Archive for General
Hans A. von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation writes about racially discriminatory provisions in the most recent version of the health care reform bill. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights sent letters to Senate and House leadership and the president advising them to remove the language.
The provisions would grant funding priority to institutions that prefer and discriminate based on race. From National Review:
“The Senate bill even creates a federally funded and administered medical school called the United States Public Health Services Track to ‘grant appropriate advanced degrees,’” von Spakovsky writes. ‘Priority in admissions is to be given to ’students from rural communities and underrepresented minorities.’ (‘Underrepresented minorities’ is liberal code for ‘Asians need not apply.’)
“Naturally, other sections of the bill require lots of data collection regarding race, ethnicity, sex, and so on. Those data will be used to implement quotas of all kinds and put providers at risk of being sued. For example, the data will help trial lawyers pursue “disparate impact” cases against physicians and hospitals — even if the differing health outcomes of patients have nothing to do with actual discriminatory treatment by providers. One provision even requires the secretary of health and human services to consult with “representatives of racial and ethnic minorities” about the content of promotional labels or print ads for drugs. Racial politics is poised to trump scientific accuracy in drug labeling.”
The commission cited research that showed improving quality of care at hospitals in minority areas would improve minority care more than eliminating racial disparities. Poor quality care and qualifications, and not the provider’s race or ethnicity, play greater roles in disparities.
“In, sum, the kind of care you get — and your individual health outcome — is determined by your doctor’s skill, not by his race or “cultural sensitivity,” writes von Spakovsky. “Unfortunately, the Democrats’ health-care legislation will force medical institutions to hire based on race and sex, not qualifications, and to lower their admission standards, which will lead to even more ‘low-quality’ doctors. Medical students admitted based on lower qualifications generally perform more poorly on licensing exams.”
Von Spakovsky invokes the late Patrick Chavis as an example of race over qualifications. Admitted to the University of California at Davis with lower qualifications than the rejected Allan Bakke, plaintiff in University of California v. Bakke, Chavis was sued for malpractice and lost his license.
If the provisions are unchallenged (legally speaking), they will pass along with the rest of the bill.
And race will retain its place in American law.
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Back in August, I blogged about racial preferences provisions (and wrote about them in a Townhall column) in the House of Representatives’s version of the health care reform bill. Found on page 881 of a bill of over 1,000 pages, for example:
“In awarding grants or contracts under this section, the Secretary shall give preference to entities that have a demonstrated record of…Training individuals who are from underrepresented minority groups or disadvantaged backgrounds.”
The Washington Times reported that the U.S. Civil Rights Commission intended to send a letter to the president and Congress, asking them to rewrite the provisions and to inform members the programs mentioned in the bill were “unlikely to reduce health care disparities among racial and ethic groups.”
The wheels of bureaucracy turn very slowly. The commission sent the letter to House leadership in October and a similar letter to Senate leadership on December 11. (Hat tip: Heritage)
An excerpt of the seven-page letter (emphasis added):
“No matter how well-intentioned, utilizing racial preferences with the hope of alleviating health care disparities is inadvisable both as a matter of policy and a matter of law. This is not to suggest that more cannot or should not be done to attract highly qualified physicians and other health care professional of any race to practice in underserved areas, where they are in short supply and badly needed. But any recruitment, training, or assessment of such health care professionals’ qualifications, and any federal funding thereof, must be accomplished without regard to race.
…
“As we noted in our October 9, 2009 letter, it is generally illegal for the government to show favoritism or even use classifications based on race, ethnicity, or sex. Indeed, such classifications and favoritism are ‘presumptively invalid.’…To withstand…[strict scrutiny], a racial classification must be necessary to serve a compelling state interest and must be narrowly drawn to serve that end…It is unlikely that the Senate Health Care bill’s racial classifications…would survive legal scrutiny.”
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The One Florida Initiative, a reaction to Ward Connerly’s campaign to end government racial preferences in the state, was an executive order issued by former Governor Jeb Bush barring race-based preferences in government hiring, contracting, and admissions.
