Last month, the Department of Justice sued New Jersey and its Civil Service Commission for using an exam that “discriminates” against blacks and Hispanics, because these groups scored “statistically significantly lower” than whites.
Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez (pictured) 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.”
Speaking at the left-leaning American Constitution Society, Perez said his department has “dusted off the disparate impact theory. If the fact support the use of disparate impact theory, whether it’s in the housing context, the voting context, the employment context, we will use the disparate impact theory because every court that has ruled on this has said that it is permissible to do so.”
The Center for Equal Opportunity’s Roger Clegg writing at NRO’s The Corner points out that during Obama’s recent State of the Union speech, he said his administration “will once again” file suits against civil rights violation and workplace discrimination, implying that the Bush administration didn’t file such suits. If that’s the case, Obama missed a big one. In 2007, Bush’s DOJ sued the New York City Fire Department for discrimination.
Furthermore, “‘the employment discrimination’ that the Obama administration is challenging is not really discrimination at all,” Clegg writes, “it’s the use of written and physical tests that are nondiscriminatory by their terms, in their design, and in their application, but which have a politically incorrect ‘disparate impact’ on this or that racial, ethnic, or gender group.”
Disparate impact creates are a no-win situation, figuratively speaking. Racial disparities in employment tests typically result in discrimination charges, and the employer ends up watering down the test. But the disparity remains. Just short of eliminating tests altogether, which fire and police departments seem reluctant to do, the employer will face discrimination complaints. If the employer tosses test results or adjusts them based on race, he’s in violation of the law.
The solution carries such a high and convoluted burden of proof. The employer must make sure the test is job related, a business necessity, and there are no less discriminatory alternatives for selecting employers.
One problem with legislation created during the civil rights era to protect blacks from discrimination is that its present-day application typically is condescending.
For example, Georgia tried to protect the integrity of the voting process by requiring voters to present state-issued identification. I was under the impression that this was standard practice, but groups cried discrimination and compared this requirement to poll taxes and literacy tests, which whites used against poor and illiterate blacks to keep them from voting. Detractors claimed the ID requirement was discriminatory to old, low-income, and black people. Black legislators in Georgia even walked out of the state capital building in protest after the law passed.
I can’t help but think of the Stepin Fetchit character, and how little regard these black politicians had for their own people—too ignorant and/or too lazy to go down to the DMV and get a state-issued ID card, which was free if they couldn’t afford it.
I’m probably in the minority of blacks who sees the stark patronizing and condescending attitude people have toward black Americans, or at least one of a few to publicly talk about it.
Writing in National Review Online, Hans A. von Spakovsky, a former counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Justice Department, writes about an example of the Voting Rights Act’s Section 5 application. This law is a holdover from the civil rights era that requires certain states to seek federal approval to make changes in voting procedures. Regarding the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division:
“These highly partisan bureaucrats…typically exhibit a disturbingly patronizing attitude towards [black Americans]…The latest example of this transparent political mischief has, unfortunately, gone largely unreported by the media. It’s an outrageous objection by the Civil Rights Division to a voting change in the small town of Kinston, N.C. The case involved a referendum by the residents of Kinston to change the elections for city council from partisan to nonpartisan. The referendum passed overwhelmingly in November 2008. But the Justice Department recently refused to pre-clear it, claiming that it discriminates against minorities.
“The department’s decision is as offensive as it is inexplicable. Consider that, at the time of the November 2008 election, Kinston had about 15,000 registered voters, of whom 65 percent were black. This is actually a higher registration rate than one would expect, since the 2000 census showed that the black voting-age population is just 58.8 percent of the total population. Moreover, on the town’s five-member city council (elected at large), two of the councilmen are black and all five are Democrats. Although the current mayor is white, the longtime prior mayor was black.”
Von Spakovsky adds that DOJ lawyers use the Voting Rights Act to benefit Democrats. I certainly can believe that, as 90 percent of black Americans vote for Democrats. But partisanship aside, the government believes blacks need hand-holding and special treatment, cannot be expected to use discernment or be responsible for their choices, or deal with the consequences of those choices.
