Archive for General
Last month, I blogged about the brouhaha at South Philadelphia High School (a school designated “persistently dangerous”), where groups of mostly black students beat up students of Asian descent. The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund filed suit against the school district, alleging “deliberate and discriminatory indifference.” The district suspended about 10 students.
The group said the district not only failed to protect the students, but covered up and downplayed the attacks.
According to Philly.com, a retired federal judge named Judge James T. Giles released a report this week that sounds to me like more downplaying. Although it appears the black students attacked the Asians primarily because they’re Asian, the judge said race or ethnicity “were contributing factors.” What were the other factors?
According to the story, there were rumors that a group of Asian students attacked a “popular, disabled” black student, and this attack, which may or may not have happened, triggered the attack on Asian students.
“We believe that in some instances, [the Asians] were randomly attacked or attacked because someone in their group was identified or misidentified as being connected to the earlier events.”
So, after black students “identified or misidentified” the Asian(s) responsible for allegedly attacking the disabled black student — although the judge couldn’t determine whether the disabled student was the victim or part of the mob — the black students retaliated? Sort of convoluted, but there you go.
As for the cover-up allegations, the judge apparently found no evidence of a cover-up but recommended the school ban hoodies, put more cameras in the school, and set up an anonymous tip hotline for students. To keep down the violence.
Good luck with that.
Philly.com columnist and blogger Will Bunch calls the judge’s report a whitewash and “complete joke.” Bunch, who’s no conservative, writes:
“A racially motivated mob can rampage through a high school in Philadelphia for two days, amid a much longer climate of violence and harassment, even from adult staffers, and not only is no one from the school district accountable but none of the perps is even arrested…Let’s move forward!”
Assigning blame would shed light on the darkness, Mr. Bunch, and nobody wants to do that. Not only would it be politically incorrect to call the problem by its name, but complaining about it will cause people to wonder whether you’re…racist.
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Yesterday the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in a case filed by black firefighter applicants, who claim that a pencil-and-paper multiple choice employment test is discriminatory because black applicants disproportionately scored too low to qualify for employment in 1995.
Specifically, the plaintiffs claim the city used an unlawful score cutoff point. Those who scored 64 or below were disqualified. Because so many applicants scored 89 or above, however, the city told those who scored below 89 but above 64 (passing scores) they likely would not be hired. Consequently, a disproportionate number of blacks were disqualified. The Business Insider reports that Chicago stopped using the cut-off scores eight years ago.
But the issue before the Supreme Court is procedural, not substantive. The court won’t decide whether the test was discriminatory, but whether the plaintiffs filed the claim in time to seek relief. Parties have a 300-day window to file complaints, but the plaintiffs in this case waited 430 days. A federal judge ruled in favor of the applicants, but the appeals court overturned the ruling and held that the applicants waited too long to challenge the test results.
The court’s decision may be announced before fall.
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Lawmakers in Utah are attempting to ban government racial preferences via a state constitutional amendment. Last week, the state’s House Business and Labor Committee approved the resolution, which heads to the full house for consideration. According to the Associated Press, there’s little evidence that preferences are “being used or has caused problems” in Utah.
Of course, it doesn’t matter whether there’s evidence. A ban would give notice that no government entity may prefer or discriminate against individuals or groups based on race. Republicans control the Utah legislature, and the governor is a Republican. These factors increase the measure’s likelihood of passing. A two-thirds vote of the state house and senate and the governor’s signature are required to amend the constitution.
Several states already ban government racial preferences. For example, in 1996, 54 percent of voters in California banned preferences. The same year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held in Hopwood v. Texas that racial preferences in college admissions was unconstitutional. In 1998, Washington state voters banned preferences by 58 percent. Ten years ago, former Florida governor Jeb Bush banned government preferences. In 2006, Michigan voters banned preferences by 58 percent, as did Nebraska voters in 2008.
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I’ll have to check the Civil Rights Act to confirm, but I’m pretty sure this is illegal, too.
In fact, “whites-only” anything is viewed as the ultimate form of unfairness, injustice, flat-out racism, and the root of all the world’s evil.
