Archive for July, 2010
A county commissioner in Frederick County, Maryland, seeks to end government racial discrimination. John L. Thompson, running as a delegate to the Maryland General Assembly, introduced a proposal to demand a constitutional amendment to eliminate racial preferences in state government.
The Frederick News Post reports the measure is based on California’s successful Proposition 209, which barred the state from discriminating against or granting preferences to individuals or groups based on race in government employment, contracting, and education.
Maryland has a minority business program, which grants preferences to minority-businesses for government contracts.
Thompson believes, like most opponents of race-based government policies, individuals should be judged based on character, not skin color. As expected, the NAACP cried foul.
“The NAACP more than anybody else would like to see Dr. King’s dream to be a reality, just like the county commissioner has stated,” said Guy Djoken, president of the Frederick County NAACP. “We can’t just put a law in place and think the law is going to resolve the issue.”
The issue he’s referring to are racial disparities between the races in housing and education. The solution to the disparity “problem” is to penalize members of one race in favor of the race on the low end of the disparity. If a percentage of contracts is set aside for members of certain racial groups, members of others are shut out. Proponents of race-based set-asides support the government wielding this sort of power over taxpayers. If the government ever decides to wield the club in the other direction (when whites become a racial minority, for example), they’d better duck.
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Beware of the white influx in Chicago’s selective government schools!
Sources report that Chicago Public Schools (CPS) is using a new admissions plan, one that replaces skin color with socioeconomic status. As a result, elite schools in the district are seeing an increase of white students. Although some sources say the level of racial diversity will stay at the same level, others report that top schools will become “more white.”
The underlying assumption is there’s something wrong with “more white” top schools. In 2009, a federal judge ended the CPS desegregation consent decree, which had been in place for over two decades. The district limited student enrollment in top schools based on race. While white students accounted for nine percent of enrollment across the district, they were limited to up to 35 percent of students admitted to top schools. Consent decree liberation resulted in higher white student enrollment at the better schools. Why? White students on average have higher grades and scores.
Since the government can’t tell people where to live (yet), it manipulates the racial make-up of schools across the district by considering race in assignments. People who support such a practice find the idea of majority-black schools alarming. Why?
“The evidence indicates that there is a negative effect for all children from all ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds for attending schools that are isolated,” Roslyn Mickelson, professor of sociology and public policy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte,” told the Chicago Tribune. “Diversity has powerful effects for everybody.”
What exactly is this “negative effect”? White children are somehow harmed attending school with other white children? In what way? What is “negative” about black children attending school with other black children? Regardless of the answers to these questions, we must ask whether the government is justified in discriminating against individuals because of the color of their skin, whatever the reason.
In Brown . Board of Education, the court declared “separate but equal” inherently unequal. I don’t believe it’s true, but let’s say it is. Did the ruling authorize the government to continue racial discrimination, but this time to racially balance schools?
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When I read Senator Jim Webb’s “Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege” article in the Wall Street Journal, my reaction to it was similar to Roger Clegg’s at The Corner. Webb calls for an end to “government-directed diversity programs,” and writes that laws against discrimination should apply to everyone equally.
But he says America still owes a debt to blacks, a group that “despite a veneer of successful people at the very top still experience high rates of poverty, drug abuse, incarceration and family breakup.”
Webb apparently believes the so-called legacy of slavery and Jim Crow are to blame for these social pathologies, and the government must intervene and/or give something to blacks to narrow the disparities. As Clegg notes, Webb doesn’t mention what partly explains social pathologies: out-of-wedlock births.
Only a third of black children in America is born to married parents, and illegitimacy is closely associated with fatherlessness, which itself is correlated with poverty, delinquency, criminality, drug use, and illegitimacy. Family instability exacerbates social pathologies. And generally speaking, a parent has less emotional attachment to and makes a lower financial investment in children he doesn’t live with. That’s a fact of human nature, despite any anecdotes to the contrary.
Webb correctly notes that “affirmative action” was created with descendants of black American slaves in mind, not immigrants, legal or otherwise. Hispanics have already overtaken blacks as the largest racial/ethnic minority in the U.S. Do preferences proponents believe Hispanics, especially first-generation immigrants, should benefit from such policies?
I say let’s end government-sanctioned racial preferences now, and the answer to the question will be irrelevant.
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Proposition 107, which would bar the government from discriminating against or granting preferences to individuals or groups on the basis on race in government employment, contracting, and education, will appear on the November 2010 ballot in Arizona.
The Center for Equal Opportunity (CEO) will submit a formal statement to the Arizona secretary of state in support of Proposition 107. An excerpt:
“The Arizona Civil Rights Initiative will simply ban preferences and other discrimination based on race, ethnicity, and sex for state and local programs in education, employment, and contracting.
“ACRI will not end all ‘affirmative action’ programs. The original meaning of that term was taking positive steps to make sure there isn’t discrimination; that’s still fine. It’s also fine to ‘cast a wide net’–advertising and recruiting far and wide to get the best applicants possible. But affirmative action programs that actually discriminate will be made illegal, as they should be. And if a program is for disadvantaged people, it should be open to disadvantaged people of all colors.