Hence, the existence of such policies as racial preferences, which hold blacks to a lesser standard.
The Washington Times recently published an editorial about Thomas Perez, Maryland’s secretary of labor and President Barack Obama’s nominee for assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.
Focusing on his record on illegal immigration and comments on racial preferences, the Times writes:
“[Perez] has served as president of the board of CASA de Maryland, an immigrant-advocacy organization known for taking several rather extreme positions. For instance, CASA has fought against keeping illegal immigrants from getting state drivers’ licenses. Mr. Perez himself has supported efforts to grant in-state tuition rates to undocumented immigrants. And he has been a strong proponent of giving preferential treatment to members of some races or ethnicities in admissions to schools to train health professionals…On that latter point, Mr. Perez argued that racial preferences could be used not just for ‘remedial’ purposes — not just to make up for past discrimination.”
Indeed, Perez believes medical schools should drop standards for black applicants, because he contends they are more likely to work in “underserved” communities than white doctors. Linda Chavez of the Center for Equal Opportunity (CEO) tackles the topic of Perez’s strange ideas published in a law journal in 2006. An excerpt from her column:
“[Perez] cited a handful of studies purported to show that minority doctors are more likely to provide medical care to under-served poor minority populations than white physicians…He then leapt to the conclusion that the best way to improve access to medical care for underserved populations was to insist that medical schools use race or ethnicity in choosing which students to admit.
“In effect, Perez appears to be arguing for a form of medical apartheid in which minority patients should be served by minority doctors under the presumption that both groups benefit from this practice. The argument is both insulting and dangerous.”
Last month, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights called the president’s health care bill’s race-based preferential treatment provisions discriminatory and found that such efforts likely won’t reduce heath care disparities. Increasing access to high-quality doctors, regardless of race, “is the best way to mitigate such disparities.” (Source)
Commenting on the Henry Louis Gates story, Connerly said, “We’ve reached a point where white males are saying, ‘We’ve done all that we need to do in terms of treating black people with kid gloves and giving them deference. Now let’s do what’s right regardless of race.’” (Source)
In the Seattle Times, Connerly said this about the Ricci v. DeStefano case: “What has changed, and it’s been growing, is frustration on the part of whites, especially white males, about remaining silent on what they regard as very unfair.”
(Photo source: Stephen Crowley/The New York Times)
Sonia Sotomayor faces a second day of questions posed by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee for confirmation to the Supreme Court. The “wise Latina” said she’d be an impartial judge, despite previous statements that indicate the contrary.
“Many Senators have asked me about my judicial philosophy. It is simple: fidelity to the law. The task of a judge is not to make the law – it is to apply the law.” (Source)
Unfortunately, Sotomayor’s past statements and court decisions will not keep her from being confirmed, considering that Democrats hold the majority in Congress. Republican senator Lindsey Graham told her, “Unless you have a complete meltdown, you’re going to get confirmed.”
That about sums it up.
Senator Orrin Hatch notes that depending on the ideology, President Barack Obama believes a judge’s personal views should effect court cases. Obama opposed Janice Rogers Brown, an appeals court judge and a conservative. “He argued that the test of a qualified judicial nominee is whether she can set aside her personal views and decide cases on their merits,” Hatch said. “But today, President Obama says that personal empathy is an essential ingredient in judicial decisions.”
What would Sotomayor’s confirmation mean for racial preferences? The conservative/liberal split on the Supreme Court would hold, with left-leaning Justice David Souter retiring at the end of the current term. In the Ricci v. DeStefano case, Souter joined Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent. In other words, he believes the city of New Haven was permitted to discriminate against whites. And so does Sotomayor.
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.
