Archive for January, 2010
The University of Massachusetts will set aside 12 slots at its medical school for members of “underrepresented” groups, which include blacks, “Hispanics, certain Southeast Asians, and Cape Verdeans, Brazilians, and other Portuguese speakers.” (Source)
Wow. I guess the school could cram a couple students from each group into those lower-standard slots.
For people who don’t believe preferences and set asides equal lower standards and think I sound like a broken record, consider this: without even looking at grades, scores, and statistics, why do you think schools set aside slots for members of certain races if these students are being admitted under the same standard as everyone else? Students admitted to those 12 slots are not being assessed in the general pool of applicants. The med school has minimum criteria, of course, but the race and ethnicity of these students are given weight that others students don’t get. With the set-aside slots, no matter how small or large, students are being admitted or denied admission based on race.
According to the article, low-income and first-generation college students of any ethnic background could apply under the “Medical Scholars Program.” That makes it sound as if any poor or first-generation college students can apply, if we go by plain language. But everyone on the face of the planet has an “ethnic background.” Do they have in mind ethnic Germans and ethnic Lithuanians?
The Center for Equal Opportunity’s Roger Clegg blogs at The Corner:
“I won’t make the usual and obvious points about why discrimination on the basis of skin color and national origin is unfair, divisive, and stupid. All that aside, this seems to me to be almost certainly illegal. To be sure, this isn’t exactly like the race/ethnicity set-aside program that was struck down in Bakke, since here the slots are also (in theory at least) going to be open to applications from members of disfavored racial and ethnic groups, so long as they are low-income or the first in their families to attend college. But this is still a very mechanical use of race, like the point system struck down in Gratz v. Bollinger. And the justification given for the racially discriminatory program by UMass president Jack Wilson is the need for ‘role models’ — which has also been rejected by the Supreme Court (in Wygant v. Jackson Board of Education, in 1986).”
A commenter writes:
“In one fell swoop, they have DESTROYED the value of the years of hard work and academic merit of any minority candidate who might graduate through the color-blind open competition admissions process (this includes all minorities from any other state or country (or even worse, from this state) who are not among the ’special’ 12 minorities who are given this unique ‘reverse discrimination’ privilege). Not only have they stripped all value from the degrees of the truly accomplished minority candidates, but the existence of this affirmative-action program will spread like wildfire by word of mouth, and knowledgeable patients will intentionally avoid any contact with ALL minority graduates of UMass Medical School for fear of being treated by one of these affirmative-action ‘doctors’ who may not know what they are doing. The stigma of this program will drive all of these fully-qualified minority graduates out-of-state after they become doctors, where they will hope that few people will know of the existence of this truly disastrous program.”
Filed under: Diversity, Roger Clegg | |Comments off
One idea that transcends political lines is that blacks are inferior and should be held to lower standards in perpetuity.
In 2007, the Department of Justice (DOJ) under George W. Bush filed suit against the New York City Fire Department (FDNY) for violating the Civil Rights Act. The Vulcan Society, a fraternal organization of black firefighters, joined the lawsuit. Did the department hire and fire based on race? Did it deny promotions based on race? No. The department requires all candidates seeking employment, regardless of race, to take an exam that assesses “reading comprehension, problem solving, spatial recognition and applying rules to general concepts.” For reasons that will be discussed and debated until the end of time, blacks as a group don’t score as well as whites on such tests.
Last summer, a federal judge ruled that FDNY discriminated against blacks and Hispanics with an exam used in 1999 and 2002. Two weeks ago, the same judge ruled that New York City intentionally discriminated against minorities by continuing to use the exam.
Read the rest at Townhall.
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Another federal case! Oh my.
Remember December’s spate of stories about mostly black students at South Philadelphia High School (designated “persistently dangerous”) beating up students of Asian descent because they’re of Asian descent? Students and groups complained, and too little was done about it.