“Opponents will say there is no need for ACRI because such discrimination isn’t happening in Arizona. But the Goldwater Institute in Phoenix has documented that there is plenty of such discrimination. See http://www.goldwaterinstitute.org/Common/Img/preferencebrief.pdf . So have our studies of admissions to the two state law schools. See http://www.ceousa.org/content/view/623/119/ .
“Opponents will make other untrue claims–for instance, that ACRI will ban breast-cancer screening programs. Such claims are simply false; remember, California, Washington, Michigan, and Nebraska have passed such initiatives, and there are obviously still breast-cancer screening programs there.”
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Abigail Fisher and Rachel Michalewicz are suing the University of Texas (UT) at Austin (Fisher v. University of Texas), alleging racial discrimination in admissions. After losing in district court, the plaintiffs appealed to the 5th Circuit. The Texas Tribune reports that the 5th Circuit will hear arguments next month.
If the plaintiffs lose the case, they may appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. If the court agrees to hear the case, the nine justices will once again grapple with race-based admissions.
The court likely would review its previous decision in Gratz v. Bollinger, in which Jennifer Gratz sued the University of Michigan for racial discrimination in undergraduate admissions. The court ruled that the school’s use of race violated the Equal Protection Clause. The court definitely would look to Grutter v. Bollinger, in which it upheld the University of Michigan law school’s use of race in admissions. Why did the court outlaw preferences in one case and uphold them in another? Michigan’s use of race in law school admissions was relatively subtle compared to undergraduate admissions.
UT uses a so-called holistic approach to admission. It bases admissions decisions on whether applicants graduated in the top 10 percent of their Texas high school graduating classes, where they fall along the socioeconomic continuum, and the percentage of minorities currently enrolled in the schools. The lower court decided this practice was constitutional, based on Grutter.
Filed under: Diversity, Judiciary | |1 Comment
In March, the Wake County School Board in Wake Country, North Carolina, voted 5-4 to end a busing policy that sent kids to schools outside their neighborhoods, a scheme that was unpopular among parents.
According to media reports, discussions at the school board meeting were “heated” and “tense.” At least three men were arrested, and one was heard shouting, “Hey, hey. Ho, ho. Resegregation has got to go.” The local NAACP’s William Barber said busing opponents had “racist attitudes.” Making a mockery of real civil rights issues, Barber said the vote to keep children in their own neighborhoods is “morally wrong…legally wrong…economically wrong.”
As he uttered those ridiculous words, his face was likely straight. Allowing children to attend schools in their own neighborhoods is tantamount to Jim Crow, an injustice.
On Tuesday, the police arrested 19 protesters at a board meeting.
In a previous post about this matter, I offered the following:
I wonder what Oliver Brown [of Brown v. Board of Education], Linda Brown’s father, would have thought about “resegregation” hysteria. Linda had to walk six blocks to a bus stop to ride the bus to a black school a mile away, bypassing the white school closer to her house. The government said his child could not attend her neighborhood school because she was black. In 2010, the government is still shuffling the racial cards. And for what? Why would parents allow the government to experiment with their children?
I suppose it’s lost on “resegregation” protesters that the whole Brown revolution began after a father put his foot down and refused to accept that his children could not attend their neighborhood school, by government mandate, because they were black.
I’m not a shrink, and I don’t play one on TV, but I wonder what goes on in the brains of black liberals who vehemently protest choice and fear predominantly black schools. Funding can’t be the only concern. There is something about giving parents — all parents — a choice and allowing consequences to unfold that terrifies them. Most likely, school demographics will change once children are allowed to attend schools closer to home. But so what? Well, liberals may say, the “best” teachers will avoid predominantly black schools, and black children will get the shaft.
Let’s say that will happen. Is it enough to justify the government busing children across town? The results are predictable. Wake County parents were fed up with the assignment plan. Had the school board voted to keep the plan, parents likely would have started taking their children out of government schools. If that were the case, most of the schools may have ended up predominantly black or Hispanic anyway.
Is there a middle ground? Perhaps: Parents who wish to send their kids across town for diversity’s sake may continue to do so. Do liberal types fear most parents, regardless of race, won’t do so?
Addendum: A Facebook commenter said she lives in Wake County, and calls the busing plan a nightmare. Her neighborhood has been redistricted for “economic diversity” to five different elementary schools. She’s now homeschooling her children.
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Michelle Malkin quoted the American Civil Rights Institute’s Ward Connerly in a recent column about that nasty business with the NAACP accusing the tea party movement of racism:
“The NAACP is a laughingstock…The group no longer represents the best interests of oppressed minorities, but the thin-skinned whims of the black elite and the ravenous appetite of the Nanny State. Establishment civil rights leaders now use their once-compelling moral authority to hector, bully and shake down corporate and political targets.
”As Ward Connerly, the truly maverick opponent of government racial preferences who is black, wrote recently, ‘the NAACP is not so much a civil-rights organization as it is a trade association with clear links to the Democratic Party, despite the claim of its chairman that the NAACP has always been non-partisan.’ Such a statement doesn’t pass the giggle test. The NAACP uses the plight of poor black people as a fig leaf to hide its true agenda of promoting policies that benefit their dues-paying members, not black people in general or poor black people in particular.’”