“Although generally sympathetic to Connerly’s campaign, Bush worried that Connerly’s constitutional proposal would sharply divide Floridians, create substantial problems for his leadership, and disrupt his efforts to woo black and Hispanic voters into the Republican Party – votes he hoped would secure his brother the presidency in 2000.” (Source)
In an effort to avoid minority backlash, Bush created the “Talented 20″ program as part of One Florida, which guarantees admissions to Florida students graduating in the top 20 percent of their high schools.
The NAACP balked, claiming the plan would reduce the numbers of blacks admitted to state schools. The numbers did decline in the beginning, but steadily increased over the years. However, one huge unintended consequence of the Talented 20 should have been obvious from the beginning: graduation rates for blacks and Hispanics are “dismal” compared to other students.
Minorities in Florida’s state schools are represented well enough, but they’re having trouble graduating. According to the mismatch theory, such a result is expected. To avoid admitting students based on race, state colleges and universities skim off students graduating at the top of their classes, regardless of whether those classes are academically challenging enough. Once admitted to the college or university, the student and the school are not well matched.
How can schools solve the problem? Extra instruction? Less rigorous classes for everyone? How about admitting and rejecting students based on grades and scores?
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Some students at Columbia University are in a tizzy over ethnic cleansing of a sort. Schools are subject to a new federal survey that lumps people of North African and Middle Eastern descent into the “White” category. (Source)
Students must choose among five race/ethnicity categories: American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian, black or African American, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, and white. Which box does the quarter black/quarter American Indian/quarter Pakistani/quarter Chinese student check?
Arab student Yasmina Raiani wrote that the regulation “clumps individuals of North African and Middle Eastern descent into ‘white,’ which is not only superficially inaccurate—in that the actual skin tone range of North African and Middle Eastern peoples is more akin to that of Hispanics/Latinos than it is to Caucasians—but also historically insensitive…To identify Arabs as ‘white’ is to disregard our history as members of the colonized world and to dismiss all acts of racial discrimination against our community.’”
The U.S. Census includes such categories as Asian Indian, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, and Samoan. Plain old “American” won’t do. The simplest solution to the which-box-do-I-check problem is to eliminate the race box altogether. Why does it still exist?
Discussing the U.S. Census on the “Uncommon Knowledge” show in 2002, the American Civil Rights Institute’s Ward Connerly said, “I think that we need to reach the point where the census doesn’t even ask you about race.” (Source)
Connerly added that race “is a political phenomenon essentially that’s been used to divide people, to segregate people and to engage in all other kinds of societal mischief. And I think that the more people are aware of the fact that this purity of races is kind of like the Nuremberg laws and is something that America should get away from.”
If only we could! But the government won’t allow it. I’d vote for the removal of race/ethnicity boxes from all government applications.
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Last month I blogged about discrimination against Americans of Asian descent at elite colleges and universities. A Princeton study showed these students were much more likely to be rejected than other students. A black student with 1150s and a white student with 1460s had the same chances of getting in as an Asian student with 1600s, top scores.
The Northwest Asian Weekly reports that Americans of Asian descent face discrimination in government contracting as well. According to a UCLA study by Dr. Paul Ong, Asian business owners snag the fewest contracts in minority set-aside programs. As most people know, Asians typically aren’t part of the preferred minority brigade.
“Korean Americans have the highest self-employment rate among Asian Americans, but they still do not earn as much as their non-Latino white counterparts, even after controlling for education and other characteristics.”
It would be helpful to know whether “Asian American” business owners are going after government contracts at rates comparable to other minorities. Earning less money may have little to do with race, and disparities don’t prove discrimination. Based on the tone of the article, however, race-related reasons are assumed.
The study will be released later this month, so we’ll have to wait until then for more information.
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The assumptions some folks on the left make never cease to amaze. For instance, if whites leave loud, dirty, and expensive cities for quieter, cleaner, and cheaper suburbs, they’re racists. If they remove their children from mediocre government schools and send them to better government schools, they’re racists. If taxpayers in low-crime areas oppose Section 8 housing in their neighborhood, they’re racists.