The indispensable Shelby Steele calls Barack Obama on his contradictory “post-racial” rhetoric and his penchant to play identity politics. He once called Obama’s post-racialism delusional. “Barack Obama seduced whites with a vision of their racial innocence precisely to coerce them into acting out of a racial motivation,” Steele wrote. Chilling, but true.
In his latest piece for the Opinion Journal, Steele says the nomination of someone like “wise Latina” Sonia Sotomayor was to be expected. Republicans have tried and failed to woo Hispanics, and Democrats understand all too well that they mustn’t take the Hispanic vote for granted. With Sotomayor, Obama scores a “first” and appeases an important racial block of voters.
And that’s precisely the problem.
“The Sotomayor nomination commits the cardinal sin of identity politics,” Steele writes. “It seeks to elevate people more for the political currency of their gender and ethnicity than for their individual merit. (Here, too, is the ugly faithlessness in minority merit that always underlies such maneuverings.) Mr. Obama is promising one thing and practicing another, using his interracial background to suggest an America delivered from racial corruption even as he practices a crude form of racial patronage. From America’s first black president, and a man promising the ‘new,’ we get a Supreme Court nomination that is both unoriginal and hackneyed.”
I, too, have witnessed the contradiction. At one point I described Obama’s speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention as conservative-like, as he seemed to transcend race. But mostly everything he’s done or said so far has been racially tinged. Can we chalk it up to human nature?
Steele calls Obama’s post-racialism a mere impression, “a chimera that grows out of a very specific racial manipulation that I have called ‘bargaining.’ Here the minority makes a bargain with white society: I will not ‘guilt’ you with America’s centuries of racism if you will not hold my minority status against me. Whites love this bargain because it allows them to feel above America’s racist past and, therefore, immune to charges of racism.”
I’ve written on my personal blog that white liberals who thought they were looking beyond race when they voted for Obama actually were voting for him for that precise reason. As Steele notes, Obama “cannot win white support without bargaining and he cannot maintain minority support without playing the very identity politics that injure him with whites.”
Is Catch-22 the best way to describe Obama’s dilemma?
Steele offers an astute distinction between Obama and hustlers like Jesse Jackson. The latter resorts to guilt-tripping whites into giving him what he wants, while the former “grants them innocence” before seeking what he wants. Obama has to appease minorities by playing identity politics on the one hand, and appease whites by pretending to be post-racial on the other. This quote sums up the essence of racial preferences, which in practice is nothing more than lowered standards:
Judge Sotomayor is the archetypal challenger. Challengers see the moral authority that comes from their group’s historic grievance as an entitlement to immediate parity with whites — whether or not their group has actually earned this parity through development. If their group is not yet competitive with whites, the moral authority that comes from their grievance should be allowed to compensate for what they lack in development. This creates a terrible corruption in which the group’s historic grievance is allowed to count as individual merit. And so a perverse incentive is created: Weakness and victimization are rewarded over development. Better to be a troublemaker than to pursue excellence.
I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.
So says Sonia Sotomayor, President Barack Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court. She said that a woman like herself would make better decisions in court cases than white men, and, by implication, that sex and ethnicity should factor into court decisions.
Such a woman, if all goes swimmingly with her nomination, will sit on the highest court in the land.
The ultimate irony is that our Constitution is supposed to guard against writing laws and making decisions that take race or sex into account. Original intent and meaning, equal justice – these aren’t abstract concepts. They are (or should be) the lifeblood of our system of justice. It doesn’t matter whether the Constitution’s drafters owned slaves or believed blacks were subhuman. It really doesn’t. What matters is the U.S. Constitution, as ratified, provides the best protection against discrimination based on the color of one’s skin.
But Sotomayor believes one’s skin color should influence how one interprets the Constitution. Chilling, and so is the double standard that allows her to say it and get away with it. The National Journal’s Stuart Taylor said this about Sotomayor’s statement:
So accustomed have we become to identity politics that it barely causes a ripple when a highly touted Supreme Court candidate, who sits on the federal Appeals Court in New York, has seriously suggested that Latina women like her make better judges than white males…Indeed, unless Sotomayor believes that Latina women also make better judges than Latino men, and also better than African-American men and women, her basic proposition seems to be that white males (with some exceptions, she noted) are inferior to all other groups in the qualities that make for a good jurist.