The NAACP is part of what I call the civil rights industry, dedicated to searching for “racism” under every rock and opposing policies that actually would help lower-income blacks become more self-reliant. For example, the NAACP opposes the use of taxpayers’ dollars to pay for school vouchers for families seeking a better education for their children. The organization would rather families “contribute” their hard-earned money to government schools run by the teachers union, arms of the Democratic party.
Malkin also mentioned Kenneth Gladney, a black conservative, beaten by union henchmen and called an Uncle Tom by so-called civil rights leaders.
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Racial preferences opponents David Lehrer and Joe Hicks co-authored an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, titled, “UC proves Prop. 209’s point.”
“As proponents of Proposition 209 in 1996, we could only have hoped that the ‘underrepresented’ minorities at the center of the debate would ultimately be admitted to the UC — without preferences — in numbers approximating their rate of admission with the benefit of preferences. Our argument then, as now, was that granting preferences on the basis of race and ethnicity was wrong and that, ultimately, in a bias-free environment, students would figure out what had to be done and would qualify for admission on their merits. That argument was right.
“Here are the facts: The number of minority admissions to the University of California for this fall — without the benefit of preferences — exceeds that of 1996, in absolute numbers and, more important, as a percentage of all “admits.” The numbers are, in almost every category, quite staggering.
“Latino students have gone from 15.4% (5,744 students) of freshman undergraduate admissions in 1996 to 23% (14,081) in 2010 (a 145% increase). Asian students have gone from 29.8% (11,085) of the freshman admits to 37.47% (22,877). Native American admits have declined slightly, from 0.9% to 0.8%, but their absolute number increased, from 360 to 531. African American admits have gone from 4% (1,628) to 4.2% (2,624), a modest gain in percentage but nearly a 50% increase in numbers of freshmen admitted.
“The only major category that declined in percentage terms was whites, who went from 44% (16,465) of the freshmen admits to 34% (20,807).”
What accounts for these post-Prop. 209 numbers? Could it be that removing race from the equation puts minorities on notice that grades and scores—and not skin color—will determine their acceptance, and, therefore, attracts minority students with higher qualifications? Perhaps.
As the writers note, racial preferences proponents are under the impression that the percentage of preferred minorities enrolled in colleges must match the percentage of preferred minorities in the state, regardless of SATs, GPAs, and overall achievement. Where did this idea of proportional representation come from?
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The Center for Equal Opportunity’s Roger Clegg was quoted in a Washington Times editorial on racial preferences in the financial regulation bill:
“Translated out of bureaucratic mumbo jumbo, this means federal hacks can pressure a vast array of private companies to make hiring decisions based on race. It is a backdoor way of instituting a racial quota system. Sure, no law will officially require a quota, but if the head of a small credit union doesn’t want to be harassed by the regulatory agency, or if there is a danger of losing any contract or subcontract with any larger institution subject to these regulations, he will know darn well that he needs to show that his institution has a high proportion of minorities and women as employees.
…
“Roger Clegg, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, raised another valid point in a July 12 essay. ‘Constitutional issues are raised by the various provisions of Section 342 because it is problematic when the government uses classifications or preferences based on race, ethnicity or sex … Indeed, such classifications and preferences are ‘presumptively invalid.’”
Also see Clegg’s article about the bill.
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Americans of Asian descent are a non-preferred minority. Most of the time, they are not the intended beneficiaries of race-based government policies. Consequently, they face discrimination. For example, Princeton University professor Thomas Espenshade authored a study that revealed black students with 1150s and whites 1460s had the same chance of admission to elite schools as an Asian student with 1600s, top scores.
Russell K. Nieli, who works for and lectures at Princeton, discusses the topic at Minding the Campus:
Asians, unlike blacks and Hispanics, receive no boost in admissions. Indeed, the opposite is often the case, as the quota-like mentality that leads college administrators to conclude they may have “too many” Asians. Despite the much lower number of Asians in the general high-school population, high-achieving Asian students — those, for instance, with SAT scores in the high 700s — are much more numerous than comparably high-achieving blacks and Hispanics, often by a factor of ten or more. Thinking as they do in racial balancing and racial quota terms, college admissions officers at the most competitive institutions almost always set the bar for admitting Asians far above that for Hispanics and even farther above that for admitting blacks.
…
Most elite universities seem to have little interest in diversifying their student bodies when it comes to the numbers of born-again Christians from the Bible belt, students from Appalachia and other rural and small-town areas, people who have served in the U.S. military, those who have grown up on farms or ranches, Mormons, Pentecostals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, lower-middle-class Catholics, working class “white ethnics,” social and political conservatives, wheelchair users, married students, married students with children, or older students first starting out in college after raising children or spending several years in the workforce. Students in these categories are often very rare at the more competitive colleges, especially the Ivy League. While these kinds of people would surely add to the diverse viewpoints and life-experiences represented on college campuses, in practice “diversity” on campus is largely a code word for the presence of a substantial proportion of those in the “underrepresented” racial minority groups.
Filed under: Diversity | |1 Comment
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