Last week, Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund filed suit against the school district, alleging “deliberate and discriminatory indifference.” (Source)
The group, citing Fourteenth Amendment violations, claims the district not only failed to protect them, but covered up and downplayed the attacks. Specifically, the group says security guards ignored attacks, and a staffer tried to talk a parent out of calling 911 when her child suffered a broken nose.
Disgusting, if true.
The school district suspended about 10 students, but obviously that wasn’t enough. There were problems before the attack, says the AALDEF, and whatever help officials offered wasn’t effective. Cecilia Chen, an attorney with the AALDEF, said students of Asian descent are still being harassed.
Students of one race attacking students of another based on race is a clear case of a “bias” crime. I think the concept of “hate crime” is dumb, but if we’re going to have such laws on the books, let’s apply them consistently. The local authorities should have bent over backward to resolve the matter and tried everything reasonable possible to avoid a federal lawsuit. For unfathomable reasons, they did not.
Why didn’t the school make a diligent effort to stop the attacks? It’s a loaded question, of course. “Are you still beating your wife?” No doubt the School District of Philadelphia believes it made a diligent effort to stop the attacks. Whether the Department of Justice takes up the case remains to be seen.
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If you’ve had the misfortune of sitting through workplace “diversity training” sessions, you know how eye-rollingly pointless they can be.
The diversity training idea stems from a former teacher named Jane Elliott, who required her all-white class to participate in role-playing exercises. Groups were separated by eye color. The first day, the blues were treated well, and the browns were treated badly. The next day, the treatment was reversed. The point was for whites to be on the receiving end of ill-treatment and empathize with blacks.
Elliott went on to lead diversity sessions at corporations, conducting similar role-playing exercises, commanding a fee of $6,000.
Diversity so-called training in the corporate sphere is one thing. Adults are better equipped to know whether they’re being subjected to misguided guilt and indoctrination. Children, with their easily malleable minds, are less equipped.
I recently read about teachers in government schools conducting segregation experiments on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. Apparently, these teachers (or more likely, higher-ups) believe requiring students to treat one another badly based on eye color is an appropriate way to teach them about America’s history of government-mandated racial segregation.
Putting children through emotional pain is a valid teaching method? Do schools typically teach through role-playing? Not only do white children in 2010 bear no responsibility whatsoever for government-mandated racial segregation, black children in 2010 are not recipients of it. What do bureaucrats hope to accomplish by separating students based on differences? Invoking children to anger and frustration generates resentment, not understanding.
The more important lesson about America’s history of racial segregation is that men like King appealed to the better part of people’s nature to carry out the promise of America’s founding and bestow the same rights to blacks that everyone else possessed. Americans of different races sacrificed and risked life and limb so that blacks could gain the privilege of being treated as free and responsible individuals equal before the law. If schools instill this idea into those malleable minds, instead of subjecting them to inane role-playing exercises designed to “teach” them how nasty people can be to each other, children might learn an enduringly valuable and more profound lesson.
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A decade ago, author Shelby Steele wrote about a racial preferences debate between the American Civil Rights Institute’s Ward Connerly and law professor Christopher Edley on C-SPAN. Among other things, Steele lamented over what he called the “disappearance of the black individual.”
During the Q&A portion of the debate, a pro-preferences black Harvard student rose to “challenge” Connerly for opposing lowered standards for blacks. Steele wrote (emphases added):
“Now consider what this Harvard student is called upon by his racial identity to argue in the year 2002. All that is creative and imaginative in him must be rallied to argue the essential weakness of his own people. Only their weakness justifies the racial preferences they receive decades after any trace of anti-black racism in college admissions. The young man must not show faith in the power of his people to overcome against any odds; he must show faith in their inability to overcome without help. As Mr. Connerly points to far less racism and far more freedom and opportunity for blacks, the young man must find a way, against all the mounting facts, to argue that black Americans simply cannot compete without preferences. If his own forebears seized freedom in a long and arduous struggle for civil rights, he must argue that his own generation is unable to compete on paper-and-pencil standardized tests.”
