Archive for Diversity
I’m working on a column about the controversy brewing at UC San Diego since last month. A group of white UCSD students held an off-campus “ghetto” party that offended some blacks, and a student-run TV station used a racial slur. Consequently, the students have come up with a list of race-based “demands” for the school. Sounds 60s, doesn’t it?
The party was organized by a black comedian calling himself Jiggaboo Jones. He’s superfluous to the mainstream media narrative on the issue, so ignore him.
Among the demands are race-based admissions, hiring, and funding. One problem: California voters barred their government from discriminating against and preferring individuals or groups based on factors like race.
The American Civil Rights Institute’s Ward Connerly, the man behind the California measure, will review the agreement between the students and the school to determine whether they violate state law. An excerpt:
“Blacks make up just 2 percent of the student body at the La Jolla campus … ‘There just aren’t enough black kids who are academically prepared to go to UC San Diego,’ Connerly said.
“He said members of the Black Student Union would do the most good by going to churches and other organizations in their communities, emphasizing education to younger children to make them academically competitive when the time comes to apply to college.”
There’s no glamour in that, Mr. Connerly, and it’s too much work. Great idea, though. Protesting and demanding race-based entitlements make the heart race.
More to come.
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Mark Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory University and author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30), commented on the BAMN lawsuit I blogged about last week.
BAMN is trying to overturn a California law that bars the government from discriminating against and preferring individuals or groups based on race, sex, etc. Among other things, the group claims racial minorities have a constitutional right to preferential treatment. In “The Tortured Logic of BAMN,” Bauerlein notes BAMN’s obsession with the American Civil Rights Institute’s Ward Connerly (“Stop Ward Connerly! Defend Affirmative Action & Integration!”).
The statement reflects BAMN’s fixation on Connerly, which is magnified on BAMN’s web page which bears the banner: “Stop Ward Connerly! Defend Affirmative Action & Integration!” (see here). Read more of BAMN’s statements and you see it’s a personal thing. Later on in the Chronicle article, George B. Washington, BAMN’s lead attorney in the effort, explains that the legal challenge isn’t aimed so much to change state law, but rather “to throw a wrench into campaigns on behalf of similar measures being mounted by the American Civil Rights Institute.”
That statement is Schmidt’s paraphrase of Washington’s claim. Two paragraphs later we get Washington’s own words on the tactic, and they’re worse: “The coalition needs to defeat Proposition 209, Mr. Washington said, because otherwise the American Civil Rights Institute is “going to go and play bully boy with minorities in states like Utah and Arizona.”
Think about that rhetoric. It sounds not like a serious legal mind at work, but rather a cheap politician taking lessons from Saul Alinsky, author of the famed Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals. One of Alinsky’s tactics is “Pick a target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” That’s what Connerly has had to endure for more than a dozen years now, and one can only wonder at how he maintains the energy and composure to press on.
Logic tends to drive some to distraction, and they ignore or downplay far-reaching consequences. For instance, individual merit is a core American value. Everyone is equal before the law, and everyone is judged by his own merits and behavior, not by those of his group (black, white, male, female, etc.).
In the same vein, when an individual faces discrimination, his rights have been violated. He is to be compensated for the injustice, not his entire racial group. Government action that “benefits” certain racial groups can also be used to harm those same racial groups. That’s the danger of giving the government power to bestow favors based on race.
We must prohibit our government from discriminating against or preferring certain groups over others for any reason. Once upon a time, blacks wanted to be free of such restraints. A collective and dynamic forward motion released them from unjust race-based government action, but some blacks are determined to go backward.
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The Wake County School Board in North Carolina is one of many government school systems that factor in socio-economic status when assigning students to spread the races across the district. Under the plan, students are bused to schools outside their neighborhoods, a practice that appears unpopular among parents of all races.
Those who oppose busing students in Wake County believe the assignment plan should promote neighborhood schools. They want to remove all references to diversity and make neighborhood schools a priority.
This week, a member of the board’s three-person policy committee made a motion to recommend approving the assignment change, but the majority rejected it. “I didn’t feel right about the wording,” said board member Debra Goldman. “I need to eyeball this more, especially when the policy has such major implications.” (Source)
Goldman voted against the change in December as well. Busing opponents say she’s betrayed her constituents. Goldman, ironically, is part of a newly elected trio that ran campaigns opposing the busing plan.