Are racial minorities racist when they do the same thing?
Hartford Courant reporter Rick Green implies that Republicans are sending coded messages to “white folks like” him. The Republican Board of Education, which opposes government discrimination and preferential treatment, is targeting like-minded voters. The board’s goal is to appeal to parents of any color who oppose racial bean-counting and sending their kids to schools across town to satisfy someone’s idea of skin deep-only diversity.
Green quotes two men who support and oppose such practices. Supporter John Brittain, who led a desegregation case, said “our neighborhood schools” is code aimed directly at white people.
The Center for Equal Opportunity’s Roger Clegg commented on the post:
“Well, if children are assigned to schools on the basis of race, that IS racial discrimination (and the Supreme Court did strike down such racial balancing in the Seattle and Louisville cases). And if ‘neighborhood schools’ is a ‘code word’ for the preservation of whiteness, what phrase would be better to convey the fact that many (most) parents prefer that their kids go to nearby schools? I suspect that whatever phrase is chosen, those who want racial balancing will criticize it as code-worded racism.”
What irritates me about white liberals like Green is their assumption that all racial minorities support so-called desegregation efforts and have no problem sending their children across town. One commenter writes:
“I love it when idiots like Brittain claim real words/phrases are code words for sinister purposes…As a minority, I want my children to go to our neighborhood schools. The idea my children might be shipped across town so that white students can see what a Mexican kid looks like is disgusting to me.”
More like him, please.
The racial balancing issue has more to do with misplaced white guilt and coercion than concern for minority kids. It is my fervent wish that more minority parents speak out against such condescending practices. In the U.S., people have a right to live wherever they wish and for whatever reason. If this right results in taxpayers of a certain color flocking to districts with better schools, so be it.
The government has no business barring children from certain schools based on the color of their skin. Local lawmakers (and judges) should (re)read Brown v. Board of Education.
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What right-leaning “person of color” among us can’t relate to Ruben Navarrette’s latest column, Ugly Racial Litmus Test?
I’ve noticed a phenomenon articulated by John McWhorter in Authentically Black: Essays for the Silent Black Majority. He wrote about a “double consciousness” whereby blacks speak of empowerment and individual responsibility in private, but they play the victim in front of whites and constantly remind them of America’s “racist” ways. Whites, says McWhorter, must be kept “on the hook.”
The black person who refuses to hold this attitude faces “intra-racial” charges of self-hater, hater of black people, and the like. Ironically, the racial authenticity of the black person who opposes lowering standards for blacks and insists blacks can and should compete against everyone also is questioned.
The Hispanic Navarrette faces similar charges. “Some people of color have this ridiculous and destructive habit of judging each other’s racial and ethnic authenticity,” he writes. “It’s both comical and sad, since the people who do it often have deep insecurities about their racial and ethnic credentials.”
Navarrette, who says he opposes lowering standards for racial minorities, has been called a sellout, a Republican thug, a coconut (similar to “Oreo”), and a fake Hispanic “all, no doubt, to the delight of white liberals who prefer that Latinos like me refrain from thinking for ourselves.”
Navarrette mentions a CNN segment in which Syracuse University professor Boyce Watkins referred to FOX News analyst Juan Williams as a “happy Negro.” I had the misfortune of being the person Watkins was sparring against during that segment. He purportedly was upset because Bill O’Reilly made a comment on his radio show about how well-behaved patrons were in a black-owned restaurant, where he dined with Al Sharpton. A media storm ensued, and O’Reilly was called ignorant and a racist.
Detractors tend to leave out the conversation’s context. O’Reilly and Juan Williams were discussing the contrast between how television plays up negative stereotypes about blacks and what O’Reilly experienced in the restaurant. He made the point that whites who don’t interact much with blacks may believe all or most blacks play to type.
Out of the entire conversation, this sentence stirred up the media storm: “There wasn’t one person in Sylvia’s who was screaming, ‘M-Fer, I want more iced tea.’”