I’m reminded of Steele’s words every time I hear or read about blacks filing lawsuits that claim civil service exams are discriminatory. It’s truly maddening. Instead of being embarrassed by the implication that they can’t be expected to compete against whites on paper-and-pencil tests, they hold their heads high while proclaiming it in public. I don’t get it.
In 2007, the Department of Justice under George W. Bush filed suit against the New York City Fire Department (FDNY) for violating the Civil Rights Act, claiming that two pass-fail written exams and the rank ordering process disparately impacted minorities and weren’t job-related or consistent with business necessity. The Vulcan Society, a fraternal organization of black FDNY firefighters, joined the lawsuit.
Last summer, Judge Nicholas Garaufis ruled that FDNY discriminated against blacks and Hispanics with a recruitment exam used between 1999 and 2007. Last week, the same judge ruled that New York City intentionally discriminated against minorities by continuing to use the exam. (Source)
Download the 107-page FDNY exam from 1999. (PDF).
Mayor Michael Bloomberg defended the city’s use of the “discriminating” tests. “When I came into office, it was right after 9/11, so we used the old test because we had to recruit right away. We didn’t have the luxury of revisiting and starting the process of building a new test base.” (Source)
New York City faces millions in damages, which may or may not include the additional cost of hiring consultants to develop a test racial minorities can pass at rates similar to whites. What would such a test look like? No multiple choice or reading comprehension questions? More pictures? Oral only? Or perhaps the city will drop civil service entrance and promotion exams altogether. It might sound the death knell for disparate impact lawsuits.
But not likely.
Filed under: Judiciary | |Comments off
In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Grutter v. Bollinger that the University of Michigan law school’s use of race in admissions was narrowly tailored to further a compelling interest in “obtaining the educational benefits that flow from” a skin deep-only diverse student body.
Justice Sandra Day O’Conner, who voted with the majority, wrote that she and her colleagues “expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.”
Six years later, O’Connor says the “25 years” language shouldn’t be construed as a deadline for the end of racial preferences. (Surprise!) Social scientists need to “clearly demonstrate the educational benefits of diverse student bodies, and to better understand the links between role models in one generation and aspirations and achievements of succeeding generations.” (Source)
What if social scientists prove that so-called educational benefits flow to racial minorities, but not to racial majorities? Under this scenario, would O’Connor and company still believe racial bean counting is constitutional?
I echo Roger Clegg’s sentiment: “I am glad she is no longer on the Supreme Court. [She] “is not a social scientist by training, and the problem with her jurisprudence is that she would too often try to be a social scientist rather than a justice. She tried to make policy rather than interpret laws.”
The Center for Individual Rights’s Terry Pell (pictured) said, “I think the fact Justice O’Connor is doing this reflects the fundamental weakness of the opinion she offered: It failed to offer a principled basis for limiting — or even judging the effectiveness of — these practices.”
Unfortunately, as long as agencies and companies can be sued for “disparate impact,” racial preferences will exist. Until any and all differences between the races disappear, there will be “discrimination” accusations, allegations, and lawsuits. However, Ricci v. DeStefano sends a warning shot to employers who infringe on the rights of individuals in one group for fear of disparate impact lawsuits from another group.
Filed under: Diversity, Judiciary, Roger Clegg | |1 Comment
The last time I filled out an application for a library card, I refused to state my race. I shouldn’t have been surprised to see a box for race on such an application, but I was. No doubt the government believes it has a legitimate reason (for “statistical purposes only” to receive government grants?) to know the race of individuals applying for the privilege to borrow books. Whatever the reason may be, the whole idea is pre-civil-rights-era-retro.
I read with pleasure a story in the Sacramento Bee about high school students who want to be identified by their nationality and not their race or ethnicity. One student said she believes eliminating racial categories would make “racial hatred go away.” It probably won’t, but that’s not the point. The goal is to stop the government from categorizing its citizens by race, not necessarily to change an individual’s views on race.
Another student said, “If we were all one race, then there wouldn’t be any racism.”
