Archive for General
Earlier this year, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF) filed suit against the Philadelphia School District, alleging “deliberate and discriminatory indifference” after groups of mostly blacks students at South Philadelphia High School (designated “persistently dangerous”) beat up students of Asian descent.
Although the district suspended about 10 students, the AALDEF claimed the school covered up and downplayed the attacks. A retired federal judge named Judge James T. Giles released a report in which he concluded that in some instances, the Asian students “were randomly attacked or attacked because someone in their group was identified or misidentified as being connected to the earlier events,” and he apparently found no evidence of a cover-up but recommended the school ban hoodies (yep, you read it right), put more cameras in the school, and set up an anonymous tip hotline for students.
The U.S. Department of Justice found merit in AALDEF’s claims and advised the district to fix the problem.
So, how will the schools go about it? If they get rid of the worst troublemakers, they’ll be accused of racial discrimination (by disproportionately expelling black students). If they do nothing, they’ll be accused of racial discrimination (by failing to protect Asian students).
One word for parents who don’t want to put up with this nonsense either way: homeschool.
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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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Like other cities, Syracuse operates under a consent decree, which stipulates that the city must hire a certain percentage of minority firefighters and police officers.
Would it shock you to know I think such mandates are ridiculous as well as racially discriminatory?
By the way, I put the word reverse in quotations marks, because there’s no such thing. Racial discrimination is racial discrimination.
A white voluntary firefighter who seeks employment with the fire department sued the city, claiming Syracuse is hiring lower scoring blacks over higher scoring whites. A federal court ruled against him in 2008, but an appeals court overturned the ruling and remanded the case.
According to a 30-year-old consent decree, the city is permitted to prefer black applicants over whites until the number of blacks hired reaches a certain percentage. Three decades ago, blacks comprised about one percent of firefighters and about 10 percent of the city’s employees. The court decreed that black firefighters should account for 10 percent of each rank in the department, and the percentage of blacks in the department should match that of the general pool.
Fast forward to 2010, and black firefighters account for 16.6 percent of the fire department. Five years ago, the general labor pool was 21 percent black. When will the preferences stop? How does the city of Syracuse get away with discriminating against whites? One preferences proponent’s answer:
“When people have knife wounds, they sometimes need surgery to heal. It’s more cutting with a knife. But it’s a different kind of cutting — one is the problem and one is the solution.”
People who think this way don’t seem to understand or care that the government has the power to give or to take away opportunities and set up barriers based on race. Those days are supposed to be over. As long as the government isn’t using this power to penalize blacks, however, the mainstream approves. But “reverse” discrimination is just as odious as “forward” discrimination.
As the article notes, federal courts tend to side with preferences opponents these days. For example, the highest court in the land ruled against the city of New Haven after it tossed a promotions test because too few minorities scored high enough to qualify for promotions.
I hope the court cancels the consent decree. If that happens, you can bet your life savings someone will file suit claiming the employment exam is “discriminatory.” And the battle to bar the use of race in government hiring decisions continues.
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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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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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Peter Wood, of the National Association of Scholars, wrote a piece about the Association of American Law Schools’s (AALS) recent race-focused workshop, in which the group outlined some rather incoherent ideas of the “unfairness-in-the-name-of-fairness” sort. But first, an excerpt from Wood’s preface:
“In the decades since, we have watched the rise of a racial preference industry, some of it focused on implementing racial preferences in particular settings and some of it aimed at inventing and selling ever more elaborate justifications for the whole idea of privileging members of some racial groups over members of others. The latter necessarily involves a great deal of logical and linguistic gymnastics. It isn’t easy to use the rhetoric of fairness to advance what most people recognize as a manifest form of unfairness. But some members of the legal profession have risen to the challenge.”
The AALS, a non-profit association comprised of 171 law schools, serves as an “academic society” for law professors. Incredibly, the AALS posits that colorblind policy undermines “the emancipatory potential of civil rights law.” What this means in plain language is that treating individuals as equal before the law, without regard to race, doesn’t go far enough.
The original civil rights crusaders had it wrong. Barring racial classifications from government policy was a noble idea, but such a principle interferes with the leftist obsession with promoting racial grievances and privileges. If the government is barred from treating citizens differently based on race, racial groups have no legal leg to stand as they demand special treatment based on race. Even at the cost of coherency and consistency, certain racial groups must be held as an exception to the principle of colorblind government policy. Anyone who thinks and/or expresses anything to the contrary is either a bigot or a sell-out.
Wood writes:
“The first plenary session at the AALS meeting, ‘The Legal (Re)production of Inequality’ was to focus ‘on the role law plays in reproducing inequality, even or perhaps especially when no formal ‘racial classifications’ are involved.’ Small group sessions were slated to ‘examine how to incorporate race into non-traditional race law classes, such as tax and the basic first year curriculum.”
And from the AALS:
“The Legal (Re)production of Inequality,’ the plenary will demonstrate some of the distinctive mechanisms through which law reproduces racial inequality in areas including: criminal justice, healthcare, housing, education, employment, immigration, and constitutional law.”