Conservative groups likely will challenge the scholarship program. Will liberal groups do the same? They balked at a satirical whites-only scholarship offered by College Republicans at Boston University a few years ago. Surely they’ll balk over the Oregon League of Minority Voters’s scholarships.
I’m surprised people still come up with such schemes, given their clear illegality. Why would the voters’ group risk wasting resources on litigation and undermining its credibility with donors?
A decade ago, a federal judge ordered two historically black colleges in Alabama to set up programs to attract white students after both schools accused the state of treating predominantly black colleges differently than predominantly white colleges. It’s safe to say most whites aren’t inclined to apply to predominately black colleges. To sweeten the pot, at least one of the colleges offered a whites-only scholarship. A black student named Jessie Tompkins sued. Tompkins was represented by the Center for Individual Rights. (Source)
Because the Oregon League of Minority Voters receives some public funding, it’s also safe to say the whites-only scholarship won’t stand, nor should it. Only privately funded sources like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are allowed to prohibit people of certain races from applying for money. (No whites need apply.)
The minority voters group must know the race-based scholarships won’t stand. Could it be a publicity stunt to “raise awareness” among mostly white Oregonians to do their part to narrow racial disparities that have little to do with racism and a lot to do with individuals’ personal choices and/or lack of responsibility?
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Another federal case! Oh my.
Remember December’s spate of stories about mostly black students at South Philadelphia High School (designated “persistently dangerous”) beating up students of Asian descent because they’re of Asian descent? Students and groups complained, and too little was done about it.
Last week, Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund filed suit against the school district, alleging “deliberate and discriminatory indifference.” (Source)
The group, citing Fourteenth Amendment violations, claims the district not only failed to protect them, but covered up and downplayed the attacks. Specifically, the group says security guards ignored attacks, and a staffer tried to talk a parent out of calling 911 when her child suffered a broken nose.
Disgusting, if true.
The school district suspended about 10 students, but obviously that wasn’t enough. There were problems before the attack, says the AALDEF, and whatever help officials offered wasn’t effective. Cecilia Chen, an attorney with the AALDEF, said students of Asian descent are still being harassed.
Students of one race attacking students of another based on race is a clear case of a “bias” crime. I think the concept of “hate crime” is dumb, but if we’re going to have such laws on the books, let’s apply them consistently. The local authorities should have bent over backward to resolve the matter and tried everything reasonable possible to avoid a federal lawsuit. For unfathomable reasons, they did not.
Why didn’t the school make a diligent effort to stop the attacks? It’s a loaded question, of course. “Are you still beating your wife?” No doubt the School District of Philadelphia believes it made a diligent effort to stop the attacks. Whether the Department of Justice takes up the case remains to be seen.
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If you’ve had the misfortune of sitting through workplace “diversity training” sessions, you know how eye-rollingly pointless they can be.
The diversity training idea stems from a former teacher named Jane Elliott, who required her all-white class to participate in role-playing exercises. Groups were separated by eye color. The first day, the blues were treated well, and the browns were treated badly. The next day, the treatment was reversed. The point was for whites to be on the receiving end of ill-treatment and empathize with blacks.
Elliott went on to lead diversity sessions at corporations, conducting similar role-playing exercises, commanding a fee of $6,000.
Diversity so-called training in the corporate sphere is one thing. Adults are better equipped to know whether they’re being subjected to misguided guilt and indoctrination. Children, with their easily malleable minds, are less equipped.
I recently read about teachers in government schools conducting segregation experiments on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. Apparently, these teachers (or more likely, higher-ups) believe requiring students to treat one another badly based on eye color is an appropriate way to teach them about America’s history of government-mandated racial segregation.
Putting children through emotional pain is a valid teaching method? Do schools typically teach through role-playing? Not only do white children in 2010 bear no responsibility whatsoever for government-mandated racial segregation, black children in 2010 are not recipients of it. What do bureaucrats hope to accomplish by separating students based on differences? Invoking children to anger and frustration generates resentment, not understanding.