While these young people may be naïve about differences and human nature, they have a purity of mind that resonates in my jaded brain. Racial differences are morally neutral, from my perspective. Differences are not good or bad per se; they just are. If you believe in God, as I do, you can appreciate how he decreed to diversify the world. How people treat others based on those differences is moral or immoral. Individuals can think whatever they want about race, but they may not interfere with another’s rights based on race, and our government may not treat people differently based on race (awarding race-based set-asides, etc.). It’s quite simple.
An excerpt:
“From 2006 to 2009, the number of Elk Grove Unified School District students whose parents listed their race as ‘multiple/no response’ went from 500 to 6,200 – a twelve-fold jump in just three years, the California Department of Education says. About one of every 10 of the district’s students now list race as ‘multiple/no response.’ …There’s also been a dramatic rise statewide. Data show the number of K-12 students listing their race as “multiple/no response” has jumped 70 percent, from 124,000 in 2006 to 210,000 last year.
“But the U.S. Department of Education, which is trying to close the achievement gap between races, is asking school officials to ‘eyeball’ students who decline to state and check a box for them.
“‘We know and the feds know you can’t force someone to fill out a form. So what the feds have actually said is to more strongly encourage them to self-identify,’ said Keric Ashley, the state Education Department’s director of data management. ‘If all those efforts fail and the parents refuse, the feds say school officials should observe and report a race.’”
So, if students and parents decline to check the box, bureaucrats will make the decision for them? That may generate more controversy than racial preferences. Can you imagine? Your outward appearance might be “African American,” but both your parents are mixed race. You’re actually more “white” than “black,” but your government has assigned you to the “African American” racial category. (Unless you were born in Africa and became an American citizen, you’re not “African American” in any case.)
The article continues on about why it’s so important for the government to categorize citizens by race. The refusal to check the race box won’t make a significant dent in the government’s racial bean counting until a critical mass of Americans refuses to check the box.
Refusing to check the box on a library card application merely is one small step for a woman, and one giant leap for humankind. Eat your heart out, Neil Armstrong.
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In “Assessing the Impact of Eliminating Affirmative Action in Higher Education,” Jessica S. Howell of California State University, Sacramento, acknowledges that declines in minority representation at colleges and universities in California and Texas, states that bar the government from discriminating against or preferring individuals or groups based on race in hiring, contracting, and admissions, have been characterized in mainstream media as “sharp.”
Her study set out to answer the question, how would minority representation be affected by a national ban on racial preferences?
The effect Howell found was modest. A nationwide ban would result in a 10 percent drop in black and Hispanic enrollment in selective colleges and universities, and a 2 percent drop overall in four-year institutions.
Commenting on the study on Minding the Campus, Roger Clegg says race neutrality’s effect on minority representation may be modest, but the effect of racial discrimination on others is not.
‘[H]ere are some of the costs of this discrimination: 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; it compromises the academic mission of the university and lowers the overall academic quality of the student body; it creates pressure to discriminate in grading and graduation; it breeds hypocrisy within the school; it encourages a scofflaw attitude among college officials; it mismatches students and institutions, guaranteeing failure for many of the former; it papers over the real social problem of why so many African Americans and Latinos are academically uncompetitive; and it gets states and schools involved in unsavory activities like deciding which racial and ethnic minorities will be favored and which ones not, and how much blood is needed to establish group membership.”
Download the 65-page study. (PDF)
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“Science and engineering should look like the rest of the population,” said Daryl Chubin of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). And if the racial bean-counting doesn’t yield the desired results, “somebody needs to pull the plug and say this has not been an open and fair search.”
The Center for Equal Opportunity’s Roger Clegg, advocate for race-neutral hiring practices, writes about the AAAS’s diversity rationales on Minding the Campus. Clegg takes the AAAS to task for seeking to adopt racial quotas.
