions exams, was called a turncoat and an Uncle Tom for standing up for his rights.
“A vote of ‘qualified’ for a white applicant doesn’t mean s/he’s coming, only that he or she can compete to win the “slate” of up to 10 nominations that (most typically) a Congress(wo)man draws up. That means that nine ‘qualified’ white applicants are rejected. SAT scores below 600 or C grades almost always produce a vote of ‘not qualified’ for white applicants.
The blogosphere recently buzzed over the Naval Academy’s widely reported “commitment” to diversity. The academy has twice as many blacks and Hispanics as it did 10 years ago, and the increase is the result of “a blitz of 1,000 outreach and recruitment events across the country.” (
A few years ago, white parents in Seattle and Jefferson County, Kentucky, sued the school districts for assigning students based on race, a policy they said violated their rights to equal protection of the laws. The schools claimed they used race only as a “tie-breaker.” The cases made their way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declared the race-based school assignment programs unconstitutional.
An excerpt from my latest Townhall column:
Robert M. O’Neil, emeritus professor of law at the University of Virginia, says Grutter v. Bollinger, a case in which the Supreme Court barred racial quotas but allowed some racial considerations in admissions, protects schools that lower the bar for minority applicants in the name of skin deep-only diversity. 
The media and the blogosphere are buzzing over the Supreme Court’s decision in Ricci v. DeStefano. Conservatives hail it as a tenuous victory over racial quotas, and liberals jeer it as a step backward for civil rights. 