Social engineering types are under the misapprehension that equal justice and equal treatment are synonymous with equal outcome and zero disparities. It isn’t. Never has been, and never will be. We could overthrow our current society and implement social change through the most profound measures imaginable, and there still would be racial disparities and unequal outcomes.
Additionally, the AALS seems unimpressed with the magnificent goal of eliminating racial classifications. Why? It is what any society calling itself free should want. What greater existence could one imagine than to live in a country devoted to liberty, fought for with blood, sweat, and tears, that promotes and protects the individual from race-based unfair treatment? I am impressed beyond words. Am I in the minority? To maintain consistent and logically sound law and policy, however, we must protect individuals against and eliminate race-based favoritism as well.
The rest of Wood’s assessment of the AALS seminar is a painful read, so I’ll leave the poking-needles-in-the-eye multitasking to you. Don’t miss part about leftist pseudo-sophisticated ideas about race. To the conclusion:
Much of the time we are like physicians of centuries past who bled their patients to reduce their fevers—leaving them worse off for the intervention. Today’s equivalent of bleeding the patients is the regime of racial preferences. The evidence is abundant that racial preferences in education have perverse effects at every level. They discourage students, mismatch them to opportunities, and diminish achievement. Racial preferences are not just unfair. They implant illusions of success that undermine students’ capacity to internalize the hard forms of self-discipline that education requires. Nor is this a matter of ‘blaming the victim.’ It is to the contrary blaming the racial preference advocates who, faced with a generations-long failure of their favorite nostrum, insist on applying it over and over. The problem is not affirmative action per se; it is the perversion of affirmative action in the form of racial preferences. Those preferences are wrong in every case, but they are at their most perniciously destructive in the world of education.
It’s naïve to expect blacks to begin protesting en masse, similar to the 1960s-era civil rights movement, against an ingrained policy that “benefits” them and likely plays little role in their daily lives, no matter how condescending it is.
Once I realized that “affirmative action” in its current incarnation was nothing more than government-sanctioned lowered standards that perpetuated notions on inferiority and victimhood, I jumped off the sinking ship. Today, I harbor no illusions that racial minorities are willing to do something about the institutionalized bigotry of low expectations.
That was a mission for a heartier generation.
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Racial preferences opponents in Arizona attempted to put language on the November 2008 ballot to amend the state constitution to bar their government from discriminating against or granting preferences to individuals based on race in government employment, education, or contracting. Unfortunately, they didn’t collect enough signatures to qualify.
Senator Russell Pearce, who authored Arizona’s SB 1070, the bill that basically eliminates all sanctuary policies in the state and makes it illegal for illegal aliens to remain in the state, also supports Proposition 107. The measure, which would amend the state constitution, reads:
“This state shall not discriminate against or grant preferential treatment to any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education or public contracting.”
Fortunately, this measure will appear on the November 2010 ballot.
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A couple of weeks ago I heard a rumor that politicians were attempting to insert racial preferences into the financial regulation bill. As it turns out, the facts have been confirmed. Included in the bill are provisions to authorize the creation of “Offices of Minority and Women Inclusion” in new financial regulatory offices.
From John Rosenberg’s blog, quoting the bill:
“Dodd-Frank’s Section 342 states that race and gender employment ratios must be observed by all government agencies that regulate the financial sector, as well as private financial institutions that do business with the government.”
Employment ratios, for the uninitiated, are quotas. As the Wall Street Journal pointed out, the federal government already discriminates on the basis of race, so a new bill requiring racial discrimination seems redundant.
Such is the state of race in America. Minorities complaining about strained race relations, especially the kind fueled by race-based government favors and set-asides, will find no assistance from their elected officials. Leftist politicians codify race-based preferential treatment, which unavoidably entails race-based discrimination. In allowing such practices, we give these same politicians power to discriminate against blacks.
In his brief in the Brown v. Board of Education case, Thurgood Marshall, then executive director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and future Supreme Court justice, wrote in 1954:
“Distinctions by race are so evil, so arbitrary and invidious that a state, bound to defend the equal protection of the laws must not invoke them in any public sphere.”
Say what you will about individuals making distinctions by race, choosing to associated only with certain races in their private time. I don’t consider this evil or invidious. When the state does it, that’s an entirely different matter. Preferences proponents just can’t get this through their heads.
“We the people” are products of various backgrounds and ethnicities. “We the people” work to pay to support the government for the good of all. “We the people” should demand no less than to be treated equally and judged as individual citizens of the state. It was a noble and necessary battle to prohibit the state from the “evil…arbitrary and invidious” practice of treating citizens differently based on the color of their skin.
And that principle holds no matter who is on the receiving end of the ill treatment.
My aim in writing and speaking against racial preferences isn’t to convince people to ignore differences between groups. I want people to understand that despite how we may feel about different races or how concerned we may be about racial disparities, it should not be within the state’s power to enact laws and set government policy that make distinctions by race.
The movement to radically change how this country dealt with race was gutsy, valiant, and long overdue. Pushing for and supporting the very thing fought against makes a mockery of those who summoned the courage to stand against unequal treatment. Nothing, not even racial disparities, justifies permitting our government to enact laws and set policy that grant preferences to individuals based on their membership in a racial group.
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