“[I]t’s clear that nondiscrimination is exactly what AAAS does not have in mind. The National Journal article says that it wants to ‘allocate additional slots to U.S. racial and ethnic minorities’ and to protect universities from ‘likely lawsuits by groups seeking color-blind admissions policies.’ As the quotes above suggest, it is demanding that schools get their numbers right. It wants quotas, it wants race and ethnicity to be weighed when hiring decisions are made.
“[I]f race or ethnicity is weighed, then racial and ethnic discrimination is taking place,” he writes. “Let’s have no nonsense about this not being so, since skin color or national origin is ‘only one factor.’ Either that factor makes a difference sometimes in who gets picked or it doesn’t. If it never makes a difference, then there’s no point in considering it. If it does make a difference on occasion, then on those occasions someone is getting or not getting the job because of skin color or national origin. That’s discrimination. Since we are dealing with scientists and not English majors, this kind of logic ought to be understandable.”
The Supreme Court in Grutter v. Bollinger contended that as long as race was one of the factors, and not THE factor, in admissions, it’s was okay. But as Clegg notes, it doesn’t make sense. Selecting students for admission based on race, whether it’s one of several factors or THE factor, is still racial discrimination.
One of the arguments the AAAS and others make to justify racial discrimination is the “role model” rationale. Racial minorities can’t succeed unless they’re taught by people who look like them.
In Black Rednecks and White Liberals, Thomas Sowell said that history has proven this idea wrong. For example, feudal Japan emerged from isolation and became an industrial nation by learning from Americans and Europeans. The country sent its students to America and Europe, and brought Americans and Europeans to Japan to teach necessary skills. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Jews in New York City were taught mostly by Irish Catholics, and a generation of black children in Harlem in the 1930s and 1940s were taught more often by Jewish teachers than black teachers. Yet, the Japanese, Jews, and blacks excelled despite looking into the faces of people who didn’t share their culture, religion, or skin color.
The Supreme Court has already rejected the role model argument over two decades ago in Wygant v. Jackson Board of Education. “A decade before that, in Hazelwood School District v. United States,” Clegg writes, “the Court had similarly noted that a school district could not point to the racial makeup of its student body as a justification for the racial makeup of its faculty. And rightly so. As Justice Powell wrote in Wygant, ‘Carried to its logical extreme, the idea that black students are better off with black teachers could lead to the very system the Court rejected in Brown v. Board of Education.’”
Think about it. In their misguided zeal to close the achievement gap between the races, social engineers want to regress to the days of government-mandated racial segregation. As long as it’s for a “good” cause, it’s okay?
(Photo credit: Shutterstock)
Filed under: Roger Clegg | |Comments off
Aside from eliminating civil service tests altogether, what can be done to lessen the adverse impact such tests have on racial minorities? Should there be more emphasis on preparation, tinkering with the test to “ensure” more or less equal outcomes, or rigging the results? Fewer multiple choice questions and more oral testing?
My view on the issue probably is in the minority among minorities. I believe men and women who seek promotions should bear the responsibility of preparing themselves for the tests and be willing to accept the consequences of failing or not scoring high enough to qualify for promotions. Such a simple, common sense opinion earns one scorn and accusations of naiveté.
The Department of Justice has filed suit against New Jersey, alleging racial discrimination against black and Hispanic police officers. The plaintiff seeks to bar the state from using the test. (Source) Download the 10-page complaint. (PDF)
Barack Obama’s assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, the same man who advocates sending lesser qualified doctors to predominately minority areas said, “This complaint should send a clear message to all public employers that employment practices with unlawful discriminatory impact on account of race or national origin will not be tolerated. The Justice Department will take all necessary action to ensure that such discriminatory practices are eliminated and that the victims of such practices are made whole.”
What is it about the promotional multiple choice test that “discriminates” against minorities? In the case of Ricci v. DeStefano, the city of New Haven tinkered with the test to lessen the adverse impact it had on minorities before Frank Ricci filed sued, and whatever the city did to the test apparently didn’t work.
Filed under: Judiciary | |1 Comment
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