“Our school system is not family friendly,” she says on her campaign web site. “As a concerned citizen, I have learned that true progress in our schools is not possible without involvement and support from the community. As a parent, I have firsthand experience with the burden of outdated reassignment practices.”
Defending her rejection of the change, Goldman said the board needs more information, and the wording of the change needs to be stronger.
Busing supporters wring their hands over “resegregation.” Majority-minority schools are to be avoided, even if it means hauling children to schools outside their neighborhoods. The implication is that black and Hispanic students can’t learn among their own. White students must be present, or we’re headed back to the days of Jim Crow. Isn’t it odd that people in homogenous countries like China and Japan aren’t fretting over lack of diversity? Apparently, they don’t have their priorities straight. Are school administrators in Scandinavia biting their nails over what to do about so many white faces? If not, perhaps they need a “Celebrate Diversity!” campaign.
Mostly in America will you perceive the dreaded fear of all- or majority-black government schools. Black children can’t learn, social engineers insinuate, unless they’re sitting beside white children. If blacks are doing poorly in school, the problem must be too few white students (and too few black teachers?). What excuse do poorly performing white students have — too many whites?
The only way out of the madness is homeschooling and private schools.
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What more needs to be said about this Newsweek article on racial preferences that John Rosenberg hasn’t said?
But I think I can manage a few comments.
In Newsweek, writer Raina Kelley makes a valiant attempt to re-frame the “affirmative action” debate to give it what she apparently believes is a much-needed makeover. What Kelley and others refer to when they use the term actually are racial preferences, which she contends are a “crucial tool in the fight for equal opportunity and access for all.”
First, Kelley seems believes affirmative action is not about preferential treatment and lowered standards, although the evidence says otherwise. “Opponents of affirmative action have succeeded in associating the phrase with unfair advantages for undeserving minorities and women.”
If a preferred racial minority is admitted with lower grades and scores than a white student, or a lesser qualified preferred minority is hired over a more qualified white person, the advantage is unfair. And no one deserves a college placement or a job. He earns it, based on qualifications. The only thing we come close to deserving — and that might not be the right word — is the chance to compete for placement or employment.
Kelley ironically cites a Stanford Magazine article in which the writers assert unequivocally that Stanford University discriminates and prefers certain racial minorities in admissions, hiring, tenure, contracting, and financial aid. The writers state the obvious: racial preferences are divisive. “In no other area of public life is there a greater disparity between the rhetoric of preferences and the reality.”
Kelly disagrees, but it’s difficult to know if she disagrees that preferences are divisive or that there isn’t a greater disparity between the rhetoric of preferences and reality.
“Stanford has every right to compose a student body based on the qualifications it thinks will maintain its status as an elite university. If one of those qualifications is a diversity of background, so be it. Any guidance counselor will tell you: it takes more than good SAT scores to get into college. Affirmative action isn’t around to play favorites—nor is it supposed to prefer people of color over white ones. It is a system designed to make sure that everybody is getting into college through their qualifications whether you are a poor kid from East L.A. or a fourth-generation legacy.”
So much to parse here. First, as a private university, Stanford may have more leeway in discriminating against and preferring certain groups. Publicly funded colleges and universities do not, although many of them do lower admissions standards for certain groups. I assume Kelley supports affirmative action at state colleges and universities. If that’s the case, it’s dead wrong. Using public funds to discriminate against and prefer people based on race is exactly what the Civil Rights Act was created to prevent. Good intentions don’t render racial discrimination and preferential treatment lawful.
Second, affirmative action does play favorites and does prefer “people of color” over whites. More than that, the practice discriminates against people of Asian descent. Ironically (or perhaps not), Asians also faced discrimination. Because they manage to excel in spite of past treatment, however, no one considers lowering standards for them.
The bottom line is that preferences exist, because for various reasons, certain racial minority groups don’t perform as well as whites or certain Asians. Consequently, some institutions have developed elaborate evaluation methods designed to mask different standards of review. The solution to the racial disparity “problem” isn’t giving college placements and jobs to lesser qualified people. Solving the problem is a far-reaching and deep-rooted challenge that does not fall within the authority of the government to fix, but to individuals themselves.
The quick fix of lowering standards based on race has to be one of the most condescending and anti-American practices ever conceived. Yet, blacks who criticize the practice are the Uncle Toms and self-haters. The world really has gone mad.