Any prominent white male would be instantly and properly banished from polite society as a racist and a sexist for making an analogous claim of ethnic and gender superiority or inferiority…Imagine the reaction if someone had unearthed in 2005 a speech in which then-Judge Samuel Alito had asserted, for example: “I would hope that a white male with the richness of his traditional American values would reach a better conclusion than a Latina woman who hasn’t lived that life” — and had proceeded to speak of “inherent physiological or cultural differences.”
(The double standard is maddening. Try this: “I would hope that a wise white man with the richness of his experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a Latina female who hasn’t lived that life.”)
Identity politics, as Taylor says, is so strong in our mind-numbingly politically correct atmosphere that Sotomayor’s remarks will do nothing more than make headlines. They will have little impact on the confirmation process.
Taylor goes down the list of similar statements attributed to Sotomayor, statements useful for columnists, commentators, and bloggers. The best ammunition confirmation opponents will have against Sotomayor, if they choose to use it, is the Ricci v. DeStefano case, in which she supported discrimination against whites and lower standards for blacks.
Victor Merina, a senior fellow at the USC Annenberg Institute for Justice and Journalism, has penned an article about the American Civil Rights Institute’s Ward Connerly, “who can match his multiracial background with the biracial Obama.” (Source)
Merina, like so many others, uses the terms affirmative action and race preferences interchangeably, when they are not synonymous. Affirmative action is casting a “wider net” to include more qualified minorities into a hiring or admissions pool. Race preferences involve lowering standards for minorities in an effort to recruit more of them, inevitably discriminating against Asian and white applicants.
Nevertheless, Mesina correctly notes that to those of us who support Connerly, “he is the champion of equality.” Connerly and others will continue their crusade to dismantle race preferences and keep a close watch on President Barack Obama, whose view on race preferences is indeed “cloudy,” although he appears to support some form of socioeconomic preferences.
In 2010, voters in Missouri, Arizona, Colorado (and perhaps Oklahoma) may get to choose whether their state and local governments are allowed to consider factors like race when hiring, contracting, and admitting. Connerly and others are hopeful Obama chooses to push class-based preferences.
“He may not want to go there as fast as I do,” Connerly said, “but he’s given every indication that’s the direction he wants to go.”
Connerly notes that when he and his wife were married, interracial marriage was outlawed. He knows what Barack Obama’s parents went through. To see the product of an interracial marriage become president of the United States is indeed historic.
“Being colorblind doesn’t necessarily mean that you don’t see color; it means that you discard its influence when you see it,” Connerly said. “I have been roundly criticized by blacks for over a decade as being naive about this, as they assert the inherent racism of Americans. I gloat, in this instance, to say that they were wrong.”
Lopez asks Connerly, “What’s your wildest dream about Barack Obama?”
“That he will say, ‘My fellow Americans, Ward Connerly is right about race preferences being a violation of all that is good about our beloved nation. Therefore, today, I am issuing an Executive Order that will require all federal agencies and all of those who receive federal funds to obey the law of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.’”
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
Last month, the Department of Justice sued New Jersey and its Civil Service Commission for using an exam that “discriminates” against blacks and Hispanics, because these groups scored “statistically significantly lower” than whites. 
Writing in 
The 
The 
Sonia Sotomayor faces a second day of questions posed by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee for confirmation to the Supreme Court. The “wise Latina” said she’d be an impartial judge, despite previous statements that indicate the contrary.
The indispensable Shelby Steele calls Barack Obama on his contradictory “post-racial” rhetoric and his penchant to play identity politics. He once called Obama’s 
I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life. 
Victor Merina, a senior fellow at the USC Annenberg Institute for Justice and Journalism, has penned an article about the 