I agreed to appear on CNN to criticize the media-created storm, not necessarily to defend O’Reilly. After Watkins made his “happy Negro” remark, I promptly admonished him and accused him of doing the same thing he’d accused O’Reilly of doing.
But in the scheme of things, it doesn’t matter. People will believe what they want to believe and say what they want to say. The best way to deal with the name-calling is to develop a very thick skin. If you strongly believe your principles and values are right, and you feel compelled to share them, you’ll need courage to face the consequences.
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John McWhorter, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of such books as Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America and Authentically Black, has written a must-read article on Minding the Campus about the state of so-called African American studies departments.
The first African American studies department was created forty years ago. McWhorter questions whether what is taught can be called education.
What should the mission of a truly modern African-American Studies department be?…The answer common in such departments is that the principal mission is to teach students about the eternal power of racism past and present. Certainly it should be part of a liberal arts education to learn that racism is more than face-to-face abuse, and that social inequality is endemic to American society. However, too often the curriculum of African-American Studies departments gives the impression that racism and disadvantage are the most important things to note and study about being black.
One would assume African American studies would transcend oppression and victimhood and give equal or greater time to the “bootstraps” and “self-help” attitudes that seemed more prevalent among blacks when they faced actual racial discrimination, and not perceived personal slights. What do the courses focus on?
Typical is the curriculum of one African-American Studies department in a solid, selective state school west of the Mississippi. In this department, racism is, essentially, everything…Following from this glum desperation is a fetishization of radical politics as blacks’ only constructive allegiance. One would never know the marginal import of radicalism to most black lives from its centrality to so many African-American Studies department syllabi. One course analyzes “the tradition of radical thought and the relevance of this thought to the needs and interests of the black community” – but what does the “relevance” consist of except intellectually? Yet the same department also offers a course on, more specifically, black Marxism.
Why is academia so much more radicalized that the “real world”? McWhorter provides examples of African American studies courses at several schools, and concludes radical indoctrination is not education. He recommends departments revise what they teach to reflect that racism against blacks “is receding, and to such a degree that the race’s challenges today are vastly different than they were forty years ago”; and offer at least one course on black conservative thought as an alternative argument. Along with men like Booker T. Washington, include the work of people like Shelby Steele, Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Debra Dickerson, and Stanley Crouch.
There is an argument hardly unfamiliar in the halls of ivy that black writers of this ilk are irrelevant to serious discussion because they are traitors to the race. Those charges must be permitted as free speech – but have no place in any brand of academic inquiry. All of the writers I have listed are careful thinkers deeply concerned with the fate of black America. It will not do to tar them as “not scholarly” because they do not all write in academic format or publish in obscure scholarly journals. Writings typically assigned by James Baldwin, Cornel West or even most of the others in this school are not written in this format either.
He suggests additional conservative writers and thinkers. In other words, African American studies departments should allow students to reflect on both sides of the argument. That is what produces true “liberal arts enlightenment.” I can’t say it better than McWhorter.
(Photo by Robert Holmgren)
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The lead investigator on a show I watch is a woman. Although thin-boned and shorter than the men she supervises, she’s a tough gal. She chases down bad guys, who manage to trip at just the right moment, and she pounces on them, slapping on handcuffs. When she does encounter a man she can’t bring down, her male subordinates conveniently pop up just in time for some serious man-handling.
Watch any program with a female cop/detective/investigator, and you’d think physical differences between men and women were trivial. But that’s TV. Real life works differently.
The Center for Equal Opportunity’s Linda Chavez writes about what happens in real life. Last week, the Department of Justice sued the Department of Corrections for discriminating against women applying for jobs as prison guards. Chavez writes:
“So what exactly constitutes this discrimination? Apparently, female prison guard applicants have a more difficult time passing a required physical abilities test (PAT) than their male counterparts, which is unacceptable to the Obama Justice Department.’
‘Bringing an end to practices that have a discriminatory impact on the basis of sex,’ says the press release touting the suit, ‘is a major priority of the Justice Department and Civil Rights Division’…It wasn’t all that long ago that the very idea of hiring women to guard violent men — even if they were behind bars — would have been thought unwise if not downright crazy. But we’ve learned that women can do non-traditional jobs, even excel at them. And we’ve been reassured by feminists that women would ultimately demonstrate they could perform these jobs just as well as men.”