Third, affirmative action is not designed so that “everybody is getting into college through their qualifications.” If that were the case, why use affirmative action in the first place? Qualifications would speak for themselves, regardless whether the student is poor.
Read John Rosenberg’s post to understand why Kelley’s characterization of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Howard University commencement speech in 1965 as supporting preferences is off the mark.
Kelley makes the same benefits-of-diversity assertion as other preference proponents. “Diversity challenges assumptions and forces people to rely on personal experience instead of stereotype. It’s hard to think black people are inferior if they’re sitting next to you in freshman English or in a conference room.”
What if personal experience confirms stereotypes? And why would it be difficult for a white person to conclude a black person is inferior because he’s sitting next to said black person? Familiarity may breed contempt and confirmation. That’s totally beside the point in any case. Who cares what someone thinks? The law is not designed to change the way people think; it’s designed to regulate how they behave. People can hold all kind of stereotypes. The government’s role is to make sure the law is applied consistently and equally, not to make sure white people don’t think bad thoughts about black people.
There is nothing new under the sun. Raina Kelley attempts to do what other racial preference proponents have done and will continue to do: offer impassioned rhetoric to convince those who support racial equality that blacks and other preferred minorities deserve unearned benefits at the expense of the majority because of America’s treatment of their ancestors.
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Civil rights industry types are worrying about the wrong thing, as usual.
For instance, the University of California’s Civil Rights Project argues in its 130-page “Choice Without Equity” report that charter schools have been a “civil rights failure.”
Are the researchers implying that government officials are blocking school doors so children can’t get in? Is there some law still on the books that mandates separate charter schools for different races?
No. The Civil Rights Project is up in arms because charter schools tend to be predominately one race or another—not by government mandate, but by choice, a word that sticks in the craw of liberals, unless the topic of discussion is abortion.
Whereas the civil rights movement’s focus was dismantling legal segregation, today’s movement focuses on racial bean counting. The top priority is not to give students of all races a quality education; it’s to put minority students next to white students. Otherwise, their civil rights are hanging in the balance. (Cue panic riff.)
According to the report, charter schools—government schools with fewer rules and regulations than traditional government schools, and attended by choice—are more segregated than traditional government schools. Charter schools tend to be located in urban areas. “As a result, charter school enrollment patterns display high levels of minority segregation, trends that are particularly severe for black students.”
What’s wrong with that? According to the researchers, “Decades of social science studies find important benefits associated with attending diverse schools, and, conversely, related educational harms in schools where poor and minority students are concentrated.”
The researchers use words like severe and harm and intensely and segregation and white flight and apartheid to insinuate something sinister is going on. To them, there is: choice.
Although whites attend charter schools in lower proportions, they’re “overrepresented” in charter schools in the Southwest and states like North Carolina. In the West, the study notes with alarm, whites are the lowest percentage of students in traditional government schools, but the highest percentage of white charter school students. Again, what’s wrong with that? Watch the researchers make a leap (emphasis added):
It would be very damaging to invest public money in schools that finance white flight from regular public schools and take with the departing white students, state and federal funding badly needed for the students left behind in even more segregated regular public schools. The fact that a number of these “white flight” schools do not report any students on free lunch suggests that they may be segregated by both race and class.
It’s all in the way you frame it. The researchers assign underhanded motives to white parents, rather than viewing them as people exercising school choice. What motives do they assign black parents for doing the same? Well, none. Most are given the choice of an inferior traditional school, according to the report, or an inferior charter school.
On the one hand, the researches call segregated charter schools a civil rights issue; on the other hand, they say charter schools’ supposedly “superior academic education performance” is “not sustained by the research.” So why all the complaining about segregated charter schools?
The researchers acknowledge that charter school enrollment almost tripled this decade, and received “increased level of funding and support from federal, state and local education agencies,” yet charter schools dominated by one race or another are problematic to them.
The selling point for charters is they claim to offer a better education than traditional government schools. The researchers are not convinced, and in any case, they believe lack of skin color diversity undermines the schools. If a predominately black charter school receives its share of funds, why is the school’s racial make-up a cause for concern? (Can you imagine a group of white parents complaining that their kids have to sit next to other white kids in school? Do parents of black charter school kids complain about the schools’ racial makeup? I fervently hope not.)
