by lbarber on 07/28/2010
in General
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.
by lbarber on 07/28/2010
in General
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?
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.
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.”
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.