Apparently, the issue isn’t whether women can pass the test; it’s whether the test itself is “job related and consistent with business necessity.” Our bloated Byzantine system permits claims against government agencies that weed out candidates based on physical strength in a profession that requires physical strength.
You don’t have to be particularly knowledgeable about the inner workings of a male prison to conclude that it’s safer for all involved to have big strong men guarding and handling other big strong and violent men. Common sense goes a long way. Alas, politically correct pabulum trumps common sense.
You may recall that in 2005, violent criminal Brian Nichols overpowered his female handler, attacked her, took her gun, and killed a judge, a deputy sheriff, and a court reporter. The woman was escorting Nichols, who was facing rape charges. The powers that be thought it was a splendid idea to assign a shorter, weaker woman (five feet) to guard a taller, stronger man who’d been caught with concealed weapons days before. (Source)
Yes, Nichols could have just as easily overpowered a man. Beside the point.
Women are disparately impacted by the PAT, because they are, on average, smaller and weaker than the average man. To remove the discriminatory effect, the agency would have to lower strength standards for women, which would defeat the purpose of having standards in the first place.
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I had to comment on a HuffPost blog post by David A. Wilson, founder of NBC Universal’s The Grio, a “video-centric news community site devoted to providing African Americans with stories and perspectives that appeal to them but are underrepresented in existing national news outlets,” if for no other reason than to clarify what most conservatives mean by colorblindness.
Wilson says it’s better to be racist than colorblind. What does he mean?
“To claim color blindness ignores this very human truth. We can no more be color blind than be unconscious of height, weight, age or sex. We can easily and openly describe any of those human characteristics; however we whisper or try to find creative ways to describe someone’s race in conversation. Of course the reasons behind this discomfort are rooted in an ugly history that held race as the primary marker for our discrimination.”
I agree. Achieving colorblindness may be a worthy goal, but we perceive differences. That’s a fact, and it’s morally neutral. It’s neither good nor bad. I’ll take it a step further: avoiding certain people based on differences isn’t a bad thing, either, although politically correct society tries to condition the sheep to believe it is.
Here is where liberal types misunderstand conservative types like myself. I don’t care whether someone dislikes me because of my skin color. That’s his/her problem, not mine. But it becomes my problem if the person infringes on my rights because of the color of my skin. If the government does it, the infringement is worse. Government policy must be colorblind. If individuals want to give it a try, more power to them.
Colorblind government policy is that which treats its citizens as individuals without regard to race. Government was instituted to protect our civil rights, that is, our individual rights, and it’s necessary for the existence of a civilized society. Its function isn’t to control people’s lives, but to allow people to live freely without interference from others. Individual private citizens may hold prejudices and biases for whatever reason, but those prejudices and biases are held in check by a government whose duty is to protect everyone’s rights. An individual is free to think whatever he wants to think about me because I’m black, but neither he nor my government may interfere with me because I’m black.
That, Mr. Wilson, is why conservatives advocate colorblind policy.
“We give weight to the idea of race being negative by considering it taboo. The more we avoid the topic, the discussion, the word, the more power we lend it. To bring race into casual conversation is to treat it as it should be treated — as a non-issue.
“Now is the time to accept our human nature and admit that no matter who we are, there’s a little racist living inside. To face our racist and look to battle its biases every day should be a personal and life long struggle for each of us against the very worst of our human nature. As any recovering addict can attest, the first step to recovery is admitting the problem.”
I disagree with him, to a point. Perceiving and acknowledging differences does not mean someone is a racist. If that were the case, the whole world’s racist. I also disagree that individuals necessarily should battle biases. Hold them all you like! Hate people of different races, if that’s your thing. But if you infringe on someone’s rights, because of race, sex, or whether the wind blows east, that’s another matter.
Let’s focus more on protecting individuals’ rights and keeping the government in check and less on trying to change the way people think.
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