The more important lesson about America’s history of racial segregation is that men like King appealed to the better part of people’s nature to carry out the promise of America’s founding and bestow the same rights to blacks that everyone else possessed. Americans of different races sacrificed and risked life and limb so that blacks could gain the privilege of being treated as free and responsible individuals equal before the law. If schools instill this idea into those malleable minds, instead of subjecting them to inane role-playing exercises designed to “teach” them how nasty people can be to each other, children might learn an enduringly valuable and more profound lesson.
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The last time I filled out an application for a library card, I refused to state my race. I shouldn’t have been surprised to see a box for race on such an application, but I was. No doubt the government believes it has a legitimate reason (for “statistical purposes only” to receive government grants?) to know the race of individuals applying for the privilege to borrow books. Whatever the reason may be, the whole idea is pre-civil-rights-era-retro.
I read with pleasure a story in the Sacramento Bee about high school students who want to be identified by their nationality and not their race or ethnicity. One student said she believes eliminating racial categories would make “racial hatred go away.” It probably won’t, but that’s not the point. The goal is to stop the government from categorizing its citizens by race, not necessarily to change an individual’s views on race.
Another student said, “If we were all one race, then there wouldn’t be any racism.”
While these young people may be naïve about differences and human nature, they have a purity of mind that resonates in my jaded brain. Racial differences are morally neutral, from my perspective. Differences are not good or bad per se; they just are. If you believe in God, as I do, you can appreciate how he decreed to diversify the world. How people treat others based on those differences is moral or immoral. Individuals can think whatever they want about race, but they may not interfere with another’s rights based on race, and our government may not treat people differently based on race (awarding race-based set-asides, etc.). It’s quite simple.
An excerpt:
“From 2006 to 2009, the number of Elk Grove Unified School District students whose parents listed their race as ‘multiple/no response’ went from 500 to 6,200 – a twelve-fold jump in just three years, the California Department of Education says. About one of every 10 of the district’s students now list race as ‘multiple/no response.’ …There’s also been a dramatic rise statewide. Data show the number of K-12 students listing their race as “multiple/no response” has jumped 70 percent, from 124,000 in 2006 to 210,000 last year.
“But the U.S. Department of Education, which is trying to close the achievement gap between races, is asking school officials to ‘eyeball’ students who decline to state and check a box for them.
“‘We know and the feds know you can’t force someone to fill out a form. So what the feds have actually said is to more strongly encourage them to self-identify,’ said Keric Ashley, the state Education Department’s director of data management. ‘If all those efforts fail and the parents refuse, the feds say school officials should observe and report a race.’”
So, if students and parents decline to check the box, bureaucrats will make the decision for them? That may generate more controversy than racial preferences. Can you imagine? Your outward appearance might be “African American,” but both your parents are mixed race. You’re actually more “white” than “black,” but your government has assigned you to the “African American” racial category. (Unless you were born in Africa and became an American citizen, you’re not “African American” in any case.)
The article continues on about why it’s so important for the government to categorize citizens by race. The refusal to check the race box won’t make a significant dent in the government’s racial bean counting until a critical mass of Americans refuses to check the box.
Refusing to check the box on a library card application merely is one small step for a woman, and one giant leap for humankind. Eat your heart out, Neil Armstrong.
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In “Assessing the Impact of Eliminating Affirmative Action in Higher Education,” Jessica S. Howell of California State University, Sacramento, acknowledges that declines in minority representation at colleges and universities in California and Texas, states that bar the government from discriminating against or preferring individuals or groups based on race in hiring, contracting, and admissions, have been characterized in mainstream media as “sharp.”
Her study set out to answer the question, how would minority representation be affected by a national ban on racial preferences?
The effect Howell found was modest. A nationwide ban would result in a 10 percent drop in black and Hispanic enrollment in selective colleges and universities, and a 2 percent drop overall in four-year institutions.
Commenting on the study on Minding the Campus, Roger Clegg says race neutrality’s effect on minority representation may be modest, but the effect of racial discrimination on others is not.