Ironically, America was transformed by a movement that sought to end government-mandated, race-based school enrollment decisions. Today’s civil rights industry wants the government to do the exact opposite.
What a shame.
The answers offered in the report on how to solve the segregation crisis aren’t groundbreaking or insightful, just the same old dated “civil rights” complaints. Among the recommendations to “promote diversity and prevent racial isolation” in charter schools are more rules and regulations. Make charter schools more like magnet schools (“specialized” schools with geographically open admission polices to draw whites — these schools still end up mostly one race or another). Other recommendations include providing free transportation, community outreach, and — surprise! — reducing choice.
Parents with choices exercise those choices. Too much government coercion, and they’ll choose a different school. Neighborhoods play a big role in the racial make-up of schools. Just short of telling people where to live, there isn’t much the government can do about that.
Addendum: Are charter schools a civil rights failure? Some of the answers on the National Journal’s education blog are priceless.
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Through the years, racial preference proponents have talked about the so-called benefits of diversity. Preferences benefit minorities by virtue of their being preferred over the majority and non-preferred minorities (people of Asian descent, for example). What’s difficult to assess is how campus diversity benefits non-preferred groups.
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 to achieve a “critical mass” of minorities was narrowly tailored to further a compelling interest in “obtaining the educational benefits that flow from” skin deep-only diverse student body. The court said the law school’s critical mass rationale “is further bolstered by numerous expert studies and reports showing that such diversity promotes learning outcomes and better prepares students for an increasingly diverse workforce, for society, and for the legal profession.”
One of the reports the court relied on to make this assessment was the Gurin Report. Patricia Gurin, a psychology and women’s studies professor, said racial diversity “has far-ranging and significant benefits for all students, non-minorities and minorities alike,” and that interacting with racially diverse peers “is positively associated with a host of what I call ‘learning outcomes.’ Students who experienced the most racial and ethnic diversity in classroom settings and in informal interactions with peers showed the greatest engagement in active thinking processes, growth in intellectual engagement and motivation, and growth in intellectual and academic skills.”
Duane Ellison, of the National Association of Scholars, submitted a response brief to the court challenging Gurin’s study. For example, Ellison says Gurin’s work is statistically flawed…”inconsistent and…trivially weak.”
“Gurin defines her own idiosyncratic diversity variables, which she labels ‘learning outcomes’ and ‘democracy outcomes…[b]ut, Gurin finds no statistical correlation between a racially and ethnically diverse student body and her ‘learning outcomes’ and democracy outcomes.’ Her statistical output shows that taking an ethnic studies course, participating in a diversity workshop, discussing minority issues, and other measures yield exceedingly weak correlations with learning and democracy outcomes, at least some of the time. At other times, she finds nothing, no statistical correlation.”
In other words, the relationship between doing all of these race-focused things and racial and ethnic diversity on campus is not strong enough to sustain the diversity-benefits-everyone argument. Yet, the Supreme Court relied on this study to decide racial discrimination was constitutionally permissible.
With the intro out of the way, I’ll point you to an article at Benzinga.com that summarizes a new study by two Duke University professors, Peter Arcidiacono and Jacob Vigdor (pictured), challenging the diversity-benefits-everyone argument. The person who wrote the article noted that increasing minority representation “usually” entails lowering standards for those minorities, a fact that isn’t expressed nearly enough.
According to the study, evidence strongly suggests that racial preferences themselves have “a negative net impact on students not directly targeted by the program.” The researchers found weak evidence of a relationship between campus diversity and postgrad outcomes of whites or Asians.
“Our empirical results cover a broad range of outcomes, including earnings, educational attainment, and satisfaction with both one’s life and one’s job. Across these varying specifications, we fail to find any significant evidence that white or Asian students who attend more diverse colleges do better later in life. Moreover, the strongest evidence we uncover suggests that increasing minority representation by lowering admission standards is unlikely to produce benefits and may in fact cause harm by reducing the representation of minority students on less selective campuses.”
In other words, whites and non-preferred minorities don’t benefit from racial bean counting in admissions. Let’s be honest. Is that one of the goals of “affirmative action”? I say no. Asserting that whites and others will obtain certain educational benefits because they’re surrounded by preferred minorities is part of the advertising claim to sell the obviously discriminatory policy. Some whites buy the product; some don’t.
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I’d be remiss if I didn’t excerpt Walter Williams’s tongue-in-cheek column on Townhall, “We Need Diversity.”
The obsession with diversity is focused on increasing the representation of racial minorities in any given arena. It almost never goes the other way. No one seriously demands that the NBA or NFL be more racially diverse. The only thing that matters is how well an individual can play. It just so happens that individuals of African descent are better, on average, than others. (Are Samoans counted as “black”? They’re definitely not “African American.”)
“According to the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport report titled ‘The 2008 Racial and Gender Report Card,’” Williams writes, “the percentage of black male basketball players in Division I was an all-time high at 60.4 percent. It was 45.9 percent in football and 6.0 percent in baseball.
“Diversity is worse in professional sports…One can understand the absence of concern for diversity in professional sports; they are in it just for the money. But one is left flummoxed by the lack of sports diversity in college sports. After all, you can’t listen to any college president or provost speak for more than five minutes before the word “diversity” drops from his lips. Colleges take diversity seriously and they spend tens of millions of dollars on it. Juilliard School has a director of diversity and inclusion; MIT has a manager of diversity recruitment; Toledo University, an associate dean for diversity; Harvard, Texas A&M, California at Berkeley, Virginia and many others boast of officers, deans, vice presidents and perhaps ministers of diversity. But, in what appears to be the height of deviousness and deceit, these diversity-driven administrators allow sports, the most visible part of the college, be the least diverse and least inclusive.”
For those who say black players dominate certain sports teams because they’re better than whites, imagine the same statement turned around: whites dominate certain professions because they’re better than blacks.
“It should be remembered that diversity creed holds that we are all equal and would be proportionately represented by race across all activities but for the fact of discrimination and oppression.”
Using that logic, whites and Asians are underrepresented in American basketball and football because of discrimination and oppression. If you think that’s ridiculous, some assume blacks are being oppressed and discriminated against because they’re underrepresented in certain professions.
“But La Shawn, that’s different.” How?
Consistency is the bane of PC’s existence.
Williams lists disparities among lighting-struck victims, job-related deaths, cervical cancer rates, and more. Diversity advocates serious about their jobs will have their hands full making sure a range of colors, sexes, nationalities, body types, etc., are represented in these groups.
(You have to laugh at this stuff to keep from tearing your hair out at the disingenuousness of diversophiles.)
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In a recent Townhall column, I wrote about the Berkeley High School Governance Council’s proposal to cut before- and after-school science labs and divert resources to “equity grants” to narrow the racial academic achievement gap The council called the gap at Berkeley, the widest in the state, “unconscionable.”
At BigJournalism.com, Linda Seebach, formerly of Rocky Mountain News, brings up an important yet overlooked point in the debate (emphasis added):
“Enrollment this school year is 14 percent Latino, 26 percent African-American, 34 percent white, 16 percent in a category the district calls multi-ethnic, and approximately 8 percent in a variety of Asian groups. But students make very different academic choices. Berkeley has six component schools, four of them officially designated ’small schools,’ averaging around 200 students each; about 500 in the International High School; and the rest, a majority, in a fairly traditional program called Academic Choice. For instance, one of the small schools, called the Community Partnerships Academy, has 51 percent African-Americans and only 7 percent whites. Another, the School for Social Justice and Ecology, is 44 percent African-American and 20 percent white. In contrast, the international program is 21 percent African-American and 44 percent white.
“These choices play out in the science classes as well. The AP science classes are only 10 percent African-American and 53 percent white, while the science classes without additional lab time almost exactly reverse the proportions, with 51 percent African-American and 9 percent white.”
The choice idea is one I considered as well. I know in the scheme of things, students’ academic choices carry little weight in “diversity” arguments. If there’s a disparity, its cause must be racial discrimination and/or lack of funding. If black students choose science classes at lower rates than other students, where’s the logic in depriving other students to divert more funds to black students? Doesn’t it essentially penalize Berkeley’s science lab students for being…white and Asian?
Unless the school is preventing qualified black students from attending science labs, there’s no issue. If presently unqualified black students wish to take more science classes, school counselors and teachers (and parents) should advise them to take the necessary preparatory classes earlier in their academic journey.
Simple-minded, I know. I can’t help it.
(Hat tip: Discriminations)
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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.”
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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
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