August 2010

The American Civil Rights Foundation (ACRF) has dropped a lawsuit against the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) after it dropped a race-based teacher assignment and transfer policy as part of a settlement. (Source)

Ward Connerly, spokesman for ACRF and president of the American Civil Rights Institute, said the race-based practice “grossly shortchanges the taxpayers, not to mention our students, when teachers are assigned on the basis of race, gender, and ethnic politics rather than competence. This legal settlement and the merit-based teaching that it encourages in the LAUSD are major benefits of Proposition 209.”

Considering that LAUSD’s practice was blatantly illegal, and the state is strapped for cash, it makes sense LAUSD decided to settle.

The ACRF may want to look into the Berkeley school district’s burgeoning effort to close the achievement gap and to improve relations between “mostly white and middle-class teachers and administrators” and minority parents and students. The worrywarts apparently believe black and Hispanic students perform poorly because there’s a subcultural* chasm between them and their white teachers. (Why not blame it on the rain, too?)

If that’s the case, how do they account for Hispanics performing better than black students? Is the subcultural chasm between whites and Hispanics, whose first language may or may not be English, narrower?

Race-based government policy supporters need to ask themselves such questions. Instead of comparing blacks with whites, compare blacks with Hispanics. Compare Hispanics with Asians, or blacks with Asians, specifically low-income Asians. Compare whites with Asians. Something, beyond having mostly white teachers and administrators, is afoot.

*We are part of the American culture. Groups within this culture with distinctive traits are subcultures.

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I’m surprised there aren’t more articles on the web like this one. The New American Foundation’s Michael Lind, who used to be conservative but converted to liberalism, argues that racial preferences are wrong. The most important part of his article is in bold:

The diversity theory is now invoked by university administrations to justify informal racial discrimination in admissions against ‘over-represented’ Chinese- and Indian-Americans on behalf of ‘under-represented’ Mexican-Americans. If the diversity rationale is to be taken seriously, then it should be cause for concern that Protestants, who make up 50 percent of the American population, are grossly ‘under-represented’ on the Supreme Court, where there are now six Catholics and three Jews.

Lind the liberal has acknowledged that racial preferences are racially discriminatory.

That’s a fact, not an opinion. However, preferences supporters typically downplay or ignore this fact. A preference based on race is inherently racially discriminatory.

Lind recounts Senator James Webb’s Wall Street Journal article, in which the Democrat called for an end to government racial preferences, and notes that preferences proponents often cite President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 Howard University graduation speech to bolster their support for government racial discrimination. But they’re wrong. As I and others have stated, discriminating against non-blacks to help blacks wasn’t an idea Johnson intended to convey. He envisioned blacks receiving the training and education they needed to compete, not to be handed unearned benefits.

Race-neutral government policy was the key goal of the civil rights movement. After generations of second-class treatment, black Americans demanded their constitutional right to be treated equally before the law, partaking in the American bounty as full citizens.

Lind makes an important point that the white working class don’t consider themselves recipients of “white privilege” and won’t support policies that penalize them or their progeny, for diversity’s sake or to redress past wrongs. In fact, no black American should support policies that penalize whites.

It is a dangerous proposition that black Americans “deserve” special treatment based on a perceived disadvantage. The sword has two edges. At this point, the solution to narrowing disparities and improving quality of life must begin at the most basic level: the individual. Race-based entitlements are a poor substitute for motivation and drive, and no substitute to acquiring the skills and education needed to compete with everyone else.

In theory and in practice, racial preferences are divisive, demeaning, unfair, and wrong. The practice patronizes blacks and penalizes whites. We stand on this common ground in the fight for race-neutral government policy.

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