‘[H]ere are some of the costs of this discrimination: It is personally unfair, passes over better qualified students, and sets a disturbing legal, political, and moral precedent in allowing racial discrimination; it creates resentment; it stigmatizes the so-called beneficiaries in the eyes of their classmates, teachers, and themselves, as well as future employers, clients, and patients; it fosters a victim mindset, removes the incentive for academic excellence, and encourages separatism; it compromises the academic mission of the university and lowers the overall academic quality of the student body; it creates pressure to discriminate in grading and graduation; it breeds hypocrisy within the school; it encourages a scofflaw attitude among college officials; it mismatches students and institutions, guaranteeing failure for many of the former; it papers over the real social problem of why so many African Americans and Latinos are academically uncompetitive; and it gets states and schools involved in unsavory activities like deciding which racial and ethnic minorities will be favored and which ones not, and how much blood is needed to establish group membership.”
Download the 65-page study. (PDF)
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I recently blogged about Thomas Espenshade, author of a Princeton University study that showed students of Asian descent are discriminated against at elite colleges and universities.
He came up with what he probably thinks is a bold plan to close the racial academic achievement gap. Calling it a project “with the same scale, urgency, and sense of importance as the original Manhattan Project,” Espenshade proposes to monitor the lives of up to 50,000 children from birth to age eighteen to try to determine what causes the racial gap and how parents, schools, neighborhoods, and the government can work together to close it.
Instead of spending massive resources on such a project, he should spend some time with students and teachers at KIPP and related schools.
Espenshade’s research shows the extent of lowered standards for blacks in higher education. For instance, black students admitted to elite colleges and universities receive the equivalent of a 310 SAT-point boost. Hispanics receive a 130-point boost. Standards for black applicants whose ancestors were American slaves are lower than those for blacks of multiracial background or who are first- or second-generation immigrants.
Espenshade is back in the news, as it were. A columnist for the New Jersey Star-Ledger blogged about Espenshade’s Manhattan Project-like proposal for improving the performance of minorities. Apparently his research shows that Princeton contributes to racial “inequality” because the school favors “affluent, advantaged students.” Yet, his research also shows how selective schools lower standards for minorities.
Racial preferences aren’t enough, says Espenshade, because the practice takes too long, and states are banning preferences in government admissions. But he’ll take them.
“If preferences for minority students were eliminated, acceptance especially for black applicants would be dramatically reduced,” reads the study. “The acceptance rates for blacks could be expected to fall from 31 percent under current policy to 13 percent, reducing the number of black students admitted by more than half.”
The study also notes that race-neutral admissions polices would reduce white acceptance rates, too. On average, students who descend from certain Asian countries outperform whites.
Sounds like a plan. Adopt race-neutral admissions, and let under- and over-representation fall where they may. That way, bureaucrats, teachers, and parents can adopt old-school teaching methods that worked well for minorities in the past, and understand why current methods and policies aren’t working. I recommend you read Thomas Sowell’s Black Rednecks and White Liberals.
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The Washington Times editorializes about racially discriminatory provisions in the health care reform bill (see our previous coverage here):
“Not only are these provisions morally suspect, but they also fly in the face of recent (and wise) Supreme Court precedent. Even in the one recent case where the high court did allow limited racial preferences, Grutter v. Bollinger in 2003, the court went to great lengths to note that ‘racial classifications, however compelling their goals, are potentially so dangerous that they may be employed no more broadly than the interest demands. Enshrining a permanent justification for racial preferences would offend this fundamental equal protection principle.’
…
“Other cases, such as Gratz v. Bollinger (2003) and Ricci v. DeStefano (2009), make clear that racial preferences by government are presumptively illegal. The Ricci case was the one in which the court ruled in favor of white firefighters who previously had been denied promotions that all agreed they had earned. Although not a direct constitutional challenge, it succinctly stated the guiding principle: ‘No individual should face workplace discrimination based on race.’”
The strangest part of all of this is people inherently understand that the provisions are discriminatory, even if the intent is to rectify the past or “fix” under-representation. Americans cannot invoke our country’s history of discrimination to justify such practices today. Government-mandated discrimination was wrong then, and it’s wrong now.
These aren’t mere platitudes intended to downplay this country’s previous treatment of blacks. We will never come to terms with the past if we continue allowing our government to rationalize racial discrimination for whatever